by Kate Rorick
Daisy, meanwhile, was busy building the party-planning aspect of her business. She already had three preschool birthday parties on the books, and had done one just last weekend for Jordan’s fourth birthday, at a family rate. Jordan wanted her basement playroom transformed into a combo dungeon-princess birthday party, as in she wanted all the pink and fluffy décor and face painting of the Princess Room, and all the ordering about and war mongering of the games in the Dungeon Room.
Daisy looked forward to the day she got to sit her niece down and introduce her to the world of D&D. Jordan was made to rule a kingdom. Or at the very least, organize a small band of scrappy adventurers.
Shanna was more than happy to leave all the work up to Daisy. But for once Daisy didn’t mind—since she was getting paid. And every penny that she made was a penny she didn’t have to take out of the down payment fund.
Future parties would be far more geek-tastic as her business expanded. But this was a good start. Quinn had helped her with the party planning, showing her how to rig all the decorations, and of course was there with Hamilton at Jordan’s birthday, but she had been busy herself.
Yes, she was in the early stages of her divorce, with volleys being thrown, visitation being worked out, and lawyers exchanging paper. It was a massive task, pulling apart the life they had built, but with every step, so far, Quinn had felt better and better. Lighter. More free.
And . . . she had started therapy. Her friends were amazing, but it wasn’t their only job to help her through this. She didn’t have to feel guilty about monopolizing a therapist’s time. And it really helped her focus on herself, not all the stuff outside she couldn’t control.
Her mother was coming to visit in a few weeks. For once she wasn’t worried about it.
Her in-laws hadn’t said word one about the divorce from whatever island they were vacationing on. She didn’t mind that either.
Stuart had made one initial threat, in their divorce proceedings. His lawyers had intimated that there was proof of her unfitness as a parent from the Halloween video, and as such, attempted to use it as leverage in their negotiations.
But Stuart hadn’t expected her to embrace the video, and put it in her bio on her new business website.
Yes, Quinn was starting a business, opening up an interior design firm of her very own. Honestly, she didn’t have much choice, because after her episode of The Brand New Home aired, she’d gotten so many calls for work she needed a way to organize it all.
When the episode had aired, just a few weeks ago, Quinn had expected it to garner notice. To once again be brought up in conversation, or on the design blogs, as a subject of ridicule. Maybe even Jaxxon LaRue would be inclined to comment (although, given the recriminations he got from the New Year’s video, maybe not). And yes, there was some of that. But there was also a surprising amount of praise.
For the way she was honest about parenting with the Hendersons. For how she owned up to her internet infamy. But mostly, for how awesome the nursery turned out to be.
There was even an Instagram post that made Quinn nearly pass out.
It was a photo of the finished nursery, the corner where she had set up the low shelves and the soft toys. And it was posted by none other than the queen of casual elegance herself, Martha Stewart.
* * *
It’s hard to go from career woman to internet joke and back again, but Quinn Barrett (the mom in the Halloween costume stomping video—remember that? Me neither) proves she’s made of sterner stuff. Learning lessons about her own pursuit of perfection, she left her career at the rigidly traditional Boston interior design firm Crabbe & Co. to hang up her own shingle, Messy Life/Lovely Home Interiors. And her debut on the new design show The Brand New Home proved a triumph—turning in the best baby room we’ve seen in ages. We can’t wait to see what her Messy Life brings next.
* * *
It wasn’t the eight-page spread in the magazine she’d spent her career dreaming about. And it certainly wasn’t the great public resurrection she’d imagined for months. There would be no morning shows where she owned her Uptight Mom narrative, no apology from the world at large for what she had been through.
But in many ways, it was better, because instead of focusing on the past, it made room for what was to come.
And what was to come was the Iguana Room, and the last year of preschool.
“Are you guys ready to have four-year-olds?” Quinn asked.
“I already have one, thanks,” Shanna piped up. Newly four Jordan was off with Jamie, taking his phone and posing for selfies. “And she’s terrifying.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen with the Parent Association,” Daisy mused. “Are you going to run again, Shanna?”
“Are you insane?” Shanna guffawed. “Have you noticed the liquid-filled beach ball under my shirt? It’s going to become a human being in a few weeks. I’m not doing anything other than that for the foreseeable future. But after . . . I’ve been thinking about going back to work, and letting Jamie scale back on his hours. He might be willing to run again. He actually enjoyed it.” She slid a glance to Quinn. “But probably only because you were there to do the hard stuff.”
“Well, I have officially retired from preschool presidency. I’m not diving back into that. Besides—new business, remember? I’ve got plenty of upcoming projects and commissions to keep me busy. But you could do it, Daisy.”
Daisy blinked. “I have a new business, too! Let’s . . . let’s leave the Parent Association to new blood. There will be a bunch of parents bringing their kids to the Baby Bear Room, eager to overinvolve themselves with Little Wonders. If any of us were there it would no doubt just ruin their fun.”
“Wow, that is exceedingly generous of you,” Shanna said drily.
“Yeah, you’re such a giver, Daisy,” Quinn added with a laugh.
At that moment, Ham and Carrie came sprinting back to their moms, Rob, Jamie, and Jordan close behind.
“Mommy, come on, it’s time for your surprise!” Carrie said, tugging at Daisy’s hand.
“Shhh . . . Carrie, you’re not supposed to tell her yet,” Rob said, unable to hide his grin.
“There’s a surprise?” Daisy asked, looking from her friends to her husband and daughter.
“She’s just talking about the pizza party,” Rob said quickly.
“Yep, the pizza party!” Quinn added quickly. “At the restaurant on Main Street. Should we get going?”
“Pizza party?” Carrie asked her dad. “But you said—”
“Pizza party! Everyone, let’s go to the pizza party!” Jordan and Hamilton started cheering along with Jamie.
“All right,” Daisy said, laughing. “Let’s go.”
* * *
They parked on Main Street, near the front of Daisy’s new store. Brown paper covered the inside of the windows, a sign on the door said New Business Coming Soon. She really had to think of a name for the place.
“Why are we here?” Daisy asked, as Rob opened up the trunk.
“I just wanted to drop off these before we hit the restaurant,” he said, pulling a set of newly finished shelves out of the trunk. “Come on, Carrie!”
Daisy unbuckled Carrie from her car seat, and together they followed Rob into the store.
“Just let me get the lights . . .”
And the store—her store—appeared before her eyes.
“What . . . how did you? . . . when?”
The narrow space was transformed. The entire thing looked like a fancy gentleman’s library. Woodwork reached to the ceiling—no musty, ratty old IKEA shelves in this place. But the wood itself was a light ash, a beautiful pale shade, giving the space a lift of femininity.
There was a long, low glass counter, edged in wood. There was the modular lighting that Quinn had insisted on, installed. Two refurbished, electric blue leather chairs sat in the front window, a little reading nook.
“I had a couple of guys from the show help out,” Robbie said. “And you know
. . . these guys gave me a hand, too.”
Just then, bursting from the back storage room was Quinn, Hamilton, Shanna, Jamie, and Jordan.
“Surprise!” They cried in unison.
“Surprise!!!!” Carrie echoed. “Did I do it right?”
“Yes, sweetie, you did great.” Robbie kissed his daughter. “Now, it’s not complete. You still don’t have a POS system, and you need internet, but . . .
“And some stock,” Shanna piped up. “But hey, it’s your store.”
It was her store. She could see it. She could see the shelves full of trade paperbacks, the front-facing display shelves full of the newest comics every week. She could see exactly where she was going to put her Captain Phasma costume. The game wall, the figurines. It was all going to be here.
“I can’t believe you did this,” she said, turning to Rob, almost crying.
“Hey, I can’t believe you moved across the country with me, so this is the least I could do. Besides, I had to get all of your stuff out of the basement and garage before Grandpa Bob came home. But there’s more.”
“There’s more??”
Daisy was waved to the back of the store, to what she had thought would be the stockroom.
There, Robbie had set up an old round table, worn and secondhand. On it were a few bottles of wine, a recently placed pizza, and Daisy’s D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide.
“What . . . is this the pizza party?”
“No,” Jamie replied. “We—Robbie and I—are going to take the kids down the street to the pizza place. You ladies are going to have your own party here.”
“Here?”
“Yup,” Shanna said. “That was Robbie’s plan.”
“Wait, what are we going to do—drink wine and unpack boxes?”
“I’ve heard a lot about this Dungeons and Dragons thing,” Quinn said. “Let’s give that a shot.”
Daisy looked at her friend like she was crazy. “You. Want to play Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Robbie said it was the one thing you would want for Mother’s Day.”
“He’s not wrong,” Daisy said. “But it’s not what you want for Mother’s Day.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Shanna added. “I have a full spa day planned on Sunday. But you seem to think this is fun . . . so maybe it is.”
“But . . . Robbie, I don’t have anything planned.”
Robbie dug into a box and handed her one of her binders. “Use something from your old campaign.”
Her fingers tingled as she took the folder from him.
“So, it’s settled. All right, kids, who wants to go get our own pizza?”
“WE DO!!!” Jordan cried, and started dragging her daddy to the door.
“Come on, Hamilton!” Carrie said, taking her friend by one hand and her dad with the other.
“Bye, Mommy!” Hamilton waved over his shoulder to Quinn, who blew him a kiss.
“Bye, Hammy—be good for Carrie and Jordan’s daddies.”
Daisy, Quinn, and Shanna waved them goodbye, watching their own Little Wonders skip and chatter, excited about the prospect of pizza, and whatever else the future held. (Maybe ice cream!)
“Okay, seriously?” Shanna said. “They’re getting pizza, not going to war. You don’t get to cry—I’m the one with the hormones.”
“I’m not crying,” Daisy said, rubbing her eyes. “I just can’t believe you guys agreed to this. I’m so glad you did, you’re going to love it.”
“Playing D&D or having a child-free afternoon?” Quinn said, as she opened a bottle of wine and poured out two glasses—and found a sparkling water for Shanna.
“Both,” Daisy said, as she sat down at the table, began flipping through her notebook, rummaging and finding her DM screen.
“Don’t get me wrong, I crave free time,” Quinn was saying, her eyes going soft, “but those kids are kind of great, aren’t they?”
“They are,” Shanna agreed, her eyes going soft, too.
“Yeah,” Daisy agreed. “But don’t worry, I won’t keep you too long. We’ll play a short adventure, only about four hours, give or take.”
“Four HOURS?” Quinn said, blinking in shock. “Do you know how many Parcels that is?”
“Seriously, think of what you could do with four hours.” Shanna agreed, wild eyed. “You could write up an entire legal brief—you could do your taxes in four hours.”
“I could cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner *while* designing a room and binge a sitcom on Netflix,” Quinn countered.
“Or, you could play a short game of D&D,” Daisy replied, laying all of her pages out in front of her. She pulled out a few sets of dice, and handed them to her friends. They looked at the sparkly purple (in Quinn’s case) and fluorescent green (for Shanna) geometric objects with a mixture of amusement and awe. Daisy smiled as she rolled up her sleeves.
“Settle in, ladies. This is gonna be fun.”
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Kate Rorick
Q&A with Kate Rorick
Read On
* * *
Take a Peek at Kate Rorick’s Debut Novel, The Baby Plan
About the Author
Meet Kate Rorick
Emmy Award–winning writer KATE RORICK is the author of novels about modern motherhood. She is also a television writer and producer, most recently for The Librarians and Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger. She is one of the writers behind the runaway YouTube sensation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and authored its two tie-in novels. In her vast spare time she is a bestselling author of historical romance, under the name Kate Noble. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Q&A with Kate Rorick
Q: You are a (fairly) new mother—without naming names or giving out details, did you base any of the situations in Little Wonders on real life?
A: If you’re asking have I ever stomped on my kid’s Halloween costume or witnessed a Parent Association meeting meltdown—no, sorry, those are wholly out of my imagination. I have attended my fair share of Halloween parades and school festivals, but they were much less dramatic than the ones depicted. But I did recently experience a preschool graduation ceremony for my first child, and am in the potty-training trenches with my second, so suffice to say . . . certain plot points in the book are incredibly present in my life.
When you become a parent, you are dropped into an entirely new world, with a different language, different customs, and different rules. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve planned, how much you’ve read, how much advice you’ve gotten—You. Are. Not. Prepared. And as soon as you feel like you’ve found your feet, your kid grows, the rules shift, and you have to scramble to keep up.
When my first child began preschool, I was a wide-eyed doe of panic, trying to figure out how to navigate interactions with the teachers and the parents—how do you best advocate for your child? How do you set up a playdate? How do you get another parent to be friends with you? (It’s not like you can pass them a note in study hall or arrange a parental hookup on Tinder.) So everything in Little Wonders about feeling out of your depth, about trying to balance who you are with what you need to be for your child, about navigating life with a three-year-old . . . that’s all very, very realistic.
Q: Daisy has a hard time adjusting to her new life on the East Coast. Have you experienced life on both coasts? Or have you been strictly a West Coast dweller your entire life?
A: I’ve spent large chunks of my life on both coasts—having been raised in the East, plus spending the first decade of adulthood there. I moved west for work about ten years ago . . . and while it’s home now, there is always the sensation of true home being where you were raised, three thousand miles away. So I have a great deal of sympathy for Robbie and his homesickness driving him all the way back east from LA. But it’s a lot harder for Daisy, who is not a Needleton native,
to feel the same sense of home. Especially when her sense of belonging to Los Angeles is so strong.
Q: Daisy is a self-declared geek, a Star Wars aficionado, and a Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master. Does geek culture play a significant role in your life?
A: Yes, geek culture plays a pretty significant role in my life—because in my day job I write for television, and very often the shows I work on are genre shows. But also because . . . I love it. Who among us doesn’t remember the thrill deep in our chests when Luke Skywalker fired those rockets and the Death Star blew up? Or when Harry Potter caught that first snitch? When you and your merry band of adventurers face your first dragon? Geek culture has become mainstream culture because these experiences—and the feelings they evoke—are universal.
My experience of Los Angeles is that it’s filled with geeks and nerds—far more so than it is with the beauty-obsessed beach dwellers that movies teach us live here. People who are so passionate about narrative, stories, world building that they’ll spend hours upon hours learning and living those worlds. And so many—SO MANY—of those nerds are women, and mothers. It was incredibly important to me that Daisy be nerdy (in fact, there was a lot more in the book about her geek cred that had to be cut because I can get really boring when I go into detail), because all too often, the depiction of moms is that they aren’t nerdy. They aren’t given permission to be passionate about anything other than their kids. Sure, the dads can have hobbies, but the moms? Maybe they get a book club. (I have nothing against book clubs. I’m in one. But I’ve also played my fair share of RPGs and tabletop games, and think they deserve equal press.)