"Yup, that looks better."
"How did you get to be so good at this, Dad?"
"I took a lot of courses in data structures and algorithms when I was younger. How's your intro to programming class going this week, anyway?"
"Pretty good, I—"
"Bobby."
"Pretty well."
"You know how much it annoys your mom."
"I knowww…"
"Anyway, sorry I interrupted you, pumpkin."
"Well, we just did a program today where we're using the Sieve of Eratosthenes to…"
"To what?"
"Mom sounds mad."
"Hm." Carl turned his head to the door to listen.
"—impossible, Becca."
"I keep telling you, it was all in fun!"
"I asked you—"
"Why the fuck are you so wound up today, Annie? Ugh, I'm still all sweaty."
Carl looked back to his daughter, who was giving him a wide-eyed stare.
"They're fighting again," Bobby said, being extra cutesy with her eyebrows raised. "Why do Mom and Aunt Becca always fight?"
"Well…" Carl scratched his beard. "It's kinda complicated, pumpkin."
Bobby started picking at her fingernails, as she tended to do when she was nervous. "Do they hate each other?"
"No." Carl frowned, shaking his head. "Of course not. They just have very different opinions on a lot of things, and they get really intense when they talk about them." He glanced again towards the door. "I'm gonna go see what we're doing for dinner, okay?" He rose from his chair at his daughter's desk.
"'Kay! But I already know what we're having."
Carl looked back to his youngest daughter. "You do, do you?"
Bobby grinned and nodded. "Mom got it all ready this morning and hid it in the back of the fridge."
A suspicion formed in Carl's mind. Annie was the best—of course she was—but was she the best? He was pretty sure that she was. "Guess I better get down there then and help out so we can eat sooner."
Bobby nodded again, eagerly this time, and watched him walk out of her room.
Carl took the stairs down to the kitchen, for some reason feeling that his feet were too hot in his socks. "Hey, how'd yoga go?" he called as he walked in, breaking into whatever heated argument he hadn't really been paying attention to, because there was always an argument when Rebecca was at the house.
"It was fun!" Rebecca exclaimed, cutting off her half of the argument to smile mischievously over at him.
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He looked to Annie, who rolled her eyes and gave him a look which he interpreted to mean I'm so annoyed I can't even talk about it. She turned away and bent over slightly to reach into the refrigerator, during which time he subtly admired the way she looked in her black yoga pants.
His wife pulled out a sealed container from the back of the fridge, then placed it on the nearby counter and took the lid off. "I'm gonna let these air while I shower—"
"Ooh, I need a shower too," Rebecca cut in, sidling up to Carl in her yoga pants and sports bra to wrap him in a squishy hug that was just barely sweaty enough to be annoying—no doubt as she'd planned it to be. "Thanks again for letting me stay with you this week," she said, looking up at him.
"Not a problem," Carl said, trying to discern the contents of the nearly-opaque container on the counter and whether it was, in fact, filled with Annie's special hamburgers as he suspected it to be. "We've got plenty of space."
Annie's lips were pressed together in an overt expression of irritation, obviously imagining how gross Rebecca's hug felt. It wasn't that bad, but it also wasn't really the hug that he'd wanted to get upon entering the room.
"I suppose maybe it's a little bigger than I remember," Rebecca said, her head turned to also look at Annie. After another moment, she finally had enough of her mildly-annoying prank and walked past him, the following sounds of footsteps on the stairs indicating that she was probably going up to shower in the guest bathroom.
Carl wasn't interested in any of that, however, and he'd already walked across the kitchen to give Annie a nice welcome home hug and kiss, the likes of which ended up turning into an I missed you kiss at her insistence and involved him tangling one hand in her curly blonde hair in the process of responding to her escalation.
"Uh," he managed, breathing heavily and stroking his hand down the back of her loose, slightly sweaty, light pink workout shirt.
Annie stared up at him, seeming to be inspecting his face.
"What, do I have something?" Carl rubbed at his beard with his free hand.
"Um…" His wife gave him a look that he couldn't quite place. "No, it's… It's nothing. I'm gonna go clean up." She trailed her hand across his stomach as she walked quickly out of the room.
Carl frowned, unable to find his usual enjoyment of watching his wife's trim figure filling out her yoga attire as she walked away from him.
Something was bugging Annie, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.
Unless she really didn't want to talk about it, of course, because he knew all too well how that was liable to make things worse.
----------------------------------------
"Wow, these burgers are surprisingly good," Rebecca commented after swallowing her first bite. She'd changed into impractically tight-looking jeans and a slightly more sensible shirt than the previous day's, though it was still a bit too revealing in Carl's estimation. Again, not that he had a problem with women wearing whatever clothing they wanted, but…
Annie, by contrast, was looking gorgeous—if still annoyed and occasionally giving him that look he couldn't quite place—in a pair of faded blue jeans and a light blue dress shirt that exposed the elegant curve of her neck and teased hints of her clavicle depending on the angle he…
At his wife's execution of her Stop Ogling Me eye roll skill, Carl's focus was disrupted, and he returned to his burger, which was the best. He'd always enjoyed a good burger—and he made pretty good ones himself—but Annie had taken it upon herself to research and develop a method of making burgers which were so good that he was already putting together a second one as everyone else was barely halfway through their first. Not that he was going to eat all the remaining burgers, though certainly he probably could if he committed himself to the task since there were only another four left out of nine total, meaning that, using Hamburger Division, there were still enough for each person to have another burger, but probably Rebecca and Annie wouldn't each have a second one, which meant that he could potentially have as many as three burgers since he'd obviously save one for Sammy, who loved these burgers almost as much as he did.
But only one, because it had been her choice to stay out with her friends before her game instead of coming home for burgers.
Carl believed that tough love was the only way to avoid spoiling his daughters.
"How was badminton today?" Annie asked, looking to their youngest daughter.
"Was okay," Bobby said around a mouthful of broccoli.
"That's the one with the, um…" Rebecca snapped her fingers a couple times. "What's the thingy called that you hit?"
Annie sighed.
"You mean the birdie?" Bobby replied in a helpful tone.
Rebecca's brows furrowed, and she placed a finger on her lips for a moment. Then she looked to Carl. "Was that the name I was thinking of?"
Carl, who had just finished his second burger and was still feeling pretty hungry after an irritation-fueled workout earlier, looked his sister-in-law dead in the eye, pointed at the plate of delicious burgers, and asked, "You gonna have a second one, or…"
Annie set her cup of milk down hard and started to cough.