When Life Gives You Lululemons Read Free Page B

’Skins/Eagles game next weekend. First playoff game. Who’s in?”
    The boys hooted.
    â€œHey, Mom, do you think Dad will take me?” Harry asked.
    â€œMy dad said tickets weren’t that expensive,” Nicholas said.
    Karolina forced herself to smile, though the boys couldn’t see her in the driver’s seat. “I’m sure he’d love that,” she lied, and sneaked a peek at Harry to see if he could hear it in her voice. Despite the fact that Harry was passionate about professional football in general and the Redskins specifically—andGraham, as a sitting U.S. senator, could name his seats anywhere in the stadium—father and son had never attended a game together. Every year Graham swore to Karolina and Harry that they’d sit in the owner’s box, fly to an important away game, or invite a bunch of Harry’s friends and get seats on the fifty-yard line, and every year another season went by without the Hartwell boys in attendance. Harry had been to a game exactly once, two years earlier, when Karolina took pity on him and bought tickets off StubHub. He’d been thrilled and cheered like crazy in his head-to-toe gear, but she knew he would have preferred to go with Graham: Karolina had unknowingly gotten tickets on the visitor side, and she couldn’t totally follow who had the ball, and in spite of her best intentions, she kept cheering at the wrong times.
    â€œMom! Hey, Mom!” Harry interrupted her thoughts. “There are cop cars behind us with their lights on.”
    â€œHmmm?” Karolina murmured, more to herself. She glanced in the rearview and saw two police cruisers with their lights ablaze, so close to the Suburban that they were nearly pushing up against the bumper. “My goodness, it must be important. Okay, okay, give me a second,” she said aloud. “I’m moving over.”
    She was grateful Harry was safely beside her, because she always got nervous when she saw an emergency vehicle in her neighborhood. Their house might be on fire, but so long as Harry was safely in her sight, she could deal with anything. She put on her blinker and eased the unwieldy truck onto the side of the road as gracefully as she could, sending a silent apology to the Crains, who lived five doors down and owned the beautiful lawn her tires were probably digging up. Only the cruisers didn’t quickly pass her on the left, as she’d expected; they too pulled to the side and came to a stop directly behind her truck.
    â€œOhhh, Mrs. Hartwell, you’re busted!” Stefan, another of Harry’s friends, yelled as all the boys laughed. Karolina did too.
    â€œYes, you know me,” Karolina said. “Going twenty in a residential neighborhood. Crazy!” She watched in the rearview as the officersstood next to her license plate and appeared to type it into an iPad-like device. Good , she thought. They would see the United States government plates that were on all three of their cars, and this whole silly thing would be over.
    But the two officers who approached her window weren’t laughing. “Ma’am? Is this your vehicle?” asked the female officer, while the male cop stood behind her and watched.
    â€œYes, of course,” Karolina said, wondering why they’d ask her such a ridiculous question. She was driving it, wasn’t she? “Officer, I really don’t think I was speeding. We literally just pulled out of the driveway. See? We live right back there. I’m just taking my son’s friends—”
    The female cop looked hard at Karolina and said, “I’ll need your license and registration, please.”
    Karolina checked the woman’s face. She wasn’t kidding. Karolina carefully removed her driver’s license from her wallet and was relieved to find the car’s registration tucked neatly in the glove compartment. “I, um, as you may recognize the name from my license