We packed the groceries in a calm quiet for a little while before I mustered up the courage to ask the thing I wanted to ask.

"You… don't really get along with your parents do you?" I asked carefully. She didn't look like she wanted to talk about it, but I wanted to know. I wasn't sure why, but I felt like I needed to know.

"They have to be there for me to get along with them." She didn't say anymore. I didn't think she really had to, the look on her face said it all.

And as comfortable our conversation was while doing laundry and shopping for groceries, so was our silence when I started cooking spaghetti. Every so often, we'd look at each other and smile sheepishly.

"Thank you." Aster said, breaking the silence between us while I stirred the sauce. The water from the pasta pot was bubbling. The entire kitchen smelled like oregano. "For today. It was… it made me feel like, I dunno, like I was apart of a family or something. So thank you."

I smiled at the vulnerability in her words, and her nervousness as she uttered them. I smiled because she pointed out something in my life I didn't know had defined me: family. I always thought that my family was incomplete for the absence of my mother, but it was that Monday that I realized I had about twenty dads to take her place.

And I'd never been happier about it.

—————-

She was there every Monday after that, waiting at the front steps of the school for me. She would tell me about her crazy nights out on Friday and Saturday. Sometimes she'd slip in that Aster bravado, but it wasn't that big of a deal because I would shoot her a look and she'd toss it out immediately. I didn't have to deal with Super-Popular-Aster-Who-Was-Incredibly-High-On-Herself that often. The only reason I had a problem with it was because it was her little shield. Most of the time with me, it was just Aster. I could be just Vivian with her and she would look at me like I was the most fascinating thing in the world.

I learned a lot about Aster on those Mondays, about her parents who were lucky to have found one another. Aster liked to laugh about how there were only two people in the entire world who were happy only seeing one another about a total of six days out of the year and they found each other.