Wings for Keiko

By Jessi Hammond

Warren has done his best to raise his daughter Keiko as a single dad after his wife died in childbirth. Most of the time he does okay.

This week is not an okay week.

Lily can see that. She looks after Keiko at after-school care. She likes Warren, she'd like to help, but she doesn't want to cross boundaries.

Until two days before the school Christmas play, when Keiko needs an angel costume…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223112471

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About this book

Warren has done his best to raise his daughter Keiko as a single dad after his wife died in childbirth. Most of the time he does okay.

This week is not an okay week.

Lily can see that. She looks after Keiko at after-school care. She likes Warren, she’d like to help, but she doesn’t want to cross boundaries.

Until two days before the school Christmas play, when Keiko needs an angel costume…

Wings for Keiko

One

Warren sat in the cab of his truck, tapping his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Ahead and behind and to both sides of him the traffic was stalled, lines of cars and big SUVs and other small delivery trucks like his own ahead as far as he could see – and probably lined up just as far behind, he guessed, glancing in the mirror. The afternoon sun to his left glinted off paintwork and glared off windows, sending a yellow wash across everything he could see despite the dark clouds ahead that promised rain sometime during the night. Far ahead he thought he could see flashing red and blue lights. An accident, then.

He sighed, glancing at his watch. Three-fifteen. He had just over an hour and a half to make two deliveries, get back to the depot, drop off his truck and make tracks to pick up Keiko at after-school care.

He wasn’t going to make it, not at this rate.

Again.

He edged the truck forward a car-length and looked across at his phone, then shook his head. Nope. He didn’t have hands-free, and he couldn’t afford a fine for using his phone while driving. His work was driving; if he couldn’t drive he couldn’t work, and if he couldn’t work he’d have to apply for the dole, and welfare wasn’t enough to keep him and Keiko going with the house payments eating up almost half of what he made as it was.

Because he didn’t have Yumi’s wage to help now.

There was a photo of Yumi in his wallet. Small, olive skin, black hair to her waist with a long fringe, bright snapping brown eyes that crinkled at the corners, smile to die for, odd and whimsical sense of humour, and a hug like a mug of cocoa on a winter’s morning. He’d been smitten the first time he’d seen her in Year Eleven, an exchange student from Japan. He’d felt like a huge, awkward brown bear around her, even though he was average height and build,