Chapter 13

(Lux)

The perfect way to pass through a storm

Seeing the way they’d turned the storm into an opportunity to start family fun time early had inspired me to jump into the kitchen and whip up some gametime treats while everyone finished restocking the shelves of all three shops to ensure they’d be ready to reopen. No one knew if that was going to be Monday yet or if the snow would get so bad they’d have to wait for it to melt enough that the streets could reopen. It wasn’t like there were plows or even salt here where it so rarely snowed more than dusting, if at all, for years on end.

Guess we were finally due to get dumped on.

What sounded like a herd of stomping goats came up the stairs, leaving me shocked to see them all in just their socks when they stepped through the door. I guess it shouldn’t have shocked me that much, when Maddox and Chaos were as tall as I was, and each was at least fifty pounds heavier.

“You need help in there, or do you need us to set up the living room?” Maddox asked as he rounded the corner and glanced between me and the huge, open space that was River’s living room.

“If you guys can get the couches and coffee table moved, that would be awesome,” I said.

I’d been so preoccupied with the living room that I’d forgotten about that part, but with everyone here, things soon started moving right along. With Chaos and Maddox rearranging things while Jeremy, River and Haven giggled, nudged and tickled one another in front of the shelf that held all the games.

“You may each choose one.” Chaos declared, voice firm, but he didn’t even have to raise it to put an immediate stop to their antics.

They lined up like little ducklings, each taking a game from the shelf and carrying it into the living room, where the square coffee table now sat neatly positioned between two couches and four ottomans.

“No fair, that Dad voice works even now,” Jeremy grumbled as he sat on the couch beside his father.

“Learn how to not make me use it and you won’t have to hear it anymore,” Chaos declared, while Jeremy groaned and scrubbed a hand over his face, looking a bit disgruntled at being told that.

“Uh-huh, it’s all that grumbling that gets you in trouble in the first place,” Chaos replied as he ruffled his hair.

“Something tells me you’ve been dealing with these threes’ antics for a long time now,” I said as I brought over a platter of food and drinks.

“Since Jeremy was eight and he and Haven collided on the playground while trying to leap out of the way of a dodgeball.”

“Ouch.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Oh, come on pops, not this story again.”

“He and Maddox haven’t heard it, so I’m gonna tell it,” Chaos said, cutting him a look. “And you will sit there and listen like everyone else.”

“Fine.”

He kicked his feet a little when he said it, while Haven pouted and groaned. River looked like a Cheshire Cat though, which told me to prepare for something hilarious. I listened while Maddox and I set up the game board for aggravation, a dice and marble game that had apparently been Jeremy’s choice.

“So, I get this call at work from the school nurse, and in the background, I hear my kid screaming bloody murder, like he’d just gotten his leg broken or something. I go flying out of there, fishtailing and laying on the horn as I start passing people. Two blocks from the school I see lights in the review and the sheriff on my ass, but no way am I stopping when I’m that close to being able to hug the little shit and tell him everything would be okay.”

“Oh damn,” Maddox said as he started passing the dice around so everyone could roll to see who’d be kicking off the game.

“My goose would have been cooked if this was the city,” Chaos explained, “But Barry was the officer at the time and the moment he got a look at my face as I burst out of the truck, he didn’t ask questions, he just followed me into the building as I went charging inside, bellowing for my kid since my dumbass couldn’t remember where the god damned nurses office was, I was so panicked.”

“It really was kinda epic,” Haven muttered.

“Hrumph,” Chaos grumbled as he cut him a fierce look. “You would think that. Meanwhile, doors started opening as all the ladies in the office came rushing out. Old Matilda McQueen was still the secretary back then, may the goddess bless that woman. She spotted me and caught me by the arm, took me into the nurse’s office where my kid and this one over here, are giggling and admiring one another’s bruises where they’d bumped their heads. Both of ‘em have big old bumps that are already an angry shade of red, and they’re laughing about how the ball didn’t get either one of them.”

I could help it, I snorted, laughing because I’d seen frantic parents come rushing in to check on freaked out kids who’d been just fine the moment they’d gotten over the sudden shock of getting hurt. I always felt for them, truly, but I couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled up out of me because there is nothing more dramatic than a child with a boo-boo.

“See these gray hairs right here?” Chaos remarked, pointing to a small smattering of them by his temple, “each and every last one of them is from that day.”

“Come on, pops, that’s not even remotely possible,” Jeremy said. “You didn’t even get the first one until I was twelve.”

“And ya put that one there too,” Chaos grumbled, nudging him until he almost fell off the couch.

“Six, yey!” River declared before passing the dice to me.

I rolled a rather mediocre three which meant River would be starting the game and play would continue to the left of us, leaving me with the final roll. That left plenty of time for them to converge on my position with their marbles and leave me hoping for lucky rolls to keep me from repeatedly getting sent back to my starting position.

“You should tell them about the prickly pear incident,” River instigated as he rolled another six and brought his first marble onto the main part of the board.

“Wait, time out!” Haven declared, sharing a glance with Jeremy, who shrugged. “How’d you know about that one? I don’t remember telling you.”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t tell him!” Jeremy declared when Haven shot him a withering look.

“Well now I really hope someone will tell me,” Maddox said, smirking at his boy, who scowled and stuck his tongue out at him.

Like the Daddy he was, Maddox chased it back into his mouth with a kiss that left Haven pink cheeked, breathless and giggling at the heated look Maddox gave him.

“What have I told you about that tongue?” Maddox asked.

I caught glimpses of River’s devilishness in his brother when Haven grinned cheekily and rattled off his response. “To keep it in my mouth unless I intend to use it.”

“And do you?” Maddox asked.

“Uh-huh, Daddy, I’m gonna use it right now.”

Whoa, okay so did he intend….

My brain whirled with the left I was worried things had just taken, not sure quite how the game would continue if Haven was on his hands and knees mashed between the coffee table and his Daddy, only the wicked little shit just picked up one of the crab puffs I’d made, dunked it into one of the dippy cups of old bay seasoned melted cheese I’d set out, and popped it in his mouth with a grin.

“Hmmmm,” he hummed around the warm morsel in his mouth before slowly chewing it.

He licked his lips when he was finished, that bright smile never leaving his face.

“See Daddy,” he remarked after he’d swallowed. “I used it, and it worked well.”

Silence, for about a split second, then Chaos chortled, Jeremy snickered, and River doubled over, laughing and rocking into me as he cackled.

“You are a menace and an absolute shit,” Maddox declared. “And I love every last snarky inch of you.”

With Haven cuddled in his arms, Maddox took his turn, the game finally continuing in between nibbles and stories.

“I suppose I am at least a little at fault for what happened with them and the prickly pears,” Chaos admitted as he bumped one of Maddox’s marbles back to the starting point and the man flipped him off good naturedly.

“Oh, now I definitely have to hear how this played out,” Maddox remarked.

“You know how it was back then,” Chaos said. “Those department stores were always giving free gifts when you made a big purchase. Well, I’d about had it with having to hang the wash just to get it to dry fully, especially if it meant these three or the dogs might come tearassing across the lawn without a care in the world, especially after I started letting them on the dirt bikes.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, immediately interrupting the story while I stroked my hand down River’s back. “You rode dirt bikes?”

“I rode on the back of their dirt bikes,” River replied. “I hated having to drive one. There were too many things to pay attention too, and too many bounces happening while I was trying to maneuver. When I rode behind them all I had to do was cling and laugh whenever we launched over something.”

“Leading to gray hairs six, seven and eight,” Chaos muttered, gesturing to a random spot on the side of his head.

“Dude, I only count four from here.” I remarked as I peered at him. “And that’s total and not even in the spot you’re gesturing in.”

“They’re hiding.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If we’ve got to account for all of the imaginary gray he thinks he has, we’ll be here until spring,” River quipped, prompting another round of giggles from Jeremy and Haven.

“Quiet you, before I decide to share the story about you and the poor old garter snake you scared into needing therapy.”

“ I scared?” River yelped. “That was all the snake’s fault, not mine. All I did was reach for a strawberry and it tried to snatch it from me!”

“Like I tried to tell you back then, it wasn’t going after you or your damned berry,” Chaos explained. “It was probably napping in the shade of the plant when you brushed against it trying to grab that berry and scared it into moving.”

“At me!” River said, lips pursed in a pouty, petulant look. “It lunged.”

“More like slithered and regretted it for the rest of its existence once you started smacking at it with the half full butter tub you held,” Chaos reminded him, laughing now too. “The way those berries started flying out of there when you started swinging the bucket at him was one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life. You’d have thought the plant exploded, especially when he stopped bashing at everything he could reach with that bucket. He smashed half of it into the dirt, decimated at least a dozen berries, and completely missed the snake, which tore off past me like its tail was on fire.”

River huffed, but he uncrossed his arms to accept the dice I passed him. “That’s what it gets for scaring me.”

“You three had a hell of a childhood, didn’t you?” Maddox asked.

“You know it,” Jeremy replied, a fond look on his face as he stared across the table at River and Haven. “I never had any siblings until they came along.”

“Sometimes the very best families are the ones we have to wait for,” I remarked as I stared around the table at the other men in the room.

“Amen to that,” Chaos said.

We might have been from different walks of life, but I already felt a kinship with them that went beyond the three of us being Daddies. Both were creative individuals, Maddox with his recipes and Chaos with the things he was able to do with anything mechanical. I’d drifted through the garage earlier in the day, carrying packages in the back way and dropping off warm drinks to keep their fingers from stiffening while they’d worked. I’d caught the tail end of Chaos explaining a manifold system to Haven that the younger man had never encountered before, going over it in intricate detail so he’d be prepared if he ever encountered one again.

“Okay, so back to the prickly pears,” Maddox urged as he moved a colorful green marble past two of Jeremy’s. “What was that all about?”

“It all started with the free juicer they gave me when I bought the new dryer,” Chaos explained. “Now I don’t know what the hell they were thinking because back then I looked even less like a guy who’d know how to use a juicer than I do now, but I went home with one that immediately caught the kids’ attention while I was hooking the dryer up.”

“They wanted to try it out, didn’t they?” I asked.

“Yup, and with what I’d just dropped on the damn dryer my pockets were too empty to go out and buy a basket of fruit for them to experiment with.”

Chuckling, Maddox ruffled his boy’s hair before tugging him into a hug. “I can see where this is going.”

“Dad said he couldn’t afford fruit,” Jerremy surmised. “He never said we couldn’t test the juicer.”

“And to be fair, we did call down to the store to see if mom had any fruit she was about to pull from the shelves and bring home,” River declared while Haven nodded in agreement. “She didn’t. But the cactus had fruit, lots of them, and we had a ladder.”

“And baskets,” Jeremy added.

“And an ATV,” River reminded him.

“And a hell of a lot of initiative, I’ll give you that,” Chaos said. “Too bad I can’t say the same about the commonsense department. Those spines are nothing to be trifled with.”

“How many did you have to pluck out of their asses?” Maddox asked.

“Fortunately, only two, and yes, one was literally stuck to my kid’s behind after he’d missed a rung coming down the ladder and landed on one.”

I grimaced, having poked my fingers several times already trying to collect the small, fallen clumps of spines for an art project. “Ouch.”

“Big, big ouch,” River sulked, stroking his thigh.

“So that’s where your scar came from,” I said as I wrapped an arm around him. “I’d wondered about that when I was kissing over it the other night.”

“Yeah, mine were in deep.” River said. “It took a lot of yanking with the tweezers before it came out.”

“Because you wouldn’t hold still and the other two kept getting in my way when I was trying to catch you and hold you down.”

“Well, he was yelling help, help,” Jeremy pointed out.

River nodded and gazed up at me with a little grin. “I was screamin’ like a banshee.”

“And I kept expecting the cops to show up because someone thought you were being killed.”

River scowled. “’cause it hurt.”

“And it would have hurt a lot worse if it had gotten in there so deep, you’d have had to go to the hospital and have them cut it out,” Chaos pointed out.

River grimaced and buried his face against my arm. “He’s threatening me,” River whined, making everyone in the room laugh.

“More like reminding you of an old threat,” I pointed out, ruffling his hair then pressing a kiss to the back of his head.

“After all of that, did they at least get to test out the juicer?” Maddox asked.

“Yup.”

When Chaos rolled, moved his marble and still didn’t elaborate further, Maddox grumbled and made an impatient movement with his hand in the hopes of hurrying him along.

“What?” Chaos asked, with the kind of feigned innocence that drew another grumbled curse word from Maddox.

“You know what, goddammit.” Maddox hissed.

“It turned out surprisingly well,” Chaos said. “They made prickly pear juice, prickly pear syrup, which meant they insisted on afterschool pancakes every day for about a week. At that point I bought a waffle maker just to change things up, which led to them heading back out to harvest more prickly pears in what became a vicious cycle of them getting stuck then hollering bloody murder when it was time for me to patch them up.”

“It was so good though,” Jeremy declared. “Well worth the damage.”

Maddox had turned to face Haven, one eyebrow quirked. “And when were you going to tell me about prickly pear syrup and help me make a batch for the shop?”

“Ummmm….” Haven stammered, looking a bit sheepish as he pinked up a little. “I hadn’t really thought about it until now.”

“Uh-huh,” Maddox grumbled before kissing him on the forehead. “I guess I’ll have to accept that answer, for now.

As I listened to them weave their pasts with their present in the stories they told and the promises they made as they organized future activities, I couldn’t help but feel like the luckiest man in Foggy Basin, if not the world, to have had one simple errand lead to a moment like this.