Page 100 of Colt
“Sounds perfect.”
He pulled the blanket over us, and I burrowed into his warmth as sleep pulled us both under.
Epilogue
?
— Colt —
Imight have slightly overestimated what a seventh birthday party required. The bouncy castle had seemed reasonable when I’d ordered it. Purple and orange, the size of a small house, anchored to the ground with industrial stakes. I’d looked at the spec sheet and thought, yeah, that’s about right. The food for twice as many people as were coming had also seemed reasonable. The cake Indira had helped me commission, the boys’ names in blue frosting with seven candles. The mechanical bull I’d rented from a company whose website had not asked a single question about the context. The snow cone machine. The fake tattoo station—flash sheets of skulls and flames and eagles, the kind of thing that would look right on any brother’s arm, scaled down for a bunch of kids. The photographer I’d booked to make sure we got all of it. All reasonable.
Lilac came over from the house at eleven, walked to where I was standing at the edge of the property, and took in the full picture in silence. “Colt.”
“Yeah, baby.”
“There’s a fake tattoo station.”
“I know.”
“All their school friends are going to go home with skulls on their faces.”
“They’re going to love it.”
She turned to look at me. I kept my eyes on the bouncy castle. After a moment she put her hand on my arm and when I finally looked at her, the expression on her face—somewhere betweenyou’ve lost your mindandit’s perfect—had me ready to defend every single item.
“I talked to Dutch about the party,” I said. “He said go big.”
“Dutch would say that.”
“He said—” I stopped. Started over. “They only turn seven once.”
“Every kid only turns seven once.”
“They’re seven and it’s their first birthday with me.” I said it evenly. She held my eyes for a moment and then nodded, once, and squeezed my arm and didn’t say another word about the fake tattoo station. Or any of the rest of it.
She went to get drinks after that. Came back with two cups of lemonade, pressed one into my hand, and stood beside me.
“You’re going to cry again,” she said.
“I’m not going to cry,” I scoffed.
She laughed and leaned into my side, and I put my arm around her and we watched our sons lose their minds in real time.
Knox had been in the bouncy castle for forty-five minutes without stopping. He came out only to eat half a hot dog, then immediately went back in. Luca had gone in for approximately six minutes, decided it was beneath his dignity, and was now sitting at one of the picnic tables explaining something to Graham with great intensity, gesturing with a plastic fork for emphasis.
Graham was listening. He had that quality—he actually listened, like what you were saying was the most important thing he’d heard all day. I’d noticed it with the boys early on. They loved him, which hadn’t surprised me once I understood what he’d done for them.
He caught my eye over Luca’s head and smiled. I raised my cup.
By noon, Handful had discovered the snow cone machine.
He was supposed to be helping set out more food. Instead he’d been at that machine for twenty minutes, working through every flavor in sequence, and was now standing in a patch of grass that had turned a deep, catastrophic red from everything he’d spilled. He had a cherry snow cone in each hand and appeared to have no awareness that anything was wrong. Knox had clocked him from inside the bouncy castle, abandoned the castle entirely, and sprinted over. Handful handed him one of the snow cones without hesitation and they stood there together, a seven-year-old and a grown man who should have known better, surveying the ruins of the grass.
“He’s going to have a red tongue for a week,” Lilac said.
“Which one?”
She looked at me. “Both of them.”
