Yeah. I needed a fainting couch real quick.
6
Wes
"Where did everyone go this morning?"I asked, parked in the middle of the kitchen while my family bustled around me.
I'd spent the past two hours torn between the lingering effervescence of flirtation and the itch of my earlier panic over the quiet. Now that my brother's home had returned to its regularly scheduled chaos, I was ready to scratch that itch.
Will stood with his back to me as he poured Cheerios into a plastic cup. He handed it to his daughter Abby, who promptly upended the contents onto the floor. "Call the dogs in, Wes," my brother said, ignoring my question. He crouched down to meet Abby at eye level. "Was that necessary?"
"Apes!" she cried.
"You asked for Cheerios," he replied evenly. "If you'd asked for grapes, I would've given you grapes."
"Apes!" she repeated.
"Are you going to throw them if I give them to you?" Will tucked her hair over her ears. "Because dogs cannot eat grapes and then your mother will decide the floor needs to be washed in the middle of the night, and we can't have either of those situations, Abby. How about blueberries?"
My mother breezed past me with little more than a pat to my shoulder, asking, "Where's the blanket Annabelle spit up on earlier? I want to toss that in with the load of baby clothes I'm washing."
"I don't know, Judy," Will replied, pushing to his feet. "Check the baby bag."
Abby toddled over to me and fastened her body around my leg. "Hello," I said to her.
My father marched through the kitchen carrying three paper grocery bags in each arm. Naturally. Why take an extra trip to the car when you could be a hero instead? "Give me a hand with this, Wesley," he said as he removed items from the bags.
"He's supposed to be calling the dogs in," Will said.
I glanced down at the child hugging my leg. She smiled up at me with a drooly grin and proceeded to gnaw at my jeans as if that was standard operating procedure. "Yeah, just a second with that. I asked where everyone went this morning. The place was a ghost town and no one mentioned a damn thing to me."
"Wesley, please. The babies are listening," my mother chided.
The gremlin on my leg was too busy chewing denim to hear anything but that wasn't my problem right now. "Cool. Whatever. Where was everyone and why was it a huge secret?"
"Is there something you're trying to say?" Will called over his shoulder.
"Yeah, I'm saying everyone left and no one told me about it," I replied. "What's the story with that?"
My father folded two empty grocery bags into precise halves, smoothing the paper along the crisp edges. "No secrets, Wesley. Your mother and I took Abby to her yoga class and food shopping while Will and Shannon had appointments."
I looked down at Abby. "You haveyogaclasses? Andmy fathertook you there?"
"Sure did," he called, smiling at the little girl. "We have a lot of fun with our tree poses, don't we?"
The man known to many as the Commodore because he loved military lifethat muchset bags of avocados and purple carrots down to extend his arms over his head and flatten the sole of his shoe to his opposite leg. Abby slapped her hand to my shin, shouting, "Shree! Shree!"
"Sorry, kiddo. I can't do that one," I said. "Still kind of amazed your grandfather does."
An overflowing laundry basket tucked to her hip, my mother said, "We love the tiny tot yoga. We do all the poses together and practice deep breathing."
"Forgive me if it takes a minute to wrap my mind around that," I said.
Shaking her head, my mother said, "Take all the time you need. I'll be in the laundry room."
"Have fun with that," I called after her. "Maybe now I could get some explanation as to why no one told me about this. I thought—I don't know. All I'm saying is, it's weird for this place to empty out. I thought something was wrong."
My father dropped his hands from over his head and studied me for a moment. It was uncomfortable, his scrutiny. "Are you sleeping well?" he asked.
