EPILOGUE
ROMAN
Six Months Later
The house isloud with good noise. Hammers. Laughter. A rolling cart squeaks down the hall. Mina stands in the doorway with paint chips fanned like a deck. She holds court with the decorator and three movers who wait for her signal. I stand behind her with a boy on each hip and a stain on my shirt that used to be oatmeal.
She kisses the air near my cheek so she doesn’t smudge me. “This wall,” she tells the crew, “pulls the light wrong. Move the bookcase again.”
They nod. The case rises. The floor creaks. The twins clap as if a parade has gone by.
The nannies hover a step back. They are good and kind and organized. I hired them because Mina asked. She worked without a net for too long, and she deserves more help than her mother can provide at her age.
I shouldn’t think of it that way—her mother is four years younger than me. But Jennifer has her own life now, and I refuse to impose when I can hire help.
I still carry my sons myself as often as I can. Xander rides my right hip. Yuri hangs on my left and tries to steal my watch. They have learned to walk, but most of their walking is getting underfoot of the construction crew that Mina’s hired.
Xander twists and points at the rug, so I set him on his feet. He toddles toward a stack of blocks with the focus of a general. Yuri watches, decides no, and tucks his face into my collar. I am a large man with more scars than I plan to count. A boy hiding in my neck still makes me feel like I’ve won something big.
Mina lifts a hand. The movers adjust two inches and wait. “There,” she says. She squints, nods once, and glances at me, so I give her the smallest smile. She smiles back and keeps moving.
It’s been like this for weeks.
Remodeling is inconvenience turned into a plan. Dust finds places I did not know existed. A hallway disappears for a day and returns with a better idea. The alarm panel beeps while a man rewires it so it cannot be tricked. The dining table arrived too big for the door, so a steady hand took off a leg outside and put it back on in the hall.
The security team twitched until I told them to breathe. This is not a siege. This is a future.
“What do you think of this finish?” Mina asks as she holds up swatches.
They are identical, as far as I’m concerned. Brown is brown. But each one has a different name, and she appears to think of themas different. This feels like a test I can’t pass, when it should be a test I can’t fail.
“Which are you leaning toward?”
“I like this one,” she says, pointing to the brown one. “But the undertones in this one could make all the difference with the lighting.” She points to the other brown one.
“Hmm,” I mutter, hoping to sound convincing. “I think you’re right about the lighting for that one.”
“Yeah, but in a good way or a bad way?”
Crap. “In a good way.” I hope.
She smiles. Success! “That’s what I was thinking. Good call. Okay, guys, we’re going with this one…”
I sit in the rocking chair near Xander, while Mina takes her crew elsewhere. Yuri sits on my lap, happy just to sit there. “Boys, marriage, in my experience, is a multitude of land mines that might be nothing at all or could be an hour-long discussion of the undertones of identical browns. If she wants to move a wall, you move a wall. If she wants to keep the old stove because it heats the kettle fast, you keep it. Those are the little things that keep her happy.”
I readjust Yuri because he’s getting big enough to cut off my circulation if he’s not sitting right. “The things I care about, I’ll dig in about. I care about sight lines. I care that the front steps hold a stroller and three bags without making anyone dance to find them. Everything else is her kingdom. Remember that.”
I set Yuri down, because Xander is reaching for him, and the pair play with balls together. The contractor pops his head in, scanning the room for what, I don’t know. He smiles at the kidsin a way that looks like a wince and then like a grin. “Little bosses, eh?”
“They get it from their mother.”
Mina hears and tosses me a look down the hallway. I raise my hands like a man caught stealing cookies. The men laugh, and then she grins. “Don’t you forget it.”
Later on, we’re in the kitchen, while the construction crew does things to the boys’ room. It’s been like this for a while—moving rooms to accommodate the latest decision. Jennifer teases that I’ve opened a can of worms and that Mina will never stop redecorating because she’s never had the chance to do it before now.
When she gets bored of ordering them around, Mina leans into my shoulder. “You sure you want this chaos? It will be another week if I’m lucky. Maybe two.”
She means months, not weeks, and that’s still an underestimation, if the plaster dust is any indication.
