“Do you think he still doesn’t know how to ride a bike?”
“Fuck off,” she fires back, fighting with the lever to wind the window up.
“Maybe you could teach him…. That’d be romantic.”
“Lick rust.”
“Fine, fine, whatever! Best of luck!” I hop out of the car, then run around a garden bed toward the porch steps. “Hi, hello!” I am tackled, immediately, by three gremlins and their little sibling who, once I’m down on the ground, wipes a wet palm across my face and dries it in my hair.
Nik and Sef had their first kid, Levi, at twenty. She’s great, as far as ten-year-olds go. She messages me from her iPad every oncein a while. Usually, she sends funny cat videos, selfies with increasingly strange filters on them, or unprompted updates about her hamster.
After Levi came Max, who’s now eight, Wyatt, who’s six, Perry, who’s just shy of four, and baby Quinn, who is…I don’t know. Less than two but more than one. I love my brother, Sef, and all of their many, many spawn but I simply cannot be expected to keep track of this many ages, let alonemonths.
“Let him breathe!” Nik calls out in his booming, deep I-am-your-father voice that he’s been perfecting since Nadia was still in diapers.
“Help!” I pretend to struggle, making them all giggle over me. “Help me, brother!”
“Auntie Bunny!” Perry shouts, using my spleen as a launching pad as she and all her siblings ditch me for the youngest, more beloved Kablukov sibling. I wonder why Nadia bothered fixing her hair as I watch her get tackled to the ground as well.
“Hi,” Nik says, standing over me in his blue flannel shirt and dark jeans. I admire his work boots, the same pair he’s had for over a decade now, and take his offered hand to help me stand.
“Hi, man.” I throw my arms around his shoulders and we both pat each other’s backs twice before going in for a real hug. “Missed you,” I tell him, holding him close.
“You too,” he whispers gruffly. “Thank you for coming.”
We step apart, his hand still on my shoulder, as Sef makes her way down the porch steps, smiling knowingly as she holds their youngest. She’s wearing a yellow crocheted top that doesn’t cover even half of her protruding,pregnantbelly and a floor-length brown skirt.
A laugh escapes me, and I grab hold of Nik’s arm to steady myself. “Surely not…” I whisper to him.
Nik’s pride is unquestionable as he watches his wife approach. “Yeah…”
“Please tell me I’m not the world’slargestasshole. Did I know Sef was knocked up again?”
“He thought you wouldn’t come if he told you,” Sef says, going on the tips of her toes to hug me tightly. “Hi, Mi. Missed you.”
“Hi, Seffy.” Sef, or Sefina, is one of the purest souls I’ve ever met. She’s a walking, talking daily affirmation card. An avid astrologist with a penchant for making people give her the exact time and location of their birth ten seconds into meeting them. A total sweetheart. The yin to my grumpy older brother’s yang. And, apparently, extremely fertile to boot.
“Congratulations.” I tighten one arm around her, kissing her cheek as I reach toward my brother and pull him in too for a kiss on the side of his head that he immediately wipes off. “Now, real question for you both, have you two ever been told about this new, life-changing device called condoms?” I whisper, earning me a shoulder shove. “Alternatively, there’s this new craze called the pull-out method.”
“You mean how Wyatt and Perry came to be?” Sef smiles widely. “Yeah, not your brother’s best skill.”
“Hey!” Nik laughs jaggedly.
“He’s getting a vasectomy,” Sef says, patting my brother’s cheek with a wink. “Aren’t you, handsome?”
Nik grumbles but kisses his wife’s wrist before she disappears to greet Nadia excitedly.
“Sothisis why you called in your one-one-nine?” I ask. “You didn’t have”—I look around at the many, many bodies in their front lawn, and the one lurking on the porch watching my younger sister intently—“enough adults?”
One of my brother’s dimples deepens, as his smile twists unevenly. “Something like that.”
“How, uh, how pregnantisshe?”
“The baby will arrive sometime in the next month or so.”
“Shit. Has it really been—”
“We haven’t spoken on the phone since January.” Nik levels me with a look that is far more paternal than I’d like. Disappointment and regret with a little bit of I-told-you-so flare. “We tried to call,” he says. And here I thought I was being anexcellentbrother by remembering to call on his birthday this year. Just not since.
