Ronan shook his head. He was used to his father blurting out his observations at the most inopportune times. It was how his brain worked — he thought it, he said it. “Can we concentrate on locating the…” Ronan stopped talking before he finished his sentence. He turned to look at the sofa and realized that if it was nighttime, they’d have been sleeping. It should be opened, not still set up like a sofa. He got up off the floor and moved toward it. “You’re a genius, Dad,” he said as he examined it.
“Damn straight,” Maverik said. Then he kinda looked at Ronan. “Why? What’d I say?”
“It was nighttime. They’d have been asleep. They fold out this sofa and sleep on it,” Ronan said, as he found the handle he searched for and released the latch on the sofa. The seated portion of the sofa popped up and Ronan took hold of the support bars just behind the back rest and pulled it up and out, unfolding the bed and setting the supports on the floor beside him. He put a knee on the thin mattress and leaned toward the head of the small sofa bed, grabbing the mattress and pulling it away from the supports it rested on.
Two sets of wide, terrified eyes stared back at him from a small space between the wall and the supports for the bed.
“Ronan!” they both yelled, as they started trying to climb out of the small, cramped space they were in.
Ronan let out a sound that triggered the boys to start crying and trying even harder to get out of their hiding spot to get to him. “It’s alright, I got you. I got you,” Ronan said, his own voicebreaking as he tried to get them out as quickly as they tried to get out.
“Momma unhooked this,” Leo said impatiently, his small hand prying at a stiff support spring while he tried to see through his tears.
Ronan quickly unhooked the spring and the two next to it, and it was just enough for the boys to slip through. He pulled Leo out, and then Matteo, who both climbed into his lap and sealed their arms around his neck as they cried.
Leo was the first to venture a glance around at their home, and panicked when he saw Maverik standing there quietly. Which sent Matteo into a panic. The both started trying to climb up and over Ronan as he held them.
“It’s alright. That’s my dad. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s my dad. He came to help me help Momma and search for you guys! He’s not going to hurt you,” Ronan assured them.
“He looks scary,” Leo confided, holding on tight.
“That’s because some bad men hurt him a long time ago, so he’s got a big scar.”
“And weird hair,” Matteo added.
Maverik chuckled. “I promise, I’m only here to make sure you’re safe. And I’ll tell you a secret, I only look scary because of my scar and my funny hair, but the bad guys don’t know that and they’re really scared. They’ll still be afraid, but you know better.”
Matteo smiled a little through his tears.
“He’s your dad?” Leo asked, looking back and forth between Ronan and Maverik.
“He is. The other kids in the family call him Poppy.”
“Except for Cristie. She’s my granddaughter and she’s grown up now, but when she was little she tried to say Poppy and somebody thought she was saying Puppy. She even had a stuffed wolf she called Poppy and they thought she was saying Puppy,”Maverik said, trying to distract the boys with funny stories. “She knew she meant me, though.”
“I got a wolf,” Matteo said. He slipped off Ronan’s lap and crawled across the fold out bed, and reached into the space between the sofa bed and the wall they’d been hiding in. He dug around for a second, then pulled out two squishy pillows that were clearly meant to be wolves. He handed one to Leo who immediately hugged it tightly to himself, and then crawled back into Ronan’s lap and hugged his own for a second before he showed it to Maverik. “See?” he asked.
“That’s a mighty fine wolf pillow,” Maverik said.
“Thanks, Puppy,” Matteo said with a grin.
Maverik chuckled. “I said she sounded like she called me Puppy, not that she really did.”
Matteo’s eyes sparkled as he teased Maverik. “But Puppy, I like Puppy.”
Maverik laughed, recognizing a like sense of humor in the boy. “Alright, I’ll let you get away with it.”
“Where’s Momma?” Leo asked.
“Yeah, I want Momma,” Matteo said, looking questioningly at Ronan.
“Momma’s resting at my house.”
“She leaved us?” Matteo asked on the verge of outrage.
“No! No, she didn’t leave you. When the bad guys were coming, she hid you and then she let them see her run away so they’d follow her. And then me and my friends got here and we took care of the bad guys. And some of my friends took Momma to my house to rest while we searched for you.”
“She knew where we were,” Leo said.
