“Semantics. Mack played me ninety seconds of it in the truck. You told some poor woman to go have a conversation with her husband.”
“It was good advice.”
“It was a bumper sticker.” He twists the cap off and takes a pull, and the corner of his mouth goes up. “It was also, and I’ll deny saying it, not the worst thing I’ve ever heard you do.”
“Dinner,” Josie calls, then louder, because nobody in the living room has ears. “Dinner. Now. Before it goes cold.”
I go to round them up. The game’s gone to commercial. Ben’s got a baby on his chest and the remote balanced on the arm of the couch. Noah’s on the floor letting Maverick use him for furniture. Mack’s pretending he came in here for the football and not to sit one room from Paige.
“Food,” I tell them. Nobody moves. “Talisa cooked most of it.”
All three of them are up before I finish my sentence. My wife isn’t a bad cook, Talisa is just that much better.
Ben hands me the baby on his way past, no warning. I take Sonny. Or Jett. I take a baby.
Dinner is loud. We don’t all fit at the table, so we don’t try. Babies get passed hand to hand. Plates balance on knees. Talisa and Peyton run a relay between the highchairs.
I end up at the far end with Nick, both of us holding a twin so Elle and Ben can eat with two hands for once. Sonny, I think, is asleep against my shoulder, drooling a warm patch through my shirt. Nick’s got Jett gnawing on his knuckle.
Josie says grace before anyone can reach for a roll, the same five lines she’s said since we moved in together and became a family. Quinn keeps his eyes open the whole time and lifts a green bean off the serving dish. Amelie catches him.
“Quinn took a bean,” she says, the second Josie gets to amen.
“Snitch.” Quinn drops two more on her plate, and she grins and forgives him on the spot.
Junie makes a break from Peyton’s lap, gets three feet across the floor on a mission to nowhere, and Stevie Nicks corrals her back toward her parents.
Peyton’s into the triplets’ birthday before her plate’s even full. She wants the whole family, a theme, a separate cake for each of them so nobody fights over a slice.
“They’re turning one,” Noah says. “They won’t know the difference.”
“I’ll know the difference.”
“It’s tradition that each baby has their own smash cake,” Josie adds.
Noah lifts both hands off his fork and goes back to eating.
“So.” Quinn points his fork at me down the length of the table. “The Love Line. You giving out kissing tips now, old man?”
“Relationship advice.”
“To strangers,” Peyton says.
“Strangers who call-in. That’s the format.”
“My dad,” Noah says to Justine, deadpan, “tells people how to stay married. For a living. Now.”
“Somebody’s got to,” Josie says from the far end, and the whole table laughs, me included.
“The anniversary clip hit forty thousand,” Paige says, not looking up from her plate. “In a day. People love a sad old man with a microphone.”
“Former sad old man.”
“Sure, Dad.”
“Is the band done?” Quinn asks.
The table goes a little quieter. I look around at the faces, each one of them part of my career. I sigh heavily and shake my head. “No, the band isn’t done, but we’re also not actively doing anything. Your dad has a bum shoulder, and JD wants to be there for Eden. He hates missing her events.”
