“Yes!” She leaned toward me excitedly. “Did you know that the Sacramento Zoo has Abyssinian ground hornbills that can live up to seventy years?”
“I didn’t. Those are birds, right?”
“Right,” she confirmed with a nod. “They have black feathers and blue skin, but the males have some red skin too.”
I nodded back but turned when a flash of movement passed in my periphery. Finn was standing there, his hair and shirt soaked with water, and he was holding one of the biggest water guns I’d ever seen.
“What the hell happened to you?” I asked with a choked laugh.
“War,” he said ominously, glancing around. When his eyes came back to me, his smile grew devious.
“Don’t even think about it,” Curtis warned, a laugh in his voice. “You spray your mom, and I’ll have to join in.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Kara warned. “Trust me.”
Finn made a little chirping noise of worry and crouched down, looking past us at someone. Then he grinned at me and army crawled away, disappearing under one of the picnic tables.
“Is that your son?” Rebel asked curiously.
“Yeah, his name’s Finn,” I replied.
“Like a fin on a fish?”
“Yeah, but with twon’s. It’s actually Finnegan, which was my mom’s maiden name.”
“Finnegan is an Irish name.”
“It is,” I confirmed.
“Curtis is Irish,” Rebel informed me. “His great-grandpa was born there.”
“Poet, right?” I asked, glancing around. It was a shot in the dark, but I knew that Curtis was a legacy, and it was impossible to forget the man with the accent that I’d met when I was young. He’d been fascinating to kids who had spent their lives in a trailer park. My brothers and I had speculated for hours about him.
“Yep,” Curtis replied with a nod. “Baby, you wanna go grab some food?”
“Sure,” I replied. I looked back to Rebel. “We’ll be right back.”
“Get a hot dog,” she ordered as I rose from my seat. “They’re better than the hamburgers.”
“Noted.”
Curtis held my hand as he tugged me toward the food tables.
“I wonder if Finn’s hungry,” I said, looking around. I couldn’t spot either of my kids, but Dylan was in a group that was lying around in the grass near the edge of the gathering.
“He’ll tell you if he is,” Curtis replied. “I doubt you’d be able to pull him away right now, though.”
“True,” I mused. “I hope he dries out. I didn’t bring him any extra clothes.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“It’s going to get chilly once the sun goes down, though,” I said with a grimace as we reached the tables.
“The kids go home once it starts getting dark,” Curtis replied. “That’s when shit gets fun.”
The smile he pointed my way made my toes curl in my sandals.
Shit.
