And Chris, well, he was now working in San Francisco. I couldn’t say that we were best friends who exchanged Christmas and birthday cards, but when he came to visit his family here, I’d buy him a beer in the new bar that had replaced the James’s old one, courtesy of the insurance payout they’d gotten. The man that he was had changed in my eyes when he’d done what he did that night, and had then apologized to Ariana for what he’d done to her too. Every time I saw him, I said thank you again for what he did for Lily and Rebel. He didn’t want the thanks, but he had to know I’d always be grateful to him for saving my girls.
“Dadda,” my son Nash yelled as I walked across the grass toward him, doing some sort of wiggly dance and not even trying to hide that I’d caught him doing something he was banned from doing.
“What did I tell you about riding the dog like a horse?” I shouted back, grinning when he shrugged and looked up at the sky. “Come here, you little monster.”
“Tate,” Lily called, walking toward us holding Rebel’s hand. They were dressed in hers and little hers matching maxi dresses, something they did often. Rebel might look like me, but she was the mini version of her mother for sure.
It pained me to admit it but she totally suited the name Rebel Rowser.
And my son… again, I had no part in picking his name because I’d done the Mayan and Chinese gender test, again, and it had said it was going to be another girl when Lily was pregnant with him. I’d been adamant it was right and had told Lily we didn’t need a gender scan because of it. Obviously, it was wrong, again.
So, I now had two kids with names that still blew my mind. Rebel Rowser Townsend, and Nash Gaston Townsend. Why Gaston? Because at the time of his birth, Rebel’s favorite movie had been Beauty and the Beast and Lily had fallen in love with the name of one of the characters from it.
I apparently hadn’t learned from my first drunken tattoo either, because after Nash came into the world (and I’d recovered three days later), the men had gone out to celebrate the birth. Way too much to drink later, I’d gone to the bathroom and had somehow managed to get both legs in one of the legs on my pants. Thinking a miracle had happened, I’d hopped out into The Bar yelling, “I’m a mermaid! Rebel’s gonna love the shit out of this.”
Had I figured it out and corrected the situation at all? Short answer – no. Instead, I’d stayed like that until I ripped my pants, and had headed to my friend’s tattoo place. There, I’d gotten a tattoo of a mermaid on my ribs with the rose from Beauty and the Beast for the kids, and for some reason I’d also had mermaid scales tattooed in pretty colors down one thigh.
Not bad enough? My cousin Cole was visiting at the time, and he’d had a unicorn horn tattooed down the inside of his left thigh. It was pink and purple and had little stars tattooed around it. Both of us had thought we were the shit on the way home, but in the harsh light of day not so much. Mine was better than his though, his looked like he had a weird cock on his thigh and had just shaken off some dick sprinkles.
Why had my friend done another messed up tattoo on two drunk guys? Well, here’s the problem with getting the guy you’d known since you could walk to tattoo you at all – payback. We’d never report Tanner, and he knew that, but he also remembered all the things we’d done to him as kids. At least we had memories of a beautiful event for life, right?
On a plus note, my daughter loved her dad’s mermaid leg, and regularly told her friends and their parents how her daddy was a mermaid here – as she pointed to her crotch. It ended up with weird looks from the dads, and some awkward propositions from the moms. Whatcha gonna do? The answer to that was Lily telling Rebel not to tell her friends about Daddy’s mermaid secret, otherwise I’d lose my mermaid magic. I gave it another year before she called bullshit on it and realized her daddy was just an ass who had mean friends that tattooed him when he was inebriated.
I’d also had Lily tattooed over my heart, but this time I’d been sober and I’d picked the flower instead of the word. Now, every morning when I woke up and went into the bathroom, I saw her name the right way around in the mirror, the flower, and my kids staring back at me. No man could ask for more than that, and if they did they were out of their minds.