I knew it.
If there was ever someone you could rely on, it was Nino.
And I was really fucking happy for him that he found his finger to put a ring on, and had his own woman to come home to at night.
“I appreciate that. How’s Cammie doing really?” I asked, always worried she was feeding me lines to easy my guilt when I was out of town.
“Your woman can handle anything,” Nino assured me. “But that firstborn of yours is gonna turn her gray.”
By some cruel twist of fate, our firstborn son somehow came out like a mini version of his Uncle August.
He was impulsive and opinionated, overly confident, and too stubborn for any of our good. There was hardly one day that we weren’t trying to handle some mini crisis he had created.
Getting his head stuck in the banister, ordering six-hundred dollars worth of toys from our smart device, bringing his sled in from outside and going down the stairs in it.
He was wild. Practically feral. It was a trait we both loved and feared in him. And all we could do was hope that the others remained calmer and easier to handle. Because two mini Augusts would be unmanageable.
“I heard about the turtle incident,” I said, shaking my head.
“Did you hear about the eggs?”
“Jesus Christ. What did he do with eggs?”
“He decided he wanted some ducks, so they could swim in the pool. He took some out of the fridge and put them under his pillow to try to hatch them.”
“Yeah, I can see where this is going.”
Poor Cammie.
That would have been disgusting.
“He claimed it was wrong to get punished because it was a science experiment. And school was important.”
“The little shit,” I laughed, perfectly able to see him saying that.
If there was anything worse than a troublemaker, it was a really smart troublemaker.
“Better get you home fast so she can tag you in and take a nap,” Nino said.
Home was always, for a lack of a better term, chaos.
It was a familiar sort of chaos, though. Because my childhood had been just like it.
Toys strewn all over the place. Half-finished art projects on the kitchen table. School-made mother’s and father’s day gift displayed in places of honor.
We did not have the kind of house where you stepped in and didn’t immediately realize kids lived there. We didn’twantthat kind of house.
We loved the remnants of their play-filled days all around us. We didn’t care too much about the dents in the walls when the kids rammed toys into them. They could be filled. We didn’t fret about the stains in the carpet. They would come out with the next shampoo. We didn’t even worry about the various things that ended up broken over the years. It could all be replaced.
The only bane to Cammie’s existence was the windows. Those massive windows our house was mainly made out of. The ones she’d once loved so much.
“I swear people must think we have a whole pack of dogs in here,” I’d heard her grumbling as she squeegied the windows for the second time that day. “Why do we have so many kid-height windows again?”
In fact, that was one of the first things I noticed after Nino dropped me off and I made my way up the front path.
The tops of the windows were spotless, like Cammie had just cleaned them. The bottoms, though? I could make out little face prints on the glass. As well as a few streaks of what might have been jelly.
“Daddy!” was the chorus as I moved inside, getting a flying hug from our oldest, and a leg hug from the next.