Another One Bites the Dust (25 page)

My stunned silence was replaced by deep belly laughs.  The type that have tears running down your face, your lungs running out of air, and your sides hurting because you’re laughing so hard and long that your abs have no time to recover from the workout.  Dismissing Bennett rolling around on the floor, I walked into the kitchen to see Payton snacking on Broccoli and cheese.  Payton’s grandfather was at the table with her sharing the same bowl, but he was dipping pieces of bread into it.

Payton’s face was a deep reddish hue, and I was still gasping for air, trying to obtain composure, but it was a losing battle.  “T-that w-was a-awesome!”  I gasped and laughed.

“What’d she do?”  Tony asked while talking to Payton’s grandmother.

“She farted in my mouth!”  Bennett moaned from the other room.  “I need CPR!”

“Payton!”  Jessie said sharply.

“What?”  She asked innocently.

“What have I told you about doing that?  That’s disgusting and rude.”  She chided.

“I can still taste it!”  Bennett shrieked.

Tears returned to rolling down my cheeks as I laughed.  I’d almost had it back under control until he’d said that last part.

“She’s always been a gassy one,” Tony exclaimed as he set a pan of lasagna onto the kitchen table.  “Bennett, quit your bitching and get in here.  Dinner’s ready.”

Payton buried her face in her hands, and I threw my arm around her shoulders as I sat down next to her.  Giving her a kiss on the forehead, we all dug in.  Death threats withstanding, it was a nice dinner.  It was also bittersweet.  I wished like hell that my parent’s were here today.  To meet their children’s loved ones, grandchildren, and the new family that would soon be joined to mine. 

The ride home I kept a vigilant eye on the road, and my thoughts kept straying back to my parents.  Payton’s family reminded me of what I didn’t have.  What I would never have again.  My children would never meet my parents.  They’d never get to see them.  My father didn’t get to walk his daughter down the aisle.  He didn’t get to see Ember graduate from high school or college.  Didn’t make it to my Ranger school graduation.  Weren’t there when I was injured in Iraq.  Not there for the birth of their first grandchild. 

I went through the nightly routine of making all the doors and windows were locked.  I fed Alpha, set out my clothes for tomorrow, plugged my phone in, checked to make sure my gun was loaded and under my pillow, and I cleaned up.  What I didn’t do was speak since we’d left her parents’ house.  Which must have seriously freaked her out because she burst after I’d been lying in bed for a long time thinking about how different life would be if I’d had had my parents here right now.

“I’ll never do it again!”  She cried and covered her face with the pillow.

I looked at her quizzically.  “Do what?”  I asked her pillow.

“Be nasty.  I wasn’t even thinking.”  She mumbled into her pillow.

“Can we name the baby Thurston if it’s a boy?”  I asked.

The pillow lowered from her face and she turned to look at me.  “Thurston?”

“That was my father’s name.”  I said quietly.

Her eyes dilated, and she scooted closer to me.  “Will you tell me about them?”

My heart seized in my chest.  I’ve avoided it for the past year now.  She’d asked, and I changed the subject.  She didn’t push because that wasn’t the type of person she was.  She was patient and persistent when she needed to be.  She’d waited for me to be ready, but hell, I might never be.

Taking a deep breath, I told her about them.

“My mother’s name was Adeline.  They were great parents.  The type who let you do whatever you wanted, within reason.  They didn’t care if James or I had a beer at the house.  They took all of my friends in as if they were one of their own.  When they died, it was my fault.” 

She snorted in disbelief, and I closed my eyes.

“They were on the way home after seeing me graduate from boot camp.  They’d spent two of their four-day vacation with my grandparents, and then came to see me.  I was staying so I could start Ranger school, and we knew it would be another sixty-one days before they would see me again, so they flew to where I was, and then they left the next day.  I wasn’t slated to start the school for another week, but I’d asked them to go home so I could have some fun.  It was the worst mistake of my life.”

“Oh, honey.  That wasn’t your fault.  You’d just gone through boot camp.  You deserved to let loose, and from what I understood, y’all were near Vegas.  Who the heck wouldn’t have wanted to go play instead of hanging with their parents?  Especially one that was about to start another school that would take every bit of your mental capacity to get through?”  She said softly.

She didn’t touch me though.  She must have known I would never get it out if she touched me.  Squeezing my eyes tightly shut, I replayed how the next few hours after their departure went.

“I was at a fucking strip club when one of the Army officers that helped trained us came in.  We started to give him shit for being there, but then the look on his face registered and we all fell silent.  He walked right up to me, and tore my heart apart.  While I was in a fucking strip club watching the girls dance on stage, my parents died in a plane crash.  The one I insisted they go home on.”

“Max, didn’t you just tell me they only had four days, and they’d already spent two with your grandparents and one with you?  They would have had to leave eventually.”  She said trying to condone my actions.

“Yeah, but they weren’t going on that flight.  I told them to leave.  The boys were going to be leaving by eight, and I wanted to go with them.  I practically shoved them out the door.” 

I felt a drop hit my cheek and my eyes opened in a flash to see tears pouring down Payton’s face, running down her neck and disappearing behind the t-shirt she was wearing.  She was leaning over me looking so mad that she could spit nails.

“This is not your fault!”  She yelled.

“Well, whose is it if not mine?”  I queried.

“Obviously it was no ones.  It was a fluke of nature.  Stop beating yourself up.”  She demanded.

“You should have seen Ember when I told her.  She was shattered.  Utterly shattered.  Then I just left her there.  I went back to school and left Cheyenne and her mom to pick up the pieces.”

She couldn’t help herself any longer; she threw herself at me, and we both laid there silently.  Payton gave up after an hour of me not speaking, and dropped off to a peaceful sleep.  It was on the fourth hour of lying there that I felt the baby.  Tiny little nudges tapped me in the stomach and euphoria surged through me.

  We were lying face to face, her belly touching mine.  Our legs wrapped together in a tangle.  Over and over again, I felt the tiny little taps.  Leaning back, I let my hand slide down over her mounded belly.  It fit perfectly in the palm of my hand.  The tap, tap, tap continued, and I fell asleep feeling my wife’s steady breathing, and my child’s rhythmic kicking.  It was a perfect pick me up to an awful day.

Chapter 13

Normal is an illusion.  What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.

-Morticia Adams

Payton

“Promise me.”  I demanded.

Max sighed and nodded his head without saying it aloud.  The man was a stubborn mule.  All I wanted was for him to play Bingo with me.  That wasn’t too much to ask!  Plus, I was wearing a stupid shirt that had ‘Team Alvarez’ on it that my mom insisted that we all wear.  The only exception was Max.  It didn’t matter how much I argued that I was no longer an Alvarez. 

“You will forever be an Alvarez.  Just because your last name changed to Tremaine doesn’t mean you lost your identity in the process.  Now wear the damn shirt.”  She’d huffed as we were walking out the door for dinner the previous week.  At least the stupid thing fit.

We were bombarded by the youngest of the family as soon as we opened the door to the hall.

“Payton!  Payton!”  My youngest cousin, Molly, squealed when I saw her.

Molly belonged to my mom’s youngest sister, Joe.  Joe married her husband, Steve, as soon as he’d gotten home from his third tour in Iraq.  They’d met when she’d started writing him letters.  She’d adopted him, and that was the end of that.  They fell in love over letters, and formed a relationship that stood the test of time.  He’d been through an eight-month deployment with the marines, and married her as soon as he made it back home.  Molly was their first, and at two years old, she’s the most spoiled of all the Alvarez kiddos.

She hit me like a wrecking ball, and I would have landed on my ass if Max hadn’t stopped my backward momentum with the wall of his body.

“Oof,” I exclaimed as I lifted her to my hip.  “You weight a ton!”

“You got fat!”  She exclaimed.

My brother chose that time to come up behind us and agree with the two-year-old terror.  “That would be an affirmative.”

“Who’s dat?”  She asked pointing her finger into Max’s face.

I smiled at her.  “That is Max.  He’s my husband.”

“Oh, yeah,” She said.  “That’s my Max.”

Joe came up to us in all her bubbly glory.  She was such a barrel of laughs.  She was more like a sister than an aunt.  She was only five years older than my twenty-four.  We had the same age gap between us than my own brother and I had.  Joe was a mid-life crisis baby.  Even though we didn’t live next to each other when we were growing up, we did speak on the phone.  Even now, we never went more than a week without speaking.

“Molly Jane!  You were supposed to be in the corner, missy.”  She scolded.

She gave Joe the look I liked to call the ‘psycho stare’ and crossed her arms over her chest.  The look she was giving was quite comical.  She tips her head down and then looks up at you with a glare.  It wouldn’t be so bad if she stopped doing it after a while, but you piss her off, and she’d give you that look for the rest of the afternoon. 

“What’d she do?”  I whispered to Steve who came up beside me.

“Told your mother to fuck off.”  Steve deadpanned.

“Damn.  Even I can’t get away with that!”  I wheezed between laughs.

Steve cracked a smile, but was too busy surveying Max to spare me much more than that.  They both were staring at each other non-blinking.

“I did some asking around about you.”  He said cryptically.

Max stared at him.  Something passed between them, and Steve nodded and left without another word.  What the hell was that?

“Come on, we’ve got a table over here.”  She said before taking Molly from my arms and grabbing my hand to lead the way.  I took Max’s hand in a death grip.  The man wasn’t leaving my sight if I had anything to say about it.

My family was a brutal bunch, and with nearly half of them being former military, and another quarter of those being active or retired cops, I felt the need to keep him in my sight to ensure his health and safety.  My family was a tight bunch, and they watched out for their own.  Seeing as this was his first family reunion, I wanted to be there when he met everyone just in case I needed to run interference.  I wanted him there for the birth of my child.  Call me funny like that.

“Who’s this hunka hunka burnin’ love?”  Aunt Mary asked as we passed by.

I acted as if I didn’t hear her, and Max didn’t protest.  He probably was a little overwhelmed.  We had a little over one hundred and fifty people in attendance.  Hell, I was overwhelmed, and I belonged to them.  Kids were running around like the assholes they were while their parents ignored them. 

“If our kid runs up and junk punches someone like that, they won’t be able to sit for a fuckin’ week.”  Max murmured in my ear as we witnessed the devil reincarnate do that very thing to my mom’s brother Sidney.

“Trust me; ours wouldn’t be one of those running around anyway.  These people may be family, but I don’t even know half of them.  Our kids will be better behaved than this in the first place.”  I said with assurance.

My mother burst out laughing as she heard the comment I just made.  “Oh, please.  Please enlighten us on how you will keep your child from turning into you.” 

“I’m not talking to you.  I can’t believe you made me wear this.”  I said pointing to my shirt and glaring at her.

“Oh, I think y’all are so cute.  You look adorable in it.”  Steve said sarcastically when I sat down next to him.

I frogged him in the leg.  “Do you know why I married Max?”

He looked at me suspiciously.  “No, why?”

“So he could kick everyone’s asses that pissed me off.”

My most annoying great aunt, Sophia, came up to us just in time to hear my previous comment, and of course she had to throw in her two cents.  “So what are y’all wanting?”

“We’re hoping it’s a pony.”  I said flatly.

Max’s beer spewed out of his mouth and all over my pants.  “What the hell, now I’m going to smell like beer the rest of the day.”

“Last night you told me that you wished that Yankee Candles would start making ones that smelled like beer.  In fact, you also told me last night that the smell of beer on my breath made you horn-” He was saying before I threw my hand over his face.

Dad scowled.  Steve and Bennett laughed.  My mom and her sister covered their mouths to keep their laughs from escaping.

“Time to eat!”  Bennett yelled.

Molly squealed her happy baby squeal, and streaked up to the front of the line grabbing a turkey leg that was easily twice as big as her own thigh, and came back to her seat, chewing happily.

My head whipped around, and I abandoned Max like the proverbial hot potato.  I cut in front of my brother, who graciously allowed it with minimal bitching.  The line quickly filled, and I didn’t see Max again until I was getting in line a second time.  He laughed as I squeezed in between him.

“That wasn’t very nice.”  He said running his nose along my jaw.

“Your child makes me have these urges, and I have to follow them or I’ll die.”  I joked.

My creepy distant cousin Orlando turned when he heard my voice, and allowed three people to pass him in line so he could stand beside me.  I shivered and scooted closer to Max, trying to keep him as far away from me as possible.