Chapter 8 #3
“You snooze, you lose,” Curtis replied with a grin. He turned and paused, like he hadn’t noticed the brown-haired woman before and just realized she was there. “There’s my girl.”
I watched from the outer edge of the circle as she popped out of her seat and threw her arms around Curtis, squeezing him around the middle. He leaned down to murmur in her ear, and then they both turned to me.
“Teddy, this is my best friend, Rebel,” he announced as she beamed at me. “Rebel, this is Teddy.”
“Hey, Rebel,” I greeted as he leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
“Hi, Teddy,” she said. “I love your name and your tattoo.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said with a little laugh, looking down at my arm.
I didn’t even think about my tattoo anymore, I’d had it so long.
The lines were done in all black, no color, with flowers and my family’s names, but if you didn’t know what you were looking for, they just looked like swirls.
“I love your hair. I can’t ever get mine that smooth, even when I iron it. ”
“I love your shirt,” she replied quickly. “And your sandals.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but I wasn’t really sure if I should say thank you or name something else that I loved about her.
“We get it,” Draco teased. “You love Teddy’s whole vibe.”
“It’s nice to tell people when you like something about them,” Rebel replied loftily. “Especially if you’re a girl’s girl.”
“You’re definitely a girl’s girl,” Charlie said firmly as she nursed the baby. She looked at me. “Pull up a chair and stay a while. Curtis can go grab you guys some food.”
I smiled at her and sat down in one of the empty lawn chairs. “Do you know where Jesse went?” I asked Kara.
“My mom stole her,” Charlie answered. “They started talking about curl cream or something, and my mom said that she had some shit in her room.”
“Oh, okay.”
“You gotta come see our new place,” Curtis was telling Rebel. “Once we have some furniture, we’ll have a movie night.”
“You don’t have any furniture?” Rebel asked as she sat down in the chair beside me.
“No, the stuff we had in Montana was shit, so we figured we’d just get new stuff when we got here.”
“Did you live in Montana too?” Rebel asked me.
“No, I just moved up from Sacramento.”
“I’ve been to Sacramento,” she replied, raising her eyebrows in surprise. “I like it there. Have you been to the Railroad Museum?”
“I haven’t,” I admitted. “Have you been to the zoo?”
“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 two n’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.