Chapter Fourteen
I t went much more easily than Logan had expected. He found himself unexpectedly cheered by Jeremy’s boundless curiosity. In a way the boy reminded him of himself, always wanting to know more about so many of the things they encountered, even on the drive to Houston. It did surprise him that the boy wanted to sit between them rather than next to a window, although he was grateful for it. Even that buffer was welcome, because he wasn’t sure how he would have done sitting directly next to Tris for hours.
He found himself enjoying the way Tris interacted with her nephew, subtly teaching him how to find out the answers to questions none of them could answer. The love between the two was so clear it was practically blinding, and he felt a pang he hadn’t had in a very long time for what he’d missed out on as a kid. He switched his gaze to look out the window, realizing he wasn’t even aware of where they were, he’d been so fixated on the pair beside him.
When he saw the sign for Bastrop, he realized he’d entirely missed the outskirts of Austin. He grimaced inwardly at himself and this habit he’d developed when Tris was around, to get so focused on something he missed everything else. He stared out at the passing landscape. It was full light now and promised to be a warm spring day. It was early enough in the year that the humidity of Houston might not be too bad, and it would be—
“—ask Logan about that.”
The sound of his name in her voice snapped him out of his effort to focus on anything but her. Realizing he had no idea what they’d been talking about, because he’d been trying so hard to not be glued to her every word, he had to look at Jeremy and say, “Sorry, I was figuring out how far we’d come. Ask me what?”
“How far have we come?” the boy asked, distracted from whatever his original question had been. Having grown up with a brain that frequently lost old questions to the momentum of new ones, he understood.
“I’m guessing about a third of the way,” he answered, “if you count all the way to Galveston.”
At the boy’s furrowed brow Tris said, “So if we’ve done a third, how much of the way is left?”
Logan could almost hear Jeremy’s mind working. “A third is when you divide it into three, right? So we have two more of those left?”
“Exactly right,” Tris said, grinning so widely at the child Logan felt that tug inside yet again. “Now, what was your question for Logan?”
The tug became a jab, simply at the sound of his name in her voice.
“Oh!” Jeremy exclaimed, and turned his head to look up at Logan. “Why do horses wear shoes but cows don’t?”
The simple question made him smile. “Actually, there are places where cows wear them, too. Oxen, anyway, which are the big ones that pull wagons and plows. But they’re very different, because they have two toes.”
Jeremy blinked. “Cows have toes?”
“That’s what a hoof is, in reality. Cow’s hooves are divided, but horse hooves aren’t.”
The boy looked boggled, then glanced down at his own feet in his now well-broken-in boots. Logan would have been willing to bet his toes were wiggling inside. “I didn’t know they were toes.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Tris said. “Horses have one, so they can run faster, cows have two, and so do giraffes and some others. Maverick has four, because dogs used to have five like people, but one has migrated up the leg over time.”
“We have five fingers, too,” Jeremy observed, holding up his hands. “Well, counting your thumb.”
To his own surprise Logan couldn’t stop himself from saying, rather teasingly, “Ah, that wonderful, opposable thumb.”
Jeremy wiggled his thumbs. “That’s what lets us grab stuff and pick it up.”
“Exactly,” Tris said.
“Ever notice,” came Jackson’s voice from the driver’s seat, which he’d volunteered for on this stretch to widen his knowledge of his new home state, “how even a car ride with my sister turns into a learning experience?”
“Never pass up an educational opportunity,” Nic said solemnly from the front passenger seat.
Logan thought they were teasing her, but he shot a quick glance at her face to be sure. She didn’t look upset, in fact was wearing an obviously exaggerated haughty expression as she said, “I seem to remember it getting you through a couple of history finals, brother mine.”
Jackson let out an audible sigh. “There is that,” he agreed, and they all laughed.
Logan said nothing. He wasn’t used to such familial teasing, and he didn’t quite know how it worked. Nic wasn’t technically part of the Thorpe family—yet—but she’d joined in easily, which told him he was the one out of sync. As usual.
He was glad when they switched off to him driving, pulling off the freeway toward the little town of Hedwig Village, which had caught Jeremy’s eyes because of the name shared with a favorite creature from a favorite book. Glad because he then had to concentrate on driving.
“You sure you don’t want to meet Houston up close and personal?” he asked Jackson as the other man climbed into the back seat. “No better way than trying to drive through it.”
“I’ll watch and learn,” Jackson said with a grin. “And be thankful,” he added with enough emphasis that Logan had to chuckle.
“All righty, then,” he said as he slid behind the wheel, trying to ignore the fact that Nic and Tris had indeed also changed places, just as Jeremy had ordained. “If it was just me, I’d be bailing now and picking up the 45 south of the city to head to the Space Center, but in this case you should get the full effect. Welcome to Houston.”
“At least it’s Saturday,” Nic said, rather glumly.
As it turned out, it was a light traffic day and they made it through the city fairly quick, with Nic pointing out things occasionally, and Tris explaining all the roads named after famous Texans. They reached the Space Center southeast of the city shortly after it opened at ten.
Jeremy was wide-eyed and slack-jawed as he looked around, gaping at the space shuttle replica mounted atop the original carrier aircraft.
“You can go inside both of them,” Nic told the boy. “We’ll come back and do that next time.”
Even Jackson seemed impressed. “I get the feeling it’d take a few trips to see everything here.”
“They have a lot of—” Logan glanced at Tris “—educational stuff, too, for kids and adults.”
Jeremy was so wound up by the time they got on the tram for the tour that would take them to the restored Apollo Mission Control center that Logan thought he might just go airborne himself. But he found he was looking at everything a little differently, just by watching the child take it all in. He might only be seven, but he recognized how old the equipment looked, technologically, and was more than a little awed at the number of people it had taken to do something he’d taken for granted as near-ancient history. They’d watched the movie and a couple of documentaries, but the boy said, “Seeing it for real is…different.”
And that alone, Logan thought, made the trek worth it.
But there was another aspect to this that hadn’t occurred to him. From the moment they’d arrived, he’d noticed people looking at them, but he hadn’t really put it together until he’d heard two women within earshot exclaiming in recognition as they looked at Jackson.
He’d already been recognized. And it struck him what a life it must be, to not be able to even take your son on an adventure like this without having people staring at you and probably eventually approaching you as if they had the right to some of what should be your child’s time. He hadn’t really thought much about this aspect of what Jackson’s life was like, and he didn’t like it.
Jackson was crouched down talking to Jeremy about what had happened here at the mission control room when the two now-giggling women made a beeline toward him. Logan wasn’t sure what made him do it, but he stepped into their path. He turned to face them, his arms crossed over his chest, and simply stood there, watching them steadily. They slowed immediately, looking at him warily.
“What are you, his bodyguard?” one of them asked.
“A friend,” he said simply.
“A good friend—” Tris’s voice came from just behind him “—who just wants to make sure he has time with his little boy.” She slipped a hand through his folded arms, but kept her gaze on the women. “After the tour, I’m sure Jackson would be happy to stop and say hello. Can you kindly wait that long?”
He saw the expressions on the women’s faces change as Tris spoke, from wary to understanding. “Of course. It was so sad, about his wife, and we just want to say how sorry we are.”
“He’ll appreciate that,” Tris assured them.
A moment later, after they’d walked back to where they’d been, Logan relaxed. “You’re good at that,” he said, sounding as inept as he felt.
“More practice,” she said. “But I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t intercepted them first. And don’t think Jackson didn’t notice, because he did.”
He shrugged, not sure what to say to that. But he saw Jackson looking at him and turned his head to meet his gaze. Her brother gave him the briefest nod, but there was a world of thanks in it. She’d been right, he had noticed.
By the time they were back in the car and headed to Galveston, he was having second thoughts. If Jeremy had been so excited about the Space Center, would a classic old sailing ship hold any interest for him at all? But as he drove he could hear the boy from the back seat, now asking if it was like a pirate ship.
“Logan, help?” Jackson asked, laughing. He liked that about the guy—he had no problem admitting he didn’t know something.
“It’s the same kind of ship,” he said, “although the Elissa was never a pirate ship. She probably would have been a good one, though, if some pirate had ever taken it in mind to steal her.”
Jeremy laughed, and it gave Logan a strange feeling of satisfaction.
Admittedly he was no real judge, but the boy seemed almost as excited at his first sight of the three-masted barque as he had been at the space shuttle.
“She’s pretty old, and most of her parts have been replaced or messed with in her life,” he said as they walked the fairly recently replaced decks.
Jeremy looked up at him, still smiling. “I thought those computers and stuff were old.”
Logan didn’t know what the concept of time to a seven-year-old was like, but Jeremy was awfully smart, so he gave it a shot. “Look at her, and think about those computers. Do they seem like different worlds?” The boy nodded. “Then think about this. She was built in 1877. We went from this—” he gestured to the boat “—to those computers and rockets and men on the moon, in less than a hundred years.”
The boy’s brow furrowed as he thought, but Jackson let out a low whistle. “Never thought about it quite like that. Wow.” Then he turned his head to look at his sister. “I see why you like him so much.”
Tris’s cheeks flushed, and she seemed to suddenly find the rigging of the old three-master fascinating. And he just stood there, words once more vanishing from his mind.