April 2025 #3
“Agreed,” Sam seconded, passing the phone to Hannah. “It’s going to slow, and if I fast-forward, I might miss something. Would you please just do your thing, because I’m already annoyed.”
Hannah’s thing was summing things up. And she was great at it.
Like amazing. A lot of times, I preferred her summaries over watching something myself.
She did it for me whenever I got a bit too far behind in a series.
It had been very helpful during Game of Thrones, and equally good during House of the Dragon, with White Lotus, Billions, and Severance.
I needed her. I didn’t need her for Ted Lasso or Shrinking, Will Trent or Reacher.
But anything really involved, sometimes I purposely let my watching lapse and had her get me caught up to a place I could start again.
It was easier. She always hit the high points, but also included details that she knew I enjoyed.
Also, she would make me watch certain scenes so I still got the gravitas of the whole thing that the filmmaker was trying to convey.
“Okay,” she said, stepping between us, leaning over so we were all watching Jake’s phone.
“This lady, who just got home—that’s her Ford Bronco there—as Jake told you already, is Finn’s aunt Gabrielle, or Gabby, as everyone calls her, and I can tell you, she is not at all happy to return and find her front lawn in shambles. ”
“I would think not,” Sam commented.
She fast-forwarded for us. “As you can see, she gets the bat away from Christine, the redhead, who her husband is having an affair with.”
“Got it,” I replied. “Already this is better.”
The guy on the front lawn with Conor, trying to kill him, was James Sullivan, whose wife, Róisín, showed up in her Mercedes moments later, parked behind Gabby.
“Wait,” Sam stopped Hannah. “If it’s Gabby’s house, why is she on the street?”
“She went to pick up more cold cuts and a cake, and by the time she got home, the garage and driveway were full.”
“Okay. Got it. Go on.”
I squinted at him.
“What? You know I need things to make sense in my head.”
I did know that and leaned around Hannah so I could kiss his cheek.
“Now is where it gets interesting,” my daughter announced.
“Now?” Sam sounded surprised.
She chuckled before tapping the screen with the tip of her fingernail. “This guy right here is Christine’s husband, Lucas.”
Sam rested his chin on his fist. “Lemme guess, he’s sleeping with Aunt Gabby.”
“Ohmygod, Dad, yes. How did you know that?” she goaded him.
He chuckled. “This just shows you that there are no such things as secrets.”
“No, there are not,” she agreed. “But to recap, Conor is having an affair with Róisín and is also having one with Christine, all the while still sleeping with his wife, Gabby.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” I asserted. “I’m thinking she’s over that.”
Hannah nodded. “Gabby is sleeping with Lucas, who is also, more than likely, still sleeping with his wife, Chirstine.”
“The redhead,” Sam clarified.
“Correct,” Hannah replied. “Now here, we have a new player,” she said, pointing to another young woman. “This is Mira.”
She was younger, pretty, apple-cheeked, bow-lipped, with voluptuous curves and pixie-cut brown hair.
“I need a piece of paper to make a Venn diagram,” Sam told his daughter.
“I’ll make you one. Now, a tidbit about Mira.”
“I don’t think I wanna know,” I assured her.
“You don’t,” Jake said with a shiver.
“Please don’t tell me,” I begged my daughter.
“Don’t be a baby. If I have to know these things, so do you.”
“I don’t think that’s logical,” Sam offered.
“So Mira is sleeping with Conor, but in a real icky twist, also with Grady.”
“Who’s Grady?” Sam asked.
“Finn’s oldest brother,” I reminded him.
It took a moment for that to sink in.
“What?”
Hannah nodded.
“No.”
Jake was laughing now.
“Eww, no,” Sam groaned. “That’s disgusting.”
“Did Grady or Conor know?” I asked Hannah.
“Nope. Absolutely no clue.”
“What is she doing there?”
“Meeting Grady at his aunt Gabby’s house,” Jake chimed in, waggling his eyebrows for us. “Because he invited her. Wanted her to meet his mom.”
“I think I need brain bleach,” Sam said with a shiver. “Bring on the pie.”
Hannah bit her bottom lip.
“Oh for crissakes, what else?”
“Well, then this girl showed up, Caitlyn, and she’s pregnant.”
I raised my hand.
“Pa?”
“It’s James’s baby.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know that?”
“Because in all of this,” I said, moving my index finger in a circle over the screen, “there’s always one couple who started off as just fooling around but fell in love in the midst of everything.”
“Yes.”
“James looks like he’s at least fifty,” Sam pointed out drolly.
“Yes. He’s fifty-one, and Caitlyn is twenty-six.”
“No. That’s too much,” Sam passed judgment.
“They’re in love, Dad, knock it off.”
“I’m missing what she sees in him,” he said flatly.
“Financial stability, kindness, someone to take care of her––”
“Who she will have to take care of when she’s still young,” Sam argued.
“Moving on,” Hannah declared.
“Fast-forward through Grady throwing up off the side of the porch when he finds out he and his uncle are sleeping with the same woman,” Jake told Hannah.
“Doing that…now.”
Sam huffed out a breath. “I want pie.”
“Wait,” Hannah told her father. “There’s Lucy first.”
“Who?” Sam whined.
Jake was cackling now.
“Lucy, who makes her entrance in three…two…one…now.”
The enormous F-150 came down the street, stopped beside a silver Lexus, and the girl who got out was carrying a golf club. I was guessing a driver with how big the head was.
In very systematic fashion, Lucy first broke all the mirrors, the windshield, and all the lights.
The club was really well made, because it held up almost to the end before breaking in half.
But Lucy, willowy with long jet-black curly hair, had another club ready to go.
She used that one to finish off the glass window in the back of the car, and used the broken shaft from the first one to carve her name on the hood.
Once she was done, she got back in her truck, took out a bag of golf clubs—I had been wondering how many she had—and threw them all into the road.
She then drove over them, stopped, reversed, and then honked until Caden, who, if I remembered correctly was Finn’s middle brother, finally came out onto the porch and roared.
“He calls her a stupid bitch where Hannah is fast-forwarding,” Jake explained to us.
“Which, I get that he’s mad and all, but he could have called her anything, it didn’t have to be bitch.
Asshole, jerkface, I mean really, the options are unlimited.
I just don’t like the word used pejoratively here because, as a person, she lost her mind, but it’s not because she’s a bitch.
It’s in direct relation to what he did.”
Hannah nodded. “We find out later that she loved him, but he cheated with three of her friends. Now, let’s be honest, first off, she needs new friends, but more importantly, Anne really liked her, but now it’s over because Caden is a dog.”
“Please let that be it,” I begged her.
“Not quite,” Hannah told us. “At some point, right before the police came, because some neighbor called in about all the screaming, Anne finally returned to the kitchen to find that Conor’s friends ended up having a food fight with everything she made.
Apparently, there had been lots of drinking going on, and it was at about this time that both Conor and Lucas decided separately, and then together, that Kola recording the whole time was bad. ”
“It’s actually very helpful for the police,” Sam chimed in.
“Did the little girl, or boy, that Kola was talking to get their cinnamon rolls?”
“Kola said she—her name is Desi—did get three before the rest were thrown around the kitchen like footballs.”
“Back to Kola,” Sam insisted.
“Well, then Conor and Lucas demanded that Kola delete everything off his phone, which Kola declined to do, and then they decided to take his phone from him, and Kola defended himself, which, we know, he can do.”
“They didn’t hurt him,” I said with a catch of breath.
Hannah looking at me like I was nuts made me feel instantly better.
Apparently, Conor came at Kola then, with Lucas backing him up, and Finn was in the house commiserating with his mother, so he didn’t see the attempt.”
“Did Kola put them both down?”
“No,” Hannah said, and her voice got low and utterly rippled with evil.
Both Sam and I turned to her.
Hannah moved the phone so we could see, and I saw Conor lunge at Kola before he suddenly dropped like a ton of bricks. Like standing in the lens frame one moment and gone the next. It was actually a bit scary.
“What the hell?” Sam breathed out.
And then there, in all his glory, scowling darkly, was George Hunt.
“Oh look who it is,” I sighed.
George had been on his way back from doing something with Kurt, his husband, remembered that he had Finn’s new laptop to give him, pinged his location, saw where he was, and simply made the decision to drop by.
Upon arrival, he saw Kola on the front porch alone, with two men approaching him in a less than friendly manner.
Because of that, he jogged over to check on the sibling of one of his favorite people in the world.
“And then did what?”
“Since it read like danger to George,” Hannah explained, “he put them on the ground.”
“That’s it?”
She shrugged. “It’s the military. He’s used to making split-second decisions while the rest of us are thinking, huh, this situation might be a bad one.”
“He does come to conclusions quickly,” I agreed.
“Yeah, so…that was that.”
“I bet it hurt,” Sam commented, sounding not the least bit sorry.
“It always hurts when George makes you stop doing something he’s not crazy about.”
“Moments later, when Christine and Gabby came over to defend Conor, George explained that Kola was not to be touched, and he, of course, should not in any way be annoyed.”
I smiled.
“Kola said everyone took a big step back at the same time. He didn’t hate that,” Jake told us. “He made it sound funny on the phone.”
“Then afterwards, Grady told everyone that Kola’s father is the chief deputy of the marshals’ office here in Chicago,” Hannah went on.
“Of course he didn’t give your title exactly how it goes with the Northern District and everything, but they got the gist and left Kola alone.
About fifteen minutes after that, Conor and Lucas woke up just as two CPD officers rolled up. ”
“What did the cops do?”
“Nothing. Nothing to do. Everything was over at that point. And knowing that Kola had everything on video, Conor and Lucas more or less slunk away.”
“I bet Finn was upset that he left Kola alone.”
“Finn is more than upset. He’s furious with his uncle, and Kola had to keep him from going after Lucas, who he doesn’t even know, but was there about to attack his boyfriend. He’s absolutely mortified at what Conor said about Kola, and then about how he treated him.”
“I hope Kola told him that we have freaks in our family as well.”
Sam nodded in vigorous agreement.
“And, I mean, we’re going to have Jake someday.”
“Pa!”
“Hey,” Jake said defensively.
“So,” I said, turning to my husband, “who’s going to jail in the group?”
“I can tell you that both Christine and Lucy are in trouble for destruction of property, but it all depends on what Gabby wants to do about her front lawn, and what Caden wants to do about his truck. The good news is, neither one of them actually hurt anyone.” He was quiet a moment.
“Wait, what happened with Róisín and Christine?”
Hannah showed us the two women rolling around in the dirt and flowers in the front yard. They both looked terrible.
“You said Anne cooked?”
“Yep. That’s her food flying around all over,” Hannah told us.
“That’s horrible,” I said, unable not to chuckle.
“Pa!” Hannah sounded scandalized.
“Pie now,” Sam demanded.
“So where is Kola?” I asked.
“Kola is here,” he called out from the back door where he and Finn were.
“Oh,” I cooed, rushing over to my son first, and then to Finn. He seemed surprised when I wrapped him in my arms. “Love, we all have crazy family gatherings.”
“I got punched at one,” Hannah told Finn as I put my arm through his and walked him into the kitchen. “And Kola got hit on by an older woman.”
Finn turned to him.
“I told you; family gatherings are freaky.”
“Is your mother all right?” I asked him, having him take a seat at the table.
“No. She cooked for two days and fed no one. If she ever invites my father’s family over for anything again, it will be a cold day in hell.”
“She’ll forgive them,” I promised him. “It might take a minute, though.”
“May I spend Easter with you all instead?”
“Of course you can,” Hannah told him. “And really, sacrificing the rabbit and drinking its blood is not at all mandatory. Only the ceremonial lamb hunt.”
He smirked at her, since he knew her better now. “Like you would ever hurt a bunny or a lamb,” he said, slipping his hand up under the hem of Kola’s T-shirt since he was standing close.
“She wouldn’t, you know she wouldn’t,” Kola agreed, taking a seat on Finn’s lap instead of in the chair.
Finn wrapped his arms around Kola’s waist and pressed his face into his back. “I need a break from my family as well. Everyone but my folks.”
“They can come for Easter too,” Sam said, and I turned to him, surprised.
“What? They should meet my parents so they know what they’re getting into.”
Finn narrowed his eyes so he didn’t cry, squeezing Kola just a bit tighter. “I would love that, sir, thank you so much.”
“It’s a done deal,” Sam said, reaching out to cup my chin.
“Yes, it is,” I said, feeling in my chest how much I loved him.
After a moment Kola said, “Where are the perogies?”
That’s it, all. I will see you in May. Stay safe and be well.