October 2025 #2
“For one, ewww,” she told him. “I always watch everything in the original language if remotely possible. I like the inflections better. For two, Wick, Harper, and Finn decided that painting the kitchen was a good idea to start late Friday night when they all got home.”
“Painting?” I asked her.
“I mean, I don’t care. Pale green kitchen with forest-green cabinets—that’s awesome. Go for it. But that’s a weekend project or a fall-break one. That is not something you want to start on a Friday night.”
“Paint fumes?”
“For starters, yeah,” she told us. “I ordered them pizza, and then we bailed. And your oldest child is asleep upstairs in his room.”
“He left Finn?”
“It was Finn’s idea,” she said with a shake of her head.
“He deserves to sleep alone when he thinks they can just ‘whip that out,’” she finished, doing a terrible impression of Kola’s beloved.
“Plus, Finn’s been a bit psycho about Kola’s birthday present.
He doesn’t understand that Kola’s love language is not gift-giving in any way, either giving or receiving, but totally quality time.
All Finn needs to do is be around him and Kola’s happy. ”
“You and your father are both gift people,” Sam told me and my daughter.
“And yours is acts of service, Dad. We know.”
He shrugged. “Is there any more pad thai?”
“Yeah, there’s a ton. I over ordered because I thought Jake was going to eat, but he had pizza before we bailed.”
“Awesome,” Sam said before he walked back to the kitchen.
“Didn’t you two eat at the anniversary party?”
“Listen to this,” I said, and flopped down beside her on the couch and relayed the story.
“Wait, he’s moving to Boston? Without Aunt Sandy?”
I nodded.
“But doesn’t that seem, you know, not super smart, considering they’ve only been married a year?”
“You would think so.”
“Huh. What did Nana say?”
“She thought Sandy was going with him.”
“Yeah, but Kitty’s still in school. And her dad’s here, and all her friends.”
“This is what I said.”
After a few minutes of silence, Hannah told me that her friend, the very rich and oh so handsome David Chan, was getting married.
“You remember him, right? He’s the one George saved from being kidnapped at that fundraiser I was at with him.”
“How could I forget,” I assured her. “Plus, he and I have seen each other on more than one occasion.”
“True,” she said with a smile.
“So he’s getting married?”
“In theory.”
“What does that mean?”
She grimaced. “It means his mother said, over my dead body, and he said, then you better get your affairs in order.”
“This sounds terrible,” I commented. “And those accents are atrocious.”
“Sorry. But it is contentious. I told him to stop being a brat. He can’t possibly marry Leticia Brummell in Hong Kong next month. She’s not right for him, and he’s just using her to irritate his parents, which is terrible.”
“Maybe he loves her.”
There was loud scoffing.
“Hannah Regina Kage, do not be so dismissive of people your friends love.”
She cackled evilly. “Yeah. Okay. We’ll see.”
It was funny, but about thirty minutes later, there was a knock on the back door. Sam got up, going to check, leaned into the kitchen so he could see out to the back door, and asked whoever it was, what the hell was happening.
“I know,” I heard Harper mutter.
Hannah and I both turned around and looked at him. Jake was still asleep on the other end of the couch. Wick and Finn were right next to Harper, standing there looking utterly bedraggled.
“Since when do you knock?” I asked him.
“These two are weird about it,” he stated, rolling his eyes and gesturing at Wick and Finn.
“It’s not right to just walk in like we own the place,” Wick declared.
“But all of you are family,” I told him. “I promise you that it’s okay.”
Wick dropped his duffel, trudged over to the couch, and took a seat beside me before putting his head on my shoulder. His sigh was long. I slipped my hand up around the side of his cheek and patted gently.
“Is the smell overwhelming?”
“Yes,” he muttered miserably.
“Even with the fans on and the windows open?”
He nodded.
“Perhaps painting is more a daytime activity?”
“It’s all Finn’s fault.”
I enjoyed hearing Finn groan.
“Is there any more Thai food?” Harper asked.
“I ordered you all pizza,” Hannah reminded him.
“But nobody wanted that so it’s in the fridge,” Wick said sounding a bit bereft. “So… is there any more Thai yes or no?”
“Yes,” Sam answered. “Come on, let’s get you all fed.”
Later, Hannah led Jake up to her room, Wick and Harper took Jake’s old room, back to being our guest room, and Finn sacked out on the couch.
Kola had been asleep for a while, and he didn’t want to wake him up.
Knowing my son as I did, I opened the door of his room and leaned in to check on him before Sam and I went to bed.
“Pa?” he said sleepily.
“Yes, love, just checking on you. Go back to sleep.”
There was a noise halfway between a moan and a rumble.
“Finn is on the couch, just so you know.”
Beats of time passed. “Finn?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him c’mere, okay?”
“Okay,” I soothed him and closed the door.
I then walked down three steps from the second-floor landing and looked down at Finn, who smiled up at me. “You need to get upstairs, as my son would like you next to him.”
“What?”
I chuckled.
“He does?”
“Of course he does. Always think, from now on, ‘he sleeps best when I’m with him.’”
He threw off the covers, grabbed the blankets and pillow we’d supplied—I always gave people a lightweight blanket for underneath and a warmer one for the top—and charged up the stairs. Right before he closed the door to Kola’s room, I got a radiant smile.
“Everything all fixed now?” Sam groused at me when I shut the two of us in for the night. I noted that Dobby was in his bed on the wingback chair beside ours, and Chilly was curled up near Sam’s pillow, where he normally slept. Both of them were down for the night.
“Yes,” I told him. “Don’t be so cranky.”
“I wanna go to sleep,” he snapped at me.
“Well, go ahead.”
“I need you to lie down with me.”
All he actually needed was me to cuddle until he fell asleep.
I could then sit up and read, but I could not, under any circumstances, leave the bedroom.
Sam could stir from a dead sleep if the bed jostled at all or if I opened the door to our room.
Those husbands that slept through their spouse getting sick in the middle of the night…
Sam Kage was not one of them. I had not, thankfully, had food poisoning in years, but the last time I was very sick, he was there, rubbing my back, and then later, with a heating pad for my stomach, making sure I could sleep.
You know someone really loves you when they will make conversation with you as you sit beside a toilet bowl and will clean everything up when you’re done.
There’s really no one better, and so him needing me so he can sleep is really not so terrible.
As soon as I smiled, he growled, and I turned off the light and got under the covers with him. Once we were snuggly, he whispered in my ear that he loved me, which, of course, was always good to hear.
Kola had a wonderful day. Hannah made him his ridiculous special dessert, the one made from six different cookies that she whipped up for him every year, and I made him lasagna.
It turned out that Aja brought the chicken marsala, and with Regina’s moussaka, Dylan’s yellow squash casserole and Caesar salad, the meal was pretty well-rounded.
Most importantly, that Sunday, we had a nice cross section of people at his birthday open house.
Poor Sandra, who showed up with Michael, the whole people coming and going all night was a bit beyond her. She’d experienced our brand of party for Christmas last year, and I was fairly certain that she was still traumatized.
Finn’s parents were there, and Harper had put together a beautiful video of Kola growing up.
Apparently, Wick had helped him, and it was basically the high points, thus far, of my son’s life.
I, of course, loved it, but I was not nearly as spellbound by it as Finn’s parents were.
They stood and watched the twenty-minute homage to all things Kola at least three times.
In the kitchen, I cornered Harper and asked him what had prompted the trip down memory lane.
It had taken time and effort to scan in pictures, pull video, and basically create the homage to my oldest child.
He smiled at me. “I think some of the issues they have with Kola are that they think Finn won’t have the life they want him to have, that they imagined him having, with Kola because he’s a man.
But in all those pictures and videos, all they have to do is look to see that, even though Kola was raised by two men, his childhood looks a lot like Finn’s. ”
I smiled at him. “That’s terribly sneaky of you.”
“Well, Jake and I were talking, before he and Hannah took their break, and when I asked him why he thought Finn’s parents weren’t a hundred percent behind their engagement—because we know they’re not homophobic—he said he was pretty sure it was their head picture.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
His chuckle made me smile. “That’s what I said. I mean, Jake, right? He’s normally right about things, but getting it out of him takes some patience.”
It was true, but Harper and Kola both had the most history of figuring it out. No two people on the planet knew Jake better, with Hannah bringing up a strong third.
“But when I said head picture out loud, I knew what he meant. So, to rebut that, I thought I would make a movie and show them the high points while sort of sandwiching it in the whole, we’re celebrating Kola and look at his life.”
I nodded.
“And Wick, he’s the anthropologist, right? Instead of letting me fill a reel with every one of Kola’s accomplishments, he said, make it as human and relatable as possible.”
“Yes,” I said, getting choked up.