Four #3
“How do you think you get allergic to a cat?” Hannah asked her brother when she was sure Renee couldn’t overhear her.
I had wondered why she had hung back enough to let a few people in front of us.
“I think it’s made up.” He was adamant. “How do you get allergic to a cat? You’re not supposed to put them in your mouth, Dad said.”
Hannah’s mouth made a perfect little O. “That’s right, huh?”
“Yep,” he insisted. “It’s not a real thing.”
“Yes, it is,” I assured him. “People are allergic to cat dander.”
“What’s dander?”
“Like dandruff.”
“What’s that?” Hannah wanted to know.
“It’s like little pieces of skin, and sometimes, it’s itchy.”
“Ewww.” She made a face. “Chilly doesn’t have that.”
I sighed. “Some people are allergic to their hair too.”
“How?” Kola wanted to know.
“It makes them sneeze.”
“Is this in a book?” he asked suspiciously.
Lately, everything I said was questioned in this manner.
“Yes, and you can look it up on the internet too.”
He appeared skeptical.
“So, is she allergic to all cats?” Hannah wanted to know.
“I suspect so.”
“Like lions? She would be allergic to Simba?”
“Simba’s not a real lion,” Kola reminded her. “He’s a cartoon.”
“But if he was a real lion, he would make her sneeze, huh?”
He thought a moment before both faces turned up to me, waiting.
“I think it’s just house cats, but we’ll have to look it up when we get back to the room.”
My answer seemed to placate them.
“Kola, look,” Hannah said, pointing at some kind of casserole. “That looks like monkey brains.”
“Or like a horse blew up.” He retched, which made the woman behind us gasp.
“Guys,” I cautioned them.
“Remember that time Chilly barfed up that hairball with the jelly beans?”
“Eww, the red ones!” Kola announced.
She dissolved into her husky laughter.
He gagged again, which sent his sister into hysterics.
Sam had to apologize to the people behind us, and I noticed that no one even picked up the spoon to put any of the red glop on their plates.
“Dad,” Kola began as we moved down the side of the buffet table, “when I get big, I’m gonna be a marshal too.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. I’m not gonna shoot people though.”
“No? What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m just gonna make them sit in a room and talk to Hannah,” he announced with diabolical glee, his voice rising at the end.
“Kola!”
He started laughing, and she picked up a roll.
“Hannah Kage, don’t you dare throw that roll,” I threatened her.
“Kola is made of boogers!”
“Well, Hannah is made of poop!”
“Guys.” Sam was chuckling, so his warning lacked any real power. Stern he was not.
Once we were sitting, Hannah asked me why a lady had hit a girl when we were in line.
“That was her daughter,” I explained.
“So, why did she hit her?”
“She’d probably done something her mother didn’t like.”
“So, she was bad?”
“Kids aren’t bad. Sometimes, they do things that make their parents upset, but it’s not bad. It’s just that the behavior is misguided.”
She looked at me like I was from another planet.
I made a noise. “Fine, yeah, she was bad.”
“How come you don’t hit me when I’m bad?”
“I don’t think hitting accomplishes anything.”
“Me neither.” She nodded, patting my arm.
I started laughing, and when Kola waggled his eyebrows at me, I lost it.
Sam just shook his head.
The day was a whirlwind. There were so many activities and sign-ups, and Sam’s father wanted both his sons with him.
I left to take the kids to the playground, let them run around like crazy people for two hours, and then took them for a walk around the lagoon.
Hannah started getting whiny and grouchy, and when I picked her up and carried her, she fell asleep in seconds.
We went back to the room, and I had Kola do the homework his teacher had given us and put Hannah down on the couch so she would be out with us instead of in the bedroom alone.
I got a call around two that reminded us we had horseback rides scheduled for three. Apparently, we were already signed up to do lots of things.
We didn’t see Sam again until after five. We had already showered and changed when he came through the front door.
“Hello!”
“In here!”
He found all three of us under the covers, watching a movie on my bed with the remainders of room service around us.
“We have to go to dinner, guys. Are you ready?”
Kola moaned and burrowed into my side, his arm on my stomach as he hid his face.
“What happened?” Sam looked at me.
“Kola got horse sick,” I said with as much of a straight face as I could manage.
Hannah pretended to puke for Sam, just in case he was confused. “He threw up all over the saddle, Daddy.”
Kola said something no one could understand into my T-shirt.
“Tell me.” Sam smiled.
“Well, it was all fine until—”
“He has it on video,” Hannah informed her father.
“Which I think might have been the problem,” I explained. “You know when you’re looking through that viewfinder too long … I think he got motion sickness.”
“Poor guy.” Sam empathized, moving over to Kola’s side.
His son rolled over and, when Sam bent, wrapped his arms around his father’s neck.
“Maybe I should order room service, too, huh, and stay here with you guys?”
Kola nodded.
“No, you gotta be with your family, Sam. You—”
“I am with my family,” he assured me, reaching out to take my hand. “And my boy needs me.”
“You wanna see the video, Daddy?” Hannah was trying to be helpful.
“Don’t look at the barf,” Kola cautioned.
“Maybe later.”
I covered my face with a pillow so there was no snickering.
When the phone in the room rang twenty minutes later, Sam answered and shook his head, obviously ready to tell whoever was on the other end of the line no. I waved, getting his attention, and told him to go ahead and go.
He covered the receiver with his hand. “Jory, I need to stay here.”
“It’s a reunion,” I reminded him.
His heavy sigh made me smile before he agreed to go.
When he left, Kola snuggled up on my right, Hannah on my left, and we all got warm and toasty, watching Homeward Bound in the air-conditioned room. I wasn’t sure what time Sam got in because I fell asleep.