Epilogue #3
“You don’t have anything you need to do.”
Work wise that was true. With the job from Teddy finalized several months back, it became abundantly clear that I needed some extra help at the shop.
To replace Traeg, but also to help pick up the slack.
Eventually, those employees got good enough to handle things on their own.
I mostly dropped in on delivery days and came in to do all the trimming of the mother plants to make new baby ones.
It meant I had a lot of free time on my hands.
But I always kept my days full. There were always chores to do. Sometimes I worked in the garden out front, or visited my grandmother, or even went to the clubhouse to hang out.
So, no, I didn’t really have to do much.
But we had a baby on the way now.
I wanted to pick out paint, choose a crib, do a gift registry.
And, you know, tell my parents. I was really dragging my feet about that part.
Mostly just because I didn’t do the whole having-a-baby thing “right.” And “right” would be to do it after a tasteful wedding and a solid year of house-building.
The last time I talked to them, they’d still asked me when I was going to go back to college. Despite having a thriving business and a comfortable personal income.
Kylo had met them briefly when he’d taken me to New York City to spend a week in another of Teddy’s hotels—this one a boutique one that was more trendy than fancy—and see all the shows on Broadway that I’d been wanting to for years.
My parents just so happened to be in town for some work meeting. We’d all met up for lunch.
Everyone had been cordial. But I could sense that my parents didn’t like that Kylo also hadn’t gone to college.
And while he obviously didn’t tell them what he did for a living, he’d informed them that he was in imports and made a six-figure income (yes, they’d been rude enough to ask). That still wasn’t good enough.
I found, for the first time in my whole life, though, that I didn’t care what they thought when it came to Kylo. They would never understand what we had. I didn’t need them to.
Maybe, once I was rested and not so sick, I wouldn’t care what they thought about me doing the marriage and baby thing out of order.
My grandmother was over the moon.
She and her friends were all working on baby blankets. And I heard they were going to start a sewing club to make onesies and old-fashioned outfits—dresses and frilly diaper covers for girls, sailor rompers and dungarees for a boy.
Traeger was pinning the cutest baby accessories to a board he shared with me.
The club old ladies were giving me all their advice.
This was the family that mattered now.
My parents could get on board… or not be involved.
That, I realized, was a huge breakthrough for me.
No more worrying about their expectations or being upset that I was always falling short in their eyes.
“That feels nice,” I said when Kylo’s fingers moved to my scalp, massaging in little circles.
“Sink into it,” Kylo invited.
I did just that, focusing on his fingertips, the calm, steady thump of his heart under my ear, the steady reassurance of his arm around my hips.
Just like that, all the anxiety slipped away.
And I slipped into a deep sleep.
Kylo - 6 Years
“What’s the matter, bub?” I asked, walking up to our son and sitting down next to where he was throwing a tantrum in the backyard at the clubhouse.
“He… they… I can’t…”
He was hyperventilating, his little chest rising and falling rapidly, his cheeks ruddy with his unspoken outrage.
“Okay. How about we take a big, deep breath like Mommy does sometimes?”
“Kay.”
“In with me. One, two, three, four, five, six. Hold, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And out, one, two, three, four, five, six.”
He followed with me, his little face stern and focused.
“What are five things you can see right now?” I asked.
“You,” he said, holding up a finger. “The flowers. Ernest. The pool. Bee.”
“Good. What are five things you can hear?”
“Bee. You. Music. Bangs,” he said when we both heard the sound of gunshots off in our makeshift shooting range. “And… the pool thing.”
“Filter.”
“The pool filter.”
His cheeks weren’t so red. The tears had dried up.
Rue and I weren’t sure how much of what he was exhibiting was just the normal kid tantrum, just the common inability for small brains to process big feelings, and how much might be a hint of actual anxiety issues.
We knew that things like that could run in families. So we were keeping an eye on it, and had the names of several reputable child psychologists saved, just in case.
Our younger child was the opposite in every way.
She was easy-going, carefree. When she wasn’t around, we called her Teflon.
Because nothing stuck to her. True, she was younger.
Maybe by the time she was five, she would have tantrums and big feelings too.
But we were enjoying her ability to just keep on keeping on even when nothing was going her way.
“Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to come with me?”
“Where?”
“Go see Grammy?” I asked.
To that, he lit right up.
Much like how Claudia indulged Ernest, she did the same for her great-grandchildren. Any toy or sweet or task, she was all too happy to do for the kids.
“Yeah!” my son said, throwing an arm up in the air. “How about you go find your sister and bring her out too?”
Mission in mind, he ran off inside the clubhouse.
They came out just a moment later, my boy still perfectly pressed and neat; his sister mismatched, stained, her reddish-brown hair she’d inherited from her mother tangled and going off in different directions.
We walked across the street as a unit, pausing to get cooed over by all the older ladies we passed on the way.
We could hear the voices of Claudia and her friends as we approached the door.
“Come on in,” Claudia called when I knocked.
“Oh, my babies!” Claudia cheered, getting to her feet and rushing over to accept the hugs the kids offered her.
I barely noticed that, though.
Because my gaze was on the woman currently sitting at the table, a book sitting in front of her with a half-naked man on the cover.
“You little liar, you,” I said as I walked over to her.
“Okay. It wasn’t a full lie. I was going to go to the bookstore after this.”
“To get next week’s book club book?”
“Maybe,” she admitted, wincing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, the books are, you know…”
“Full of big dicks and toe-curling orgasms?” I asked, loving how her cheeks went pink.
“Shh!” Her worried gaze slid over toward the kids. But they were busy getting shown all the snacks in the kitchen. “But yes.”
“Darlin’, if I knew book club was the reason you’ve been waking me up in the middle of the night to fuck, I would have been supportive.”
“It’s just, you know, I’m with the kids all day. And it starts to feel like everything is kid-related. I caught myself sitting and watching one of their shows. All alone. While they were outside. Grammy left her book at the house one day. I picked it up. And I was hooked.”
“Well, how about we head to the bookstore right now? I think I heard your grandmother talking about this series about aliens with double dicks.”
To that, Rue snorted and went pinker.
“I was kind of curious about that series.”
“The kids want to come with me to go see Missy’s new puppy,” Claudia said. “Why don’t you two go have some grown-up time?” she suggested.
I looked at Rue, seeing her answer before she spoke.
“I could go for that.”
It was settled then.
We left the kids with their grandmother, left Ernest with the club, went to the bookstore, bought out a third of the damn romance section, then went home and curled up in bed.
Until the story started getting good, leaving Rue shifting around and flushing.
Then, well, we reenacted the scenes in the book.
I was fully behind this new hobby of hers.
Rue - 20 Years
“You’re okay, sweetie,” I said, sitting on the dock next to our teenaged son who was panting for breath, his eyes wide and panicked, his jaw set in a frustrated line.
“It’s not. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. Your body is just overreacting to your fear.”
“My chest hurts.”
“I know,” I said, running my hand up and down his back. He was practically vibrating with panic. “I get that all the time. If you want to walk away, we can walk away. Or, if you want, we can work through this and keep trying.”
I’d never been given choices as a kid.
If I said I was going to do something, my parents forced me to finish.
Signed up for softball and learned I could neither hit nor pitch?
Too bad; I had to finish the season sitting on the bench.
Had no ability to play piano? Oh, well, I had to finish all the lessons already paid for with the nasty-ass instructor who snapped at me each time I messed up.
That lack of control, of choice, was definitely something that triggered my anxiety when I was younger. So I wanted to make sure my kids always knew that they had a choice, that I wasn’t going to force them to do something they genuinely didn’t want to.
Did we encourage them to give everything a solid try? Of course. But if they did and they weren’t happy with it, we let them move on.
So our kid deciding to possibly bow out of the parasailing session he’d been looking forward to?
No big deal, if that was what he really wanted.
“You know, I was terrified when I did this the first time,” I told him.
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Your father was the only reason I got through it. I could go get him to go with you,” I suggested.
“Can you?” he asked.
“Go with you? Absolutely. The worst part is this,” I said. “Once we’re strapped in, and the boat starts, it happens so fast that you don’t have a chance to be freaking out.”
Just then, John pulled up with Teddy’s boat, all the parasailing equipment waiting for us.
“You ready?” I asked.
“No. But let’s do it anyway.”
That was what we did.
And he hated every moment of it.
But he walked a little taller afterward, having overcome his fear.
I felt a little guilty that one of our kids had developed the same kind of anxiety I did. But I was so happy to have the tools to help him overcome it so it didn’t take over his whole life.
“Mom!” our daughter said when we walked into Teddy’s mansion.
“What’s up?”
“Do you see this?” she asked, waving toward a plant in the corner. “That thing is worth twenty grand.”
“I know. I was the one to sell it to Teddy.”
I was a little stunned when the check cleared and went into my account.
“Can I take a clipping?” she asked. “Just here at the first node? He won’t even see it.”
I shared a look with Kylo.
Our little carefree rebel.
I had a feeling that, someday, she might be living in the clubhouse, riding a bike, and giving me something to be anxious about every night.
“Go ahead,” Kylo said.
She whipped a pair of scissors out of her bag, snipped the plant at a perfect angle, then stuck it in a cleaned-out soda bottle with some water.
She might have been more her dad, but there was a hint of me in her. And not just her hair.
Much to my parents’ delight, though, our son had ambitions they approved of.
He’d been in all the clubs in school. He got great grades.
He was attending an Ivy League. He had dreams of a corner office and a plush investment portfolio.
Teddy was his idol, and he was doing everything it took to become just like him.
Eventually, the kids decided they wanted to hang out with friends in Miami, leaving the two of us alone in a giant, sprawling mansion.
“Come with me,” Kylo said, reaching for my hand and pulling me outside.
He lowered onto an outdoor lounge and pulled me with him.
“It’s interesting to be back here,” he said as his arms went around me. “Feels really full circle.”
“The only thing that would make it—” I started, only to trail off when the sprinklers came on, blasting us with cold water, and making us run for the cabanas.
“You planned that,” I said, small-eyeing him.
Kylo shot me a guilty look.
“I might have bribed John to set them off before he left.”
“You know,” I said, glancing around the yard, the sand and sea beyond it. The perfect privacy. “I have one more item on my bucket list.” I told him, pushing him against the wall.
“Oh, yeah?” Kylo asked, a smirk toying with his lips. “What’s that?”
I shot him a wicked smile, then stripped out of my clothes.
Over all the years, Kylo had methodically ticked off every item on my list.
And I just kept adding new ones.
But now, all of them involved him.
Because somewhere along the way, the list stopped being about what I wanted to do and became about who I wanted to do life with.
And it would always, always be Kylo.