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“I’m not freaking out.” Now he was all insult. “I don’t freak out. I’m very good at not freaking out.” His tone grew a little more strained.
“True,” I said. “Normally. But, ask yourself, why are you still in your work overalls with greasy hands and you drove all the way here from Brooklyn without double-checking where she is. She told us her plans at breakfast.”
I took another sip of the soda as Archie turned those words over in his head. I could practically hear the gears and wheels kicking in his brain.
He sat down abruptly, like someone had cut his strings and stared at his hands, then the food, then stood up again. “Oh shit. I am freaking out, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, but it’s all good man. Happens to the best of us.”
“Clearly,” Archie said, a hint of arrogance in his smirk. “It’s happening to me.”
I chuckled. “Go wash your hands and lose the work boots before Jeremy sees you.”
He moved like a scalded cat. The water kicked on in the kitchen and he scrubbed up. He disappeared back to the garage before returning in socked feet without his overalls. The jeans and t-shirt were much better and far less greasy.
“Why does it look like someone exploded paint all over the inside of the garage?”
Was it that bad? “Charlie and Jeremy were working on a project.”
“Right.” Archie shook his head and dragged out the chair. Instead of eating, he just stared at the food. I gave him a minute. The panic might be subsiding, but he still needed to get all the wheels back on the track. “Isn’t Charlie a little young for working with paint like that?”
“Probably why it looks like an explosion.”
“Point,” he said with a slow nod before he reached over to crack open his soda. “She’s with Dad today. They’re handling the funding…”
“Yep.” I raised my sandwich.
“I knew that.”
“Yep.” I took a bite and chewed it as Archie downed some of the soda.
“I’m losing my mind.”
I grinned at him. “Yep.”
His expression soured and he gave me a dirty look. “You could have warned a guy.”
“You saw it happen to Coop and to Jake. I know you were worried when it happened to me.”
“But were you really panicking or just overthinking stuff?” The challenge was a fair one.
“Both. The point is, it hits all of us. It’s not fun, when you get hit with the sudden feeling of hope and terror and they spin around inside of you like a top.”
Leaning back in the chair, Archie stared up at the ceiling. “It’s like—all I can do is think about everything that could go wrong. With me. With her. With you guys. With the kids. Jake and I were talking about the tour and how we needed to balance out our work schedules for those few weeks so one of us is around. Charlie is not going to like the separation, even if it’s good for him.”
We shared a grimace. Yes, the time apart would be good. He needed to learn to share his mother more and to not panic when she wasn’t there. Newborns were one hundred percent dependent and Frankie had nursed them all. She’d been so thrilled that she could and I would never get tired of the look on her face when she cradled one of the babies to her breast.
Never.
“Then it hit you that she was going to be miles away and you wouldn’t be seeing her regularly either. Different cities. Traveling. Stress…”
“Yeah,” Archie said slowly, then scrubbed a hand over his face again. “Crap. I can’t just lock her up in a padded room, right?”
“Nope. If you try, you’re going to be missing your balls or end up in a padded room of your own.” To be fair, we were all overprotective. “Here’s the thing, take a breath and remember, this isn’t our first.”
With Izzy, everything had been new. While Josh and Charlie had both been different pregnancies, we at least had an idea of what to expect.
“We’ve done this before. She’s toured before. We’ll be home before the third trimester. She hasn’t been as sick with this one, thankfully.”
