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"So your brothers are taking bets on her eye color..."
"Oh, fuck," I said with a grin.Scotti- 6 yearsHe didn't make parole at five like we expected, for reasons we didn't get to know about. I figured he had gotten into a small amount of trouble at some point, gotten into a scuffle, gotten another couple months put on his sentence.
But today was supposed to be the day.
The only reason we knew that was because when Ryan called the jail to put money into his commissary, it got rejected.
The energy around us was palpable. The men were expectant. They wanted their brother. They missed him every single damn day he was gone. They worried themselves to ulcers. They raged and paced and fell into dark places at times. Like around the holidays. Like on his birthday. Like every single time a letter was returned to sender.
I understood why they were excited.
But that was why my stomach was in knots.
Because I had a feeling that they were getting their hopes up, that this day was going to be downright heartbreaking to them.
I glanced over at Fee, Lea, and Dusty, seeing a similar tension in their eyes. The kids, luckily, were mostly unaware. We had all, as a group, decided to not make a big deal about it to them, not wanting to make them nervous or get their hopes too high.
Becca was old enough to be sat down and talked to about it. In fact, Fee and Hunter had very much told her what Detective Lloyd had told them to tell her, information she accepted with the wisdom of a kid who grew up in a non-traditional world. Izzy and Mayla weren't far behind Becca, but didn't remember their Uncle Eli quite as well as Becca did.
As for Shane and Lea's group, six-year-old Jason, five-year-old twins Jake and Joey, and one-year-old Sam had never met their uncle. Neither had Ryan and Dusty's Danny who had just turned four, Ford who was three, or the very newborn Gia.
My children, well, they obviously hadn't met him either. His namesake, Eli, was three. Jules, whose real name was Julia, Helen's middle name, was two. Our youngest, just a couple weeks old, born just two days after Dusty and Ryan's Gia, was Natalie.
Three down, all girls.
Mark was just about having a heart attack.
As were all my brothers who would surely never think they should be allowed to one day date.
I hoped for my poor husband's sake that the next and final two would be boys. I hoped it for my girls as well. As a girl who grew up with brothers, I wanted that for them. Granted, they would have Jason, Jake, Joey, Danny, and Ford to look out for them. So no matter what happened, they would have a bit of insulation from the world. Which was good.
"Do you think it is bad news that we haven't heard from Charlie and Helen?" Dusty asked, eyes a little swollen, Gia being a bit more difficult than her previous two babies, always up at night with colic. She quickly defended her sleeplessness, insisting Ryan took her so she could try to catch up, but said that there was no way she could sleep through her baby crying. So neither of them got any sleep.
Charlie and Helen had gotten up before the sun had even risen, and drove all the way up to the prison, having no idea what time he might be released, and not wanting to miss him.
It was the middle of the day.
It wasn't looking good.
If they had him, if he was with them, they would have at least texted someone so everyone stopped worrying. And I doubted the prison released anyone after five or six in the evening.
"Six years," Fee said, looking at the backs of the men we all loved so much. "So much has changed. I mean, just look at that," she said, waving a hand to the backyard where the kids were all in various levels of play. "When he left, it was just my girls. Just the three of them. Now there are thirteen. I don't think, even if they can get him back, I don't think the videos we all took of every event will ever make him feel like he was caught up. I think a part of him is always going to feel like he doesn't belong in the way he used to. You guys know Eli," she said, then gave me a sad look. "I guess you didn't really get to know him much either."
"He's just... he's got the kindest soul," Dusty insisted. "I know all these men are good and giving and sweet. But Eli just always had something a little extra. He was more patient, more introspective, more... I don't know... is 'soulful' too cheesy?"
