“Good enough,” she says and points to his left arm. “What does your tattoo say?”
“Famiglia è tutto.” He flexes obnoxiously.
“Family is everything,” she translates.
“We all have the same ink,” Tye says. “Got it when we were teenagers. The four of us and our two cousins, Monte and Nico.”
Cecilia turns to me. “You have one too?”
“Yes. Words we live by.”
She’s still staring at my arm as if she expects to see through the shirt fabric when Fort and Getty wander back from their adventures in the brush.
Tye whistles to them. “Show our girl your ink, boys. She wants to see how we match.”
None of my brothers need to be prodded to take off their clothes for a pretty girl. Getty rips all the buttons on his shirt, drops it into the dirt and stands directly in front of Cecilia.
“What else do you wanna see?” He hooks a thumb in the waistband of his pants and drags it an inch lower.
Now I’m grossed out and pissed off. I kick the back of his knee and down he goes. He bounces back up, flips me the bird and then performs a backflip for no reason other than to show off.
Cecilia rubs her arms. “You guys are tough to keep up with.”
“Honey,” Tye says, swinging an arm around her, “you don’t have to take all of us at once. No wonder you look scared.”
“Shut up, Tiberius,” Cecilia says and wriggles out of his embrace.
Laughter explodes, some of it mine.
But insults tend to bounce right off Tye and he winks at her. “I knew you were a keeper the day you got here.”
“She just told you to shut up,” Fort points out.
Tye shrugs. “Abuse turns me on.”
Cecilia giggles. “Must have been exhausting to keep track of you all when you were kids.”
“Yeah, we were terrible children,” Tye says.
“Fucking nightmares,” Getty declares.
“Except for Julian,” Fort says. “He was never a kid. He started issuing orders the minute he could talk.”
“True.” Tye hops off the tailgate and stretches. “My earliest memories involve being yelled at by Julian. But he wasn’t always a dick. Like when he used to tell me not to rip the heads off flowers because it hurt their feelings.”
“That was Mom,” I say. “Whenever she’d bring us into the greenhouse you’d always vandalize her daisies. To make you stop, she told you flowers had feelings too. You started to cry and tried to put the petals back together. So she picked you up and tickled you until you laughed.”
“Did she?” Tye’s voice drops, his tone newly somber.
Getty turns around and stares at me.
Fort, standing a few paces away, puts his hands on his hips and gazes at the sky.
“I haven’t seen a greenhouse,” Cecilia says softly.
“It’s gone,” I tell her. “The day of our mother’s funeral, Dad took a tractor and kept ramming it until it was knocked over. He just couldn’t stand to look at it.”
“Because it reminded him of her?”
