“Good.”
Anything else he might have said was swept away as unconsciousness pulled me under.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Tatum
The red brick,single story home with attached two-car garage looked exactly the same as it had when Ma and Dad purchased it in the late eighties. For years, they had talked about adding a second story for more room, but the conversation died down after we became a family of three, and these days it was a blessing because neither of them would have been able to handle the stairs, anyway.
My grip tightened and loosened on the steering wheel of the rental car as my men waited patiently for my signal to go inside.
I couldn’t say what had made me so nervous.
The conversation with Ma had gone well. She hadn’t even yelled at me for lying. But something about being back here, with these larger-than-life men in tow, felt surreal.
Would they fit into this piece of suburbia?
Would they understand how much Ma and Dad meant to me?
Would Dad even know who I was this time?
None of these questions could be answered sitting in the driveway, and perhaps the answers didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Instead of letting myself spiral any deeper, I released my seatbelt and pushed out of the car without another word. The slap of several car doors behind me was the reminder I wasn’t going in alone.
The house still smelled the same. The slap of lavender and fresh baked bread surrounded us as we slipped our shoes off inside the front door and padded through the living room in our socks.
“That you, Tater-tots?” Ma called from the kitchen.
“Yeah, Ma. It’s us.”
“Come through and make sure you take off your shoes.”
“Already done, Ma.” I smiled as we stepped through the doorway into the kitchen and found her elbow deep in flour and eggs.
“Good. Now, can one of you boys open the jar of tomato sauce on the counter over there?”
Otis was the first to reach for the jar, twisting the lid off with a pop and waiting for the next instruction. Harvey jumped in, too, kneading the pasta under Ma’s instruction as Calix and Toby stood back wearing matching looks of utter bewilderment. I wondered if they’d ever been exposed to this kind of domesticity.
Possibly not.
While the lasagna was assembled under Ma’s watchful eye, I slipped between the brothers, squeezing Toby’s hand and givingCalix a warm smile in hopes he would understand that here he was safe.
“So you boys are musicians?” Ma asked, dusting her hands off and reaching for the oven timer.
“Yes, ma’am,” Otis said.
He pushed a curl out of his face, leaving a white streak of flour across his cheek. Harvey absently reached across and wiped the mark from his face before continuing to wipe the countertops clean. Ma smiled in approval, sending me a sly wink when she caught my gaze. Nothing got past Dottie King.
When the air was thick with the smell of tomatoes and cooked ground beef, and the counters gleamed, I excused us all under the pretense of a house tour.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said as soon as we were out of earshot.
“We’ll all be eating it, so why shouldn’t we help?” Otis said, running a hand over the river stone feature wall that ran the length of the hallway.
“Thanks. She insists on doing everything herself. I get so worried about her.”
