Page 3 of But For You

“Yeah,” Hannah Banana chimed in again, always her big brother’s backup. “How do you know?”

I had to think.

Kola waited, squinting at me.

Hannah was waiting as well, one of her perfectly shaped dark brows arching. It was new. She had the same way of looking at me that her father did, like I was an idiot.

“Do not lick the cat! Nobody licks the cat!” Sam ordered when the silence stretched for too long.

I started laughing; only my husband would have to make such rules.

He looked down at his son, Mykola Thomas Kage—Thomas after Sam’s father—soon-to-be six years old, going on forty, who was full of questions and opinions.

We had adopted him when he was three, from an agency in the Netherlands. When we made the final trip to bring him home, he saw us from the window of the orphanage director’s office and ran to the door to meet us. We were there two weeks, and he started to call Sam Daddy, which Sam was madly in love with hearing. Though Kola had been taught the American word father, it was not his, not the one he had grown up hearing and waiting to use for someone who belonged to him. So, he tried out the one he knew on me.

Pa.

So simple of a word, but it meant so much.

I had heard it in the streets when we visited, along with the more formal vader, and seen kids run to their fathers, using it. Not the Papa I knew, not what Sam’s father was called by his grandchildren, but instead just Pa. When Kola called to me, I answered to it, and his face—the way it lit up, the absolute blinding joy—was a gift.

Sam was Daddy, and Daddy represented Kola’s new life and his new family in the United States, and I was the comfort of the old. I was Pa, and he had named me.

Of course it didn’t matter to me what name he settled on. He could have called me Jory for all I cared; he was my kid, and that was all I gave a damn about. He was legally and completely mine and Sam’s, and that was what mattered. And we were good, the three of us, until the first agency we had contacted back when we started the whole adoption process called to tell us a little girl from Montevideo was ready for adoption. I had forgotten about them because they never came through, but that turned out not to be the case. You heard from them when it was time, and it finally was.

I was surprised, Sam unsure, until the professional but not personable and definitely not warm gentleman slid the picture across the desk to us. He needed to know if we wanted the little girl in the photograph.

Yes, we wanted the angel very much.

Our family went from three to four with the coming of the little sister that Kola wanted nothing to do with until we were all home under one roof. He resented all of us going to the airport to pick her up, hated her crying in the car, and was really annoyed that Sam was carrying her instead of him. He was starting to fret; it was all over his face—until Sam knelt and picked him up too.

Kids were so funny. As soon as Kola had figured out that Hannah was planning on sharing us with him, that she wasn’t there to take his spot, that nothing was changing in the love department, just some tweaking in the time area, he had decided he liked her. And now, after years, their bond was noticeable.

They fought like cats and dogs … but only sometimes. She cried, he moped, they chased each other and roughhoused, but nine times out of ten, I found her in his room in the morning. When we were out, he held her hand, he fixed things when she couldn’t, and he was supremely patient when she was trying to impart some tidbit of information. I was like, Spit it out, kid!, but Kola just nodded and waited until some incident about a bug on a flower was communicated in excruciating detail.

He brushed her off if she fell down, made her remember her mittens and hat, and could be counted on to translate her wishes to others if Sam and I were absent. Dylan Greer, my best friend, was really surprised because she was certain that, sometimes, Hannah Banana—or B, as we all called her—spoke in tongues. But Kola would just say that she wanted milk or a crayon or a flashlight. And he was never wrong. He was an excellent big brother, and she adored him.

Hannah Regina Kage—her middle name after Sam’s mother—had the most adorable little button nose on the planet. I would lean in to kiss her sometimes and nibble on her nose instead. It made her squeal with delight. Putting her toes in my mouth was also cause for raucous laughter. Even at a year old, she’d had a good laugh. It was not timid or soft. She was small, but how she expressed herself was big. People heard the deep, throaty sound and were enchanted. I had been under her spell at first glance.

In our neighborhood in River Park, sometimes, people still looked at us when we were out walking. And most questioned Kola when they got close since, with his deep-set cobalt-blue eyes, sharp European features, and black hair, he didn’t look like either me or Sam. But Hannah, who was half-Uruguayan, was obviously adopted. What was funny though was that people still questioned whether Gentry—born with my brother, Dane’s, charcoal eyes instead of my sister-in-law, Aja’s, honey-brown ones—actually belonged to his own mother. I always wondered why people cared. If your kid was blue and you were orange, who gave a crap as long as you loved and cherished the blue kid? People still surprised me.

“Pa.” Kola was looking up at me like I was the village idiot.

“What?”

“If Hannah can’t lick Chilly, you can’t lick Daddy.”

I had a terrible image of giving Sam a blow job just then, and he probably knew it, which was why he grabbed me and covered my mouth with his hand.

“Will you two go finish your breakfast, please?” Sam ordered them.

They left then, but not without casting looks back.

Sam moved his hand, but bent and kissed me. I received it happily, and of course, there was more retching.

“Kola Kage!” I admonished him, even as I laughed. “Will you knock that off?”

“Ewww,” Hannah squeaked out.