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I took the balloons just as she thrust another present into my other hand.
“Should I open it now?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s an iPad. Yours is old as dirt. You’re welcome.”
Then she was gone, joining the mass of kids that were now playing in the large open room beyond the restaurant itself.
“Wow,” I said as I shook the box at Folsom. “I think she just told me I needed to upgrade my tech.”
Folsom wrapped her arm around mine as she said, “My kid tells it like it is.”
I snorted. “Just like her mother.”
And soon, I would have yet another one just like her.
God help me.
EPILOGUE
What wine pairs best with finding out your in-laws are staying over a day longer than you thought?
-Kobe to Folsom
KOBE
6 years later
My gaze took everything in at once.
Or tried to.
But it was a lot.
The Singh Circus was always a lot.
But every time it rolled into the town closest to us, we would go. Sometimes it would be within an hour. Other times, it would be within six.
No matter where it landed, we went.
We even went when it wasn’t anywhere close to us.
And I would always drive my family there, even if I didn’t really have any interest in a circus.
Why? Because for a year, one of Folsom’s most vulnerable, she’d needed that circus and those people. The Singh family. And I would go out of my way to make sure that I always took her to see that family. The one that she made herself when she needed them most.
“Daddy!”
Seven men turned to see who screamed “Daddy,” but it was only me that bent down to scoop up the screeching three-year-old.
“Daddy!” she smiled, both of her hands full. One hand with cotton candy and the other with what looked to be a cheese stick, but I couldn’t be sure. “Look what I have. Want a bite?”
I grinned and took the tiniest of bites of her cotton candy.
“What did you just go do?” I asked her.
“I’ll tell you what your kid just did,” an angry voice said, some male I’d never met. “She cut me off and made me let go of my balloons.”
He pointed upward, but my background made it to where I never looked away when someone was around me. Call it a hazard of being in prison, if you will. It’d been years and years since I’d done my time, but that didn’t change my ingrained habits.
