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And, of course, there was the new kitten creating chaos too. Another rescue that one of the kids had found on their way home from school, skinny and crying, and trying to eat out of a bag beside a dumpster.
On top of all of that, there were appointments to keep and helping with homework, all that stuff.
Sometimes, I just forgot about food until everyone was saying they were hungry, prompting me to throw on some pasta and try to make some sort of interesting sauce to go on it. And a salad, so I didn’t feel guilty about not serving veg.
“I think we’re gonna have to soundproof that room at this rate,” Emilio said, coming toward me as the kids moved in on the pizza boxes like I hadn’t fed them in a week.
“That would save me a lot of headaches,” I agreed, letting him pull me in through the kitchen, then out into the garden.
We could still hear the music, but it was dulled a lot by the stone walls.
“You seem like you need a minute,” he said, reaching up to rub at my temples.
God, he was still so handsome. Maybe, if it was possible, even more so. There was something about a little silver in an already gorgeous man’s hair that made him even hotter.
“It’s been a day,” I admitted. “I didn’t imagine that the teens could be worse than the early elementary school ages.”
God, all the fighting those days.
Over toys. Over what was on the TV. Over if we were going to go to the park or the arcade. Over who got to have their friends over. Over what we were going to eat for dinner.
I hadn’t known a single moment of peace for a solid… ten years. Around that time, they’d stopped being enemies, and started forming bonds.
“Well, when they were seven and upset about something, they could only scream so loud,” Emilio reasoned, looking up toward our daughter’s bedroom. “The music seems to have no sound limits.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “Thanks for getting dinner.”
“The calendar looked especially hectic today,” he said, shrugging it off. “How are you holding up?” he asked as one of the kids screamed Pizza! and then, blessedly, the music cut off.
“I should have thought of bribing her with food sooner,” I said, shaking my head at the oversight.
Little kids on summer break were like vacuums, but teenagers on any random day in the middle of the week were bottomless pits. My grocery bill was insane.
Food was always the right way to handle a situation. How did I not remember that? This was a house full of Italian children, after all.
We both turned, watching the kids through the window, standing around in the kitchen, eating over no plates, dripping grease, one of them drinking out of the damn soda bottle despite being told not to several times in the past, but calm, laughing, talking. Even our surly girl in full goth attire was cracking smiles and seemingly teasing her brother.
“We did good,” I said, exhaling hard.
“Yeah, we did,” he agreed. “Oh, Christ,” he said as our bookworm daughter seemed to misjudge the distance between her and the island, whacking her hip off of it so hard that we both winced from outside. “That one is all you,” he said, pulling me close.
That wasn’t exactly true.
They were, each of them, parts of both of us.
And their aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins.
Everyone that had come in and poured their love into these kids over the years.
But none of them poured quite as much as Emilio and I did.
You’d think it would be hard.
But, as it turned out, our love had been endlessly flowing from the start, and it had never so much as slowed over the years. We were always overflowing into the kids.
“You know,” Emilio said a little while later when the kids went their separate ways and the music started up again. “There is one perk to that volume of music,” he told me, shooting me a wicked little smirk. “We won’t traumatize the kids if we go have some adult time in our room.”
There was always an upside in this crazy, amazing, unexpected, life we had created together.
“Oh,” I said later, as I was resting on his chest, tracing my fingers over his skin. “I forgot. I got you a new belt buckle,” I told him.
