Happy Ending

by J. Sterling

  “I guess I won’t mind,” Claudia said. “Congratulations again. She’s really beautiful.”

  “She looks just like Ryan.” I shook my head. “It’s like I didn’t even make her at all.”

  “Damn Fisher genes.”

  I shrugged. “Could be worse.”

  “Oh, it could definitely be worse. The three of us are pretty lucky,” she said.

  I agreed, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was agreeing to. Were we lucky that our kids might be as handsome as their fathers? Or were we lucky that we were the women that they’d chosen to love and spend their lives with?

  Maybe none of it was luck at all. Maybe all of it was?

  I had no idea, but I sure was thankful for all of it.

  Diapers Are Dumb

  Ryan

  Frank pulled me aside at the hospital while everyone else was ogling the baby. “I know it’s not the best time to tell you, but I got some news.”

  “What did you find out?”

  He pulled at his hair, which told me the answer wasn’t good. “If that guy has the original deed to the land, then the one our lawyers drew up and Sam signed probably won’t be valid. An original documented deed with signatures supersedes all others that came after.”

  My heart, which had been soaring on cloud nine only moments ago, came crashing down. “So we’re screwed? We have no rights?”

  “Technically, it looks that way. But I’m not giving up yet.”

  “Don’t,” I said firmly. “There’s got to be some kind of loophole.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  We three were all financially set for life, thanks to not only the success of the bar itself, but also to the location fees we received whenever the bar was used in a television episode. Yet it wasn’t about the money.

  Sam’s Bar had evolved from a dream to a reality, and Frank and I made it happen together without anyone else’s help. And as soon as Nick joined us, it felt like even more of an accomplishment. The bar was about us as brothers being in business together, succeeding by pooling our individual talents.

  Before Nick came along, we had allowed a few reality TV shows to film us for the free exposure it gave us. Nick was the one who changed all that, negotiating location fees for us anytime the bar was either mentioned or used as a shooting location. And if one of us appeared in the episode, we got a talent fee.

  Those fees added up nicely over the years, continuing to earn us money without any effort. Sam’s had become a part of us, our heart, and Fishers didn’t walk away from the things they loved.

  We had to figure it out.

  • • •

  The next ten days passed by in a blink. We still weren’t completely sure what the hell was going on with the original deed to the land or how this man could have gotten his hands on it. Frank’s information so far had been deemed accurate, but we still didn’t have any concrete information beyond that.

  No one could find any records of Sam Sr. passing the land to a new owner, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened. There were apparently hundreds of unorganized boxes of property transactions to go through by hand, and that required time that we didn’t have.

  Because we had no way to get in touch with the scary dude who had threatened to take it all from us, we were at his mercy, which wasn’t something any of us were used to. By not giving us a way to contact him, he’d taken away our ability to negotiate or get more information to determine what it was he was truly after. None of us could figure out why he wanted to tear down the bar, although we never mentioned it after we talked about it at length one night.

  Like typical men, we refused to ask the same questions over and over again. What was the point when we had no answers? We’d just be whining like a bunch of girls, and Frank wouldn’t allow that. So until we had a fucking solution, we didn’t discuss it; which meant we never talked about it because we had nothing to offer on the how-do-we-fix-this front.

  Aside from the bar, things at home were going great. Well, as great as they could when you no longer got to sleep through the night.

  The whole not having sex with my sexy-as-fuck girlfriend issue had been easier to adjust to than I’d anticipated, but the not-sleeping part sucked. People weren’t kidding when they said sleep would become a thing of the past after you had a baby. Hope woke up wailing every two hours on the dot, and Sofia was like a damn psychic, knowing exactly what the baby needed and tending to it, sometimes with her eyes half-closed. How she knew these things while I still fumbled a putting the diaper on properly was beyond me.

  While I tried to spend most of my time at home, I also continued to check in at the bar. Since Hope spent most of her day sleeping, Sofia had made it a habit to force me out of the house every day. She said I was driving her crazy, sitting around staring at her all day long, but she didn’t realize how mesmerized I was by both her and the baby we created.

  I wanted to help, to do everything, but realized pretty early on that there wasn’t much for me to do. Sofia breastfed our little angel and I changed her diapers—badly—whenever she let me, which honestly wasn’t very often. I think she’d been so used to doing everything on her own that she forgot I was there to help. Or maybe she was tired of fixing all my diaper mishaps. It was probably a little of both.

  Matson and I tried to come up with a plan to steal the baby one afternoon so Sofia could sleep all day and not worry, but we failed. Sofia yelled, so Matson and I left and played at the beach until dusk. After that, I started bringing him to the bar with me so we could both get out of the house together, and Sofia only had to tend to one kid instead of two. Even though it wasn’t technically legal to have Matson in the bar during operating hours, it was worth the risk it posed if we got caught, especially if we were going to lose the bar anyway. What would it matter? We never stayed for very long, and Matson loved it there.

  “When I grow up, can I work here?” he asked one afternoon, and my heart cracked in two inside my chest.

  “Absolutely. I’ll teach you everything I know,” I said, hoping to God it wasn’t a lie, and that the bar would still be standing when Matson was old enough to work here.

  “Cool,” he said as he spun on the bar stool.

  “Are you going to make drinks like Ryan, or do you want to be a marketing genius like me?” Nick asked.

  Matson put a finger on his chin as he pondered the question. “Probably both,” he said with confidence. “I can do both, right?”

  Nick grinned at him. “You can do anything you want.”

  When I grunted in frustration, Nick shook his head at me.

  “How do you still not know how to do that?”

  I glared at him, then stared down at the baby doll on top of the bar that I’d been practicing putting a diaper on. I lifted it into the air and watched as the diaper came undone and fell off. Nick and Matson both laughed.

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” I grumbled, dropping the dumb doll.

  Nick waltzed over, grabbed the doll and the diaper, and within two seconds had it on perfectly. Why could everyone else and their dog put a diaper on a baby without any issues, and I couldn’t?

  “You can’t be good at everything, brother,” Nick said, laughing at my dejected expression.

  “But I need to be good at this. I need to be able to put a diaper on my daughter and not have it fall off the second she starts wiggling.”

  “Mama said you’re not allowed to anymore,” Matson said, still spinning his bar stool.

  My head swung in his direction. “What?”

  He stopped spinning and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Uh, maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

  “It’s okay,” I said with a sigh. “She’s right. But I’ll figure it out.”

  I reached for the fake baby one more time and undid Nick’s diaper. I was determined to get it right, and I wasn’t going to stop until I did.

  Reaching for my phone, I pulled up YouTube and searched for a tutorial. Af
ter watching it several times, I attempted the process again and let out a whoop of joy when I lifted the fake baby and the diaper stayed in place. I even shook the doll to see if the diaper would come undone, but it didn’t.

  “I did it! I finally fucking did it!”

  “Uh, bad word.” Matson stopped spinning and stared at me wide-eyed.

  Crap. “Sorry, buddy. I just got really excited.”

  “I won’t tell,” he said, and went back to spinning.

  One Fisher Down

  Ryan

  “Fraaank!”

  The sound of Jess’s panicked voice froze the three of us brothers where we were waiting in the pastor’s office for the wedding to start.

  Nick reacted first, heading for the door at the same time that Jess burst through it. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” he asked as he reached for her.

  She moved out of his grasp, clearly in a hurry. “Nothing, maybe. I just need to show Frank something and see if he freaks out.”

  I cast a quick glance at my older brother, who looked just as confused as the rest of us.

  “Read this.” She shoved a small notecard into his hands.

  Nick and I huddled around Frank, trying to read it over his shoulder but failing. It looked like a welcome announcement of some kind from Frank and Claudia, and I assumed they were being handed out to the wedding guests upon their arrival this morning at the church.

  “What am I looking for here, Jess?” He handed the notecard back to her, and she shook her head with a satisfied smile.

  “I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t even see it. Most people read things too fast, and their brain fixes the mistake instead of registering it.”

  “What mistake?” I took the paper and started laughing immediately. “Farnk? They spelled your name F-A-R-N-K! Oh, this is too much.”

  Nick ripped it from my grasp and cracked up. “Farnk Fisher.”

  “This isn’t funny, assholes!” Jess told us, and we immediately tried to stop laughing. “Claudia’s freaking out. She thinks Frank is going to be pissed.”

  Frank pushed back from his chair and stood to his full height, towering over Jess. “Jess, please go tell my fiancée that I’m not pissed, or upset, or anything else she’s worried about. I couldn’t care less about this stupid piece of paper.”

  He stopped short and held up a hand. “Maybe don’t tell her that part. Just tell her I want to marry her, and that’s all that matters.”

  Jess breathed out a sigh of relief. “I told her you wouldn’t care, that guys don’t give two shits about this kind of stuff, but she wasn’t convinced.”

  “Go calm her down for me, please.” He leaned over to give Jess a quick peck on the side of the head, and I swore I heard Nick growl. We Fishers are a possessive bunch.

  “Okay. I’ll see you guys in a bit.” She turned to leave but then stopped and gave Nick a hard kiss. “You all look really fucking hot, by the way,” she said, waving her hand at us in our formalwear, then rushed out the door the same way she’d come in.

  “So, Farn—” I started to call Frank by his new nickname, and he took a menacing step toward me, shutting me up.

  “Don’t start. I told Jess I didn’t care so that she’d calm Claudia down. But who the hell messes up the groom’s name on a welcome card? The printers had one job to do. One!”

  “It will be a funny memory?” Nick sounded so unconvinced, it came out like a question.

  “I swear to God, I’ll punch you both in the face if you start calling me that.”

  I scoffed. “You can’t give us black eyes. It’ll ruin your wedding pictures, Farnk.”

  Nick tried to hold back a laugh, but failed miserably. Frank clenched his hands into fists, and I raised my palms in surrender.

  “Kidding. Kidding. I won’t say it anymore.” When his hands unclenched, I mumbled, “To your face.”

  “Let’s have a drink.” Nick raised one of the shot glasses I’d brought for us with a bottle of tequila, and set it on the table in a damn good distraction tactic.

  “Great idea. Here. Drink this.” I poured a shot of tequila in front of Frank and waited for him to pick up the glass. “It will help calm the nerves.”

  “I’m not nervous.” He glared at me but took the drink anyway.

  “I wouldn’t be either,” Nick lied, pouring himself a shot and downing it.

  “Fine. None of us are nervous.” I poured another round for us. “Drink up.”

  “Why are we drinking?” Frank growled as he adjusted his tie.

  “It’s what men do on their wedding day,” I said as if I were an authority on the subject.

  Nick nodded. “He’s right. We’re supposed to drink before we all walk down the aisle.”

  “No more,” Frank said after swallowing his third shot. “I’d like to remember every single detail about this day.”

  I smiled inwardly. Two years ago, I would have sworn this day would never come. Before he met Claudia, Frank had been stuck in a relationship, bound by guilt and obligation. It had been no way to live, but he couldn’t seem to see his way out of it.

  I never thought I’d see a time when Frank wasn’t with Shelby, but I also suspected he’d never walk down the aisle with her, no matter how much she had wanted it or how guilty he felt. It was only once Claudia was in the picture that Frank’s entire demeanor changed. He came to life. He had hope again. And I hadn’t realized just how hopeless he’d become until I had something to compare it to.

  Now I couldn’t imagine him with anyone else. Marrying Claudia wasn’t an option for him, it was a necessity, like continuing with life without making her a Fisher would be all sorts of wrong. I understood it completely because it was how I felt about Sofia. And it was how Nick felt about Jess.

  Our dad poked his head into the small room, then stepped inside. “You guys ready?”

  “Hey, Dad,” we all said in unison.

  “It’s a full house out there. How you feeling, son?” Smiling, he clapped a hand on Frank’s shoulder.

  “Great,” Frank said.

  Dad laughed. “Then get out there and get the girl.”

  “I plan on it.”

  Dad dropped his hand from Frank’s shoulder, and his expression turned serious. “It was nice what you did. For Claudia’s family.”

  “She really wanted them here. And they wanted to be here, especially after the proposal.” Frank smiled, probably remembering his trip to Colombia with Claudia that he’d planned with the help of Claudia’s mom and stepdad. It was where he’d proposed.

  “Couldn’t have been easy,” Dad said.

  Frank shook his head. “Oh, it wasn’t. Immigration and visas are a total pain in the ass. I don’t recommend trying it.”

  “Well, I’m glad it all worked out. You all look nice, by the way. Your mother and I are really proud. Of all three of you.” His gaze roamed each of our faces. “You’ve done well for yourselves, both in life and love.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” we chimed back.

  I had to stop the emotion from welling up and coming out. Frank would never forgive me if I cried on his wedding day.

  “One down, two to go,” Dad said, pointing at me and Nick as he headed toward the door.

  Frank sucked in a deep breath, and then gave us a huge grin. “Let’s do this.”

  Nick and I both smiled back and reached for our tuxedo jackets. Standing by Frank’s side while he married Claudia would be the easiest thing we’d do all day.

  We walked down the hallway and then through the open doors toward the altar. Cream-colored flowers and gold candles adorned the sanctuary, setting an elegant romantic vibe. It was stunning, to say the least.

  Yeah, I know. Dudes shouldn’t love this kind of shit, but I did.

  As we walked past my parents in the front row, who held my daughter and sat with my son, I gave Matson a quick wave. He grinned and waved back before looking down the aisle, most likely for his mother.

  Since we brothers were all up front at the altar, o
ur girls were walking down the aisle toward us alone. It was a little nontraditional, but Claudia had told us months ago that they didn’t even do bridesmaids in Colombia, so the fact that she had any at all wasn’t customary in her native country.

  Watching Frank’s face as he watched his bride walk down the aisle almost caused me to cry like the little girl he always accused me of being. But that was nothing compared to the way it felt to see Sofia standing there dressed in gold. That sight alone almost brought me to my knees. I couldn’t help but imagine the two of us getting married, and I knew she felt it too.

  She kept catching me watching her during the vows, and when the promises of forever were made, my eyes never left my woman’s. Not even when her cheeks turned pink. Not even when Nick elbowed me in the ribs. I swore to myself that would be us someday soon.

  As Frank and Claudia were pronounced Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, everyone in the church rose to their feet and cheered. I’d never seen my brother look so happy in my entire life. He leaned over to kiss Claudia one more time, and then they started their walk back down the aisle hand in hand, both wearing giant smiles.

  The rest of us in the wedding party grinned at each other, eager to get the party started. Weddings were romantic as hell, but the reception was always the best part.

  Frank and Claudia disappeared somewhere with the photographer. The rest of us in the wedding party filed into one of the rooms in the back, waiting for our cue to head out to the cars that waited to drive us to the reception.

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off you,” I whispered into Sofia’s ear as I brushed a strand of her hair off her shoulder.

  She gave me a knowing grin. “I noticed.”

  “You liked it.”

  She shook her head. “I loved it.”

  “That’s going to be us real soon.” Pressing a kiss to her cheek, I lingered for a moment and breathed her in.

  “Soon, huh?” She leaned back and gave me a look.

  “You’ll see,” I promised.

  “Stop whispering,” Nick said as he pulled a flask from his jacket pocket and handed it to me.