by Julia Kent
My concept of a big, happy family is one created from wistful memories, snippets of movies, and the occasional invitation to someone’s parents’ private island for Thanksgiving.
“Oh!” Shannon perks up as I make a right turn into the gravel-coated parking lot for the state park. She smiles. Something in me loosens.
You might think I’m out of my mind for bringing an anaphylactic bee sting patient to a park in Massachusetts in August, and you’d be right, except that Shannon—unlike my vampire brother CEO—has decided that she will not restrict her life in any way because of her allergy. She goes outside, she hikes, she all-but beekeeps a set of apiaries in her zest to live a “normal” life.
Frankly, she missed the boat on a “normal” life with a mother like hers and falling in love with a billionaire’s son, but I like to humor her.
We climb out of my SUV and before we can shut the doors a bee floats past my face, lazy and stupid.
“God damn it,” I bark, pointing at the .025 ounces of death with wings.
Shannon shrugs.
I open my door. “Get in. We’ll go somewhere else.” What the hell was I thinking? Adrenaline streaks through me like I’ve been injected with it.
“See?” She jangles her purse and reaches in, pulling out two EpiPens. “I have two. One for me, and one for your penis.”
I should be in a conference room right now. Million dollar contracts should be presented before me, arrayed like a fan, with entire divisions of companies hanging in the balance, waiting for my decision. That kind of power is what I handle best. Finding weakness, shoring up strength, making money, making more money—that’s what Declan McCormick does. It’s in my blood. It’s who I am. Power, influence, and authority are my trifecta.
Out here, in nature, where a single insect could steal the most precious being in my life away from me, though, none of that matters.
Not one shred of power can stop Shannon from dying because of a single random god damn drop of poison on a bee’s ass.
And I can’t do anything about that. The fucking bee wins.
Sure, she has those EpiPens in her hand, and we can race to a hospital again. I could cloister her and make her stay inside eight months out of the year, living in constant fear like my brother.
Or I could walk away. Break it off. I have every right. This hits too close. My mother died and Shannon has the same, exact vulnerability and it’s killing me that no matter how many millions I have in the bank, no matter how many businesses rely on my decisions for sustenance, no matter how many people I control, I have to place my heart in Shannon’s hands and trust that everything will be fine. My life with her stretches out into a captivating eternity, and if she doesn’t walk the entire journey with me because of a bee appendage no bigger than a splinter, I—
I don’t know.
I have no other option.
She walks around the SUV, takes the keys out of my open hand, beeps the locks and starts walking down the trail. She’s a hundred feet or so ahead of me before I choose to take a step toward her, willing myself to stop scanning the air for bees like a Special Ops dude on a mission.
“My penis,” I call out to her, “doesn’t swell up when it gets bitten.”
Just then, two hikers come out from around an enormous oak tree. I pretend not to notice them as I catch up to Shannon. They’re snickering. That’s okay. I’m accustomed to public ridicule being par for the course when it comes to being with Shannon. Remember #HotSanta?
“Your penis,” Shannon says under her breath as we continue the walk up the hill toward the meadow where we first began to make love and she almost died. Those two phrases really shouldn’t be in the same sentence. Ever.
“My penis what?” It responds to sound and is listening intently. She leaves those two words hanging.
She pauses and reaches into her back pocket, pulling out her phone. It’s buzzing. I groan.
She reads the screen. “Carol. Can I come and watch her kids for an hour while she does a quick mystery shop?”
I groan louder.
“Or,” Shannon asks pointedly, “she says I could do the shop for her instead.” Shannon’s eyelashes flutter and she looks at me with mischief. “It’s a dropped sex toy shop. The mystery shopper who was supposed to do it was a no show. Carol has no choice. In fact,” she adds, trying to butter me up with a coquettish look, “I was doing nine dropped mystery shops the morning I met you.”
I narrow my eyes and try to stare her down.
She doesn’t budge.
Damn. That used to work.
“You and Greg promised me you’d stop doing shops,” I say, knowing I’m full of it, because any day now Greg’s going to beg her to do the fake restaurant shop for me.
“You’re right,” she says, tapping away on the screen.
“What are you typing?” I can see the edge of the field where we can walk to privacy. Shannon grabbed the backpack with our blanket in it as she got out of the SUV, and I have a condom in my wallet....
“I just let her know we’re on our way to pick up Tyler and Jeffrey to take them out for ice cream while Carol does the mystery shop.”
I look at the field.
I look at Shannon.
The Field of Dreams in one direction.
The Children of the Corn in the other.
My shoulders slump and I start walking back to the SUV. “Fine,” I say as she lifts an imaginary chain attached to a body part and leads me off to babysit.
CHAPTER SIX
“When are you going to be my uncle?” Jeffrey demands as we walk through the front door to Carol’s apartment.
I look at him. He can’t stop grinning and giggling. Wait a minute. Something’s off.
“Marie!” I say in Resting Asshole Baritone. “I know you’re here somewhere! How much did you pay him to ask me that?”
Shannon pulls a one dollar bill out of her pocket and stage whispers as she hands it to him. “Nice try.”
“Grandma paid me five buckth. You’re cheap, Thannon.” She gives him a huge hug in spite of the insult. I give him a high five not for the uncle comment, but because I can admire a budding entrepreneur. Jeffrey may be my investment banker someday if he keeps this up.
And my nephew, too.
“You need a hug,” Tyler announces from the hallway, the corners of his mouth turned down in sadness.
I bend down and open my arms.
He screeches, “I will not! I will not!” Carol comes rushing to my rescue as Tyler offers himself to Shannon for an embrace.
“Let me guess,” I say slowly, puzzling through the intricacies of Tyler’s language disorder. “He was really saying ‘I need a hug’ and he was saying it to Shannon.’”
“Good! You’re becoming increasingly fluent in Tylerish!” Carol chirps. She looks so much like a young Marie that I worry about Dad meeting her one day.
Which would be, most likely, at our wedding rehearsal dinner.
Wedding.
Proposal.
“He’s actually fluent in Russian. Remember?” Shannon winks at me.
“Chuckles smells like a pickled egg shoved inside a rotting gerbil,” I say in Russian.
Carol freezes and slowly looks at Shannon. Chuckles walks out of the room in a huff. He loves me. I know he’ll forgive me, but I’ll check my shoes before I slip them on when I’m here.
“You get the hot billionaire and he speaks Russian? All I got was a tattoo’d musician Internet Marketer wannabe with an entitlement complex who left me in credit card debt hell.”
Shannon shrugs.
“He has two brothers!” Marie calls out from the back room. “Isn’t that perfect? You have two sisters, Shannon, and Declan has two brothers.”
“If you and my dad married, Shannon and I would be stepsiblings,” I say.
Marie turns pale as Jason walks into the room. Do these parents ever spend time in their own homes?
“What’s this about Marie marrying your father?” Jason asks, the
corner of his mouth twitching. At first, I think he’s trying not to smile, but then I see the clenched jaw. The tight fists. He’s angry.
“Declan was making a joke. It’s not funny,” Shannon says. I, on the contrary, think the look on Marie’s face is hilarious.
“Why are we babysitting when Marie and Jason are here to help out?”
“I have to go to work, and Marie’s scheduled for the mystery shop with Carol,” Jason explains. “Otherwise I’d invite you over to my place for a brew.” He’s wearing a paint-streaked t-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. At his house, he doesn’t even bother with the flip flops most of the time. Jason’s as casual as my father is formal. They’re a study in contrasts.
Marie looks at me with a pained expression in those bright blue eyes. “Declan? A word in private?”
My hands are in my pants pockets, fingers touching the phone I paid $700 to get out of that kid’s hands in the moment. I offered $300 but he countered with a grand. Negotiating with my naked front covered by a Strawberry Shortcake pillow from Shannon’s childhood left me in a woefully weak bargaining position.
“Private?” I say quietly to her. “Is there such a thing as privacy with you?”
The barb makes her flinch. Jason’s watching us carefully, and I see his shoulders tense. I’m treading on very unstable ground here, but I don’t give a shit.
Then again, I do. I should. With a pending proposal and a commitment to be a member of this family for the rest of my natural life, the part of me that defaults to sarcastic zingers might need to pull back. In the McCormick family, fluency in Sarcasmish is a requirement.
While Shannon’s family is full of one-liners and witty jokes, there’s no razor edge to the words. Feelings are easily hurt. People here actually have real emotional reactions to painful words.
There’s no wall like the one I was taught to build, brick by brick.
Sting by sting.
Marie nods toward a small bedroom to the right. It must be Carol’s, and I realize that in a year and a half of dating Shannon I’ve never been in this room before. The walls are covered with giant maps, beautiful, textured, nuanced maps of each continent. No country names—no words at all. Just a visual, the oceans made of a very pale seawater green, the continents a muted rainbow of varying shades of beige, green and brown.
I’m staring, and Marie’s watching me, a proud smile on her face. “Carol’s a mixed-media artist in her spare time.”
“She has two kids and a job and has spare time?” I ask. “According to Shannon, Carol doesn’t have time to shower most days.”
Marie laughs, but it’s a restrained sound. Marie isn’t a restrained person, so it’s telling. “Carol majored in art in college until her ex convinced her to drop out so she could make enough money to support them during his ‘career’ as an Internet Marketer.”
“Ah. Todd,” I say. It’s hard to keep the acid out of my voice. Jeffrey worshipped his father and begged Santa—me, in disguise—to bring his dad home for Christmas last year. Despite every call, text, and email outreach possible by Carol, no dice. The guy didn’t even bother to send a Christmas card to his own kids.
Loser.
“Carol was always my wild child,” Marie says with a loving sigh. “She’s had a hard life.”
Who hasn’t?
“What is this?” I ask, changing the subject, touching the odd pebbles that appear to be meticulously glued together to make the maps.
“Coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“Coffee beans,” Marie elaborates. “Carol buys green coffee beans in bulk. Roasts them different colors. Then she makes her art.”
Terry would have a field day with this. He’s the creative one in the family and while Dad hates it, he’s—
“I’m sorry about your ass,” Marie blurts out.
Here we go.
“My ass is fine. It’s my pride that’s hurt. More than that, though, it’s Shannon. That was one hell of an invasion, Marie, and I can’t have you doing that anymore.”
Marie hangs her head in the closest thing to shame she’s capable of feeling. Her hair doesn’t move with her at all. The woman must use the equivalent of a can of SuperGlue to keep it in place.
“I know. We just have a pretty free kind of family—”
“You have no boundaries. Shannon does.”
Marie’s face flashes with anger as she looks at me. “I’ve apologized for barging in on you having sex while a camera crew filmed me. I’ve tried to make amends. You’re a hard man, Declan.”
I smile without showing teeth. “I take that as a compliment.”
She shakes her head slowly. Sadly. “You need to learn how to forgive and move on.”
It dawns on me that her sadness isn’t about her rudeness in barging in on us, but is directed toward me. As if I’m the sad one. Being the object of her pity isn’t high on my list of goals.
“I don’t need to do anything, Marie. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
She pales. “You don’t...I don’t...” Her frown deepens and oh, no—are those tears?
I see where Shannon gets it.
“Declan,” she says with a tiny sob in her voice. “Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone.”
My perfectly reasonable, one hundred percent unassailable, totally understandable and perfectly justified righteous indignation is being threatened by the salt water in her eyes.
This is unfair.
“And in our family, when someone makes a mistake, they go to the person they hurt and they apologize. Sincerely and truly. And then, because we love each other, the person accepts. They forgive. They move on.”
Now there’s a fairy tale, right? Because who does that in real life?
She’s watching me carefully, without guile.
Oh, shit.
She’s serious. She really believes that this is how people work. Maybe in schlocky sitcoms. But I’ve been alive long enough to know that forgiveness is just a catch phrase that people with character disorders use against the weak.
At least, that’s what Dad always says.
“You want me to forgive you,” I say, clarifying.
“I won’t demand it, but it would be nice. You have a way of behaving that feels like the knife is being twisted a bit,” she answers.
“Maybe I’m not ready to forgive.” The words are out before I realize they’re all wrong. I’m conceding, aren’t I? Just mentioning the idea that I would forgive if I were ready shows a willingness to negotiate, and everyone knows the first rule of negotiations is never, ever to speak first.
(The second rule is not to do it naked after your mother-in-law’s barged in on you having sex).
She beams a smile of happiness that makes me feel like Tony Robbins is going to chew me out the next time I see him at a conference.
Marie just won.
Flinging her arms around me in an embrace I don’t reciprocate, she squeezes me twice, gives me a kiss on the cheek, and flees out the front door with a purse slung over her shoulder.
What the hell just happened?
How did I go from being aggrieved party to the one who was chided for not forgiving?
The look on my face must betray what’s going on inside, because Jason comes over to me and slings an arm around my shoulder.
“You’ve just been Marie’d.”
“What?”
“Marie’d. She got you. Welcome to the family.”
As that sinks in, I realize I haven’t even proposed yet and I’m being manipulated by people I’m not legally obligated to interact with.
The kids run into the kitchen past me and Jason.
“You want a cheese stick,” Tyler declares, opening the refrigerator door.
“We’re going out for ice cream, honey,” Shannon explains. “You want some?”
“Tyler wants ice cream!” Tyler says. Tyler’s like the Bob Dole of little kids, always talking about himself in third person. It’s amusing. Very gradually, he’s replacing his name with ‘I�
�, and as he begins to talk normally Carol’s thrilled. I think it’s pretty cool that he has a mind that works differently. Those are the people you really want to hang out with.
Tyler will develop something big some day, the future equivalent of the Internet, or the cell phone, or he’ll head Anonymous. I want to stay on Tyler’s good side.
“Say, ‘I want some ice cream, please,’” Carol says in a patient tone.
“I want some ice cream, please,” Tyler repeats perfectly. He’s nearly seven now, and while he’s still way behind kids his age, he’s really come a long way. Marie, Jason and Carol have acted as a unit, receiving training and support from speech therapists and teachers at Tyler’s school, and it shows. I admire that. The big, happy family really kicks in with the Jacobys when one of them needs help.
Maybe there’s something to this forgiveness bullshit.
Shannon offers a palm to Tyler. “High five!”
Tyler turns to me, ignoring her, and gives me a closed fist. “High zero!” he declares.
We fist bump.
That’s the closest he comes to saying When are you going to be my uncle?
Soon, kid. Soon.
I hope.
“Ice cream, huh?” I murmur in Shannon’s ear, giving her a kiss on the earlobe. “You’re my favorite flavor.”
She smiles and blushes, entwining her fingers in mine as we hold hands and herd the two excited boys outside for the walk down the street to their favorite ice cream stand. Carol’s already pulling out of the driveway with Marie. I can see Jason climbing in his car and he waves, a friendly smile plastered across his face.
We walk on the sidewalk, a couple with a stroller walking past us, going in the opposite direction. Shannon peeks in the stroller’s top and makes a sound of gushy surprise, a little “Oh!” that indicates her ovaries are ready to hijack my sperm and put them in a half-nelson, pinning them to her uterine wall.
First things first. I still need to propose. But watching Jeffrey and Tyler make their ambling way down the road, the four city blocks like their own personal obstacle course, makes me think about kids. We want them. Shannon’s made it clear that she needs to have her career in order before she’ll consider having any, but I think she’s already softening.