Page 65 of 3 Daddies to Go

I laugh.

“Is this a job interview?”

She cringes.

“Yeah, that’s what it sounded like, but not what I meant. You told me about your parents and your jobs. What else is there that I should know?”

I think for a second. We covered our families pretty well, but we didn’t go into detail about anything else.

“Well, we all grew up here in Georgia. We’ve known each other our entire lives. Herbie, too.”

“Really? I knew you’d been friends a long time, but I didn’t realize it had been that long. How did you all meet?”

Tag jumps in. “We lived on the same block. Our parents knew each other, too, so they pushed us together. Since we’re all only kids, it helped to have guys around, and we ended up like brothers. At school, the teachers thought we were actually related.”

“I can see that. You’re all very similar.”

“Yeah, always have been,” Tanner says. “We tried to switch places once.”

Kendall bursts out laughing.

“Wait, are you serious?”

We nod.

“It was in, what, second grade?” I ask the others. They confirm I’m right. “We’d forced our parents to give us the same haircut, all four of us. Tanner, Tag, and I already have the same blue eyes, so we looked alike anyway. Herbie’s eyes are brown, but back then, he had the same build as us. When we sprouted up, he kind of stayed the same.”

We continue walking, barely paying attention to the sculpture. Kendall is far too interested in this story to point them out.

“We weren’t the brightest kids back then, so we didn’t even wait for a substitute teacher. We came in Monday morning, dressed in our school uniforms, and we sat at each other’s seats. I was Herbie, he was Tanner, Tanner was Tag, and Tag was me.”

She wipes away tears, she’s laughing so hard.

“Anyway, the teacher came in and saw us sitting at the wrong desks. She rolled her eyes and told us to get back where we belonged, or she’d call our parents.”

“She was so mad,” Tag says, cracking up. “But in that defeated sort of way. We really put her through hell. What was her name again?”

“Mrs. Breen,” I say. “We tried to play it off like we didn’t know what she was talking about, acting like we hadn’t actually switched. She wasn’t buying it, and neither was the rest of the class. After like ten minutes, we just gave up and went back to our seats.”

“That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” Kendall says, her body bent over with laughter. “You guys thought you’d get away with it!”

“We had no doubt that we would pull it off. I told you, we weren’t smart.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

I shake my head.

“She didn’t even call our parents. I really think we’d exhausted her by then. This was near the end of the school year. She didn’t want to report us and risk having us again the next year.”

“You guys were deviants.”

“We were. Did you ever do anything crazy in elementary school?”

“Nothing remotely close to trying to switch places with my non-identical friends, that’s for sure.”

We walk a bit further, and the laughter dies down. Kendall keeps asking us different questions about growing up, and when we’ve exhausted those, we start listing our favorite things. She learns our favorite colors, foods, sports, and a hundred other things. She always answers the questions, too.

After the walk through the park, Kendall takes us to an outdoor movie. After that, we walk back to the hotel, and she leaves us in the lobby.