Page 42 of Irish Mafia Boss's Triplet Baby
“What is it now then?”
“Three-way?” Margot prompts. She’s wrestling with the wine bottle, a wine key rummaged out of Lexie’s purse. “He’s pretty built, I bet he’d be a fine, easy little ride. Screamer, too, wanna bet?”
Lexie laughs and I snort. We do this once a week now, wine or whiskey in the backyard at sunset, a loose invite tossed like a net. Sometimes the guys show up, Pat and Nick and Nick’s brother Clancy, and we catch up and talk about the old days and the new and they bring around their girlfriends to gossip and roll joints under the sun-streaked sky. Marnie comes too, and she and the girls swap horror stories about high school parties and ex-boyfriends and customers at work. Sometimes we reminisce, remember Dad and Milo and nights drunk in the park under the stars.
Sometimes, though, it’s just the three of us; me, Lexie, and Margot, and it feels like nothing has really changed. They’re together more often than they’re not, those years of absence bound up and tucked away, forgotten and forgiven. We’ve lost so many people, it seems, but after everything, we’re still family. And that means everything.
We don’t bother with glasses tonight, passing the wine back and forth and taking long laughing swigs. It’s sweet and light, tastes of summer and stars, and for a minute, everything fades but the three of us, gathered around the life we’ve built like a fire on a cold night. The girls are at home with Nancy, close enough I feel like I could touch them, hear their high tittering laughter—those girls,mygirls—and Dad and Milo’s ghosts are here too, somehow, traces of them everywhere, in Margot’s waving hands and dramatic storytelling, in Lexie’s warmth and the chime of her laughter, head thrown back and lavender-scented hair dancing across my face.
Family. It strikes me that that word was the real through line for my prison time—not revenge. It was Margot who kept me alive and sane through those lonely three years, and Lexie’s memory, and Dad, and Milo, and the promise of something waiting for me when I got out.
I pull Lexie close. This life we’ve got isn’t perfect. It’s dangerous, and unpredictable. But it’s ours, and for once, finally,at last, we’re calling the shots. I kiss her neck as she talks to Margot, the heat of her skin against my lips. Real. Present.Mine.
Town’s waiting out there beyond this house, beyond the wild stretch out there and the leafy tossing trees, waiting for someone to save it. And that’s ours, that destiny. With these people gathered around me, I feel more than capable. I feel inevitable.
“Hey, look,” Margot says, pointing with the wine bottle.
The far sky is pitching darker, darker, but for a faint halo of pale blue where the sun has left its trace. Between the stark trees a lone shadow stalks, mirage-like, maybe-there-maybe-not, maybe just the wine sparkling at the edges of reality.
What did you miss most?Margot had asked me that here, not so long ago.You, I’d said.Dad. Fresh air.
But it occurs to me now that I was also missing something I’d never had: this. Family. Future. Past. All together in one perfect-imperfect place.
Lexie looks down at me, those stunning eyes glittering and lit and inscrutable.Love you, she mouths, and in the distance, a wolf howls at the stars.
THE END