Page 139 of The Havenport Collection

Callum

I heard another crash as I tried to clean up the spilled goldfish crackers off the floor. Then a scream. Was that a happy scream? Or a hurt one? How did you tell the difference? Kids just screamed all the damn time.

I picked my head up to see Henry whiz by, holding a video game controller with Sam in hot pursuit, shirtless. What happened to his shirt?

Henry doubled back, grabbing a paper bag off the counter and taking off with it.

“Henry,” I shouted. “Bring the candy back. I brought that for after dinner.”

Yes, I brought candy to bribe the kids with, what could I say? I liked their mom and was willing to pull out all the stops to make sure she had a fun night out.

Henry and Sam were good kids, but I was learning the hard way that they were not easy to keep up with.

Violet needed to buy a formal dress for the wedding this weekend.

I felt bad about that, since I knew money was tight and very few people owned evening gowns, especially single moms who run farms. But she insisted that she wanted to, that it would be fun.

Since Havenport didn’t have a ton of shops, her friends had suggested a night out in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which was a larger city about thirty minutes north of town.

They were going dress shopping and then out for dinner and drinks.

I knew Violet rarely went out and how much she enjoyed the new friends she had made, so I volunteered to babysit.

Her mom was usually busy with book club events at the farm store on Thursdays, so I knew she needed the help.

The way she looked at me when I volunteered, it was pure lust. My pulse quickened, and my pants got a bit tighter.

I had spent years obsessing about my abs and my watch collection—who knew that all this time a little free childcare was the sexiest thing of all?

What would she do once she learned how good I was at laundry?

I was really good at it, if I did say so myself.

My mind began to wander. The farmhouse had a laundry room—I wonder if it had a lock on the door…

My sexy daydreams were interrupted by more screams and what sounded like sobs. I bounded up the stairs to the second floor to find Sam crying and Henry screaming for help.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong? Did you fall? Are you hurt?” I scanned both boys for visible injuries.

Sam shook his head between sobs. “It’s his nose,” Henry cried.

I looked at his nose, and it wasn’t bleeding.

And then I looked down. The candy I had brought was torn open and all over the floor of their room. Henry’s face was caked in chocolate, and he had a guilty look on his face.

“What happened?”

“Sam stuck an M&M up his nose,” Henry explained, shaking.

“What?”

Sam shot a dirty look at his brother. “Henry dared me to.”

“Let me look.” I tilted Sam’s head back and used the flashlight on my phone to look up his nose. I didn’t see anything. I flipped on the overhead lights and laid him back on his bed. Sure enough, I saw a massive yellow thing up his nostril.

“Get it out,” he sobbed, his small body shaking with fear.

It was really up there. I started to panic. What should I do? Call 911? No, that is insane . It’s an M&M .

But it was way up his nose. His nostrils were so small I couldn’t stick my finger up there, and it would probably make it much worse. I pushed on it from the outside, seeing if I could push it down and out. This was made difficult by Sam’s cries and Henry’s screams.

Think, think, think. How do you get an M&M out of a kid’s nose?

I wanted to panic and then call my mom. But I was a grown-ass man. I had faced all kinds of challenges in my academic, athletic, and professional careers, and I was not going to let some chocolate take me down.

Chocolate, hm…

“Okay, boys. Everyone calm down.” I picked Sam up and headed to the bathroom. “I have a plan. “Henry, grab some towels.”

I set Sam on the ledge of the tub. “Sam. We’ve got to melt the chocolate. It will come out, I promise. I’m just going to lean your face into the water, and it will melt. Okay?”

Henry came over with a stack of fluffy white towels, and we carefully put Sam’s nose under the steamy water. Within a few seconds, chocolate began to leak out.

“Great job, Sam. We’ve almost got it.”

“You have chocolate boogers!” Henry squealed, and Sam started to laugh hysterically. I had to contain my laughter—even in an emergency situation they couldn’t resist a good booger joke.

Eventually, we were able to melt the chocolate fully. We had a good laugh while sitting in the bathroom, all of our clothes totally soaked. Henry went and got the rest of the candy, and we sat for a while, laughing about chocolate boogers and stress eating sugar.

Was this what parenthood was like? Blinding terror followed immediately by giggles and junk food?

I sent the boys to their room to change into fresh clothes while I cleaned up the wreckage of the bathroom. I got all the wet towels and clothes into the laundry and cleaned things up as best I could. I didn’t want Violet to come home and see some kind of candy murder scene in her bathroom.

By the time I made it downstairs, exhausted by congratulating myself on my problem solving, I was met with another disaster. Fucking Mr. Pickles.

“Boys,” I hollered. They came to the top of the stairs. “How did Mr. Pickles get out?”

They looked at each other and ran down the stairs.

We approached the living room, trying to figure out how to get him out of the main house and back into the mudroom where he was currently living in a dog crate.

I was met with the evidence that he had been running wild for the last hour while I had been dealing with the M&M catastrophe.

In addition to shitting all over the living room, Mr. Pickles had clearly helped himself to the throw pillows, which had been pecked half to death.

It also appeared that he had danced on the coffee table, leaving some significant scratches.

“Boys,”—I rolled my neck, knowing that I would shortly be wrestling a chicken—“we need to grab him and get him back in his crate.”

“He’s really mean when you try and grab him,” Sam said. I rolled my neck again. What were all the workouts and training for if I couldn’t catch an injured rooster?

“I’ll grab him. You guys help me corner him.”

They nodded sagely.

“Grandma will be so mad if she sees this mess,” Henry said. “We’ll be in big trouble.” His lower lip began to tremble. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“We’ve got this, little man. We are going to get him back in his crate and clean everything up. Okay? We just need to work as a team.”

I should have known that two five-year-old boys would have no concept of how to capture a pissed off twenty-pound rooster.

Lots of running and falling ensued. We finally got him after Henry got a towel from the laundry room.

I threw it over the rooster, which confused him, and then I was able to pick him up without too many injuries.

My shirt was destroyed, and I had a few scratches on my forearms, but thankfully that was the extent of the damage.

I had never considered just how dangerous an angry rooster could be.

I collapsed on the couch and checked my watch. Yup. It was only six thirty p.m.

After a solid hour of cleaning, shampooing the rooster poop out of the carpet, and disposing of the murdered throw pillows, I was finally able to get the boys to sit down for dinner. The boys voted burgers over pizza, so after a quick order on my delivery app, we were good to go.

I sat down and took a much-deserved bite of my double bacon cheeseburger. I couldn’t remember the last time I had consumed one, and after the night I’d had, it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

“This is so good!” Sam exclaimed, mouth full.

Henry nodded. “I can’t believe you can put bacon on top of a burger.”

“And onion rings!” Sam added.

I smiled at the boys. I didn’t remember much from when I was their age, but I do remember my brothers and I putting away burgers for sport. My mother always complained we ate everything in sight, and it was not an exaggeration.

I sat back, full, tired, and content. Henry and Sam were a handful, but a lot of fun. It had been fun to hang out with them and experience some of the chaos up close.

I was just starting to relax when they went for the jugular.

“Are you going to marry our mom?” Henry asked, pushing up his glasses.

I almost choked on my French fry. I coughed to buy myself some time to respond while trying too forcefully remove the potato from my larynx.

I took a sip of water and tried to calm my racing heart.

“I like your mom a lot.” I was trying to be as diplomatic as possible. I had no idea how to broach this subject with five-year-olds, and their tiny stares of disapproval were sending me into a tailspin.

Sam narrowed his eyes, clearly not pleased with my response. “Mom is the best,” he said, never breaking eye contact. “She works super hard and takes care of everyone.”

I nodded, not sure where this was going.

“And we want her to be happy,” Sam said. “Henry and I are super happy here. We love the farm and our school and soccer.”

“Yup,” added Henry proudly. “Grandma lives here, and our cousins are right over there.” He pointed in the direction of Rose and Yael’s house. “It’s so fun. But Mom is so tired all the time.”

I sat back and listened to them. Judging by the looks they were exchanging, they had clearly planned this. I thought hanging out with the boys would be all snacks and video games, not getting interrogated by kindergartners.

“So,” Sam said, looking at Henry for reassurance, “we think you should marry our mom. She likes you and is always smiling when you’re here.

And our dad was not nice to her, and you are.

” I had to keep my eyes from bulging out of my head.

It’s not like I hadn’t thought about it.

I had, more than I probably should have, but this was neither the time nor the place to admit that out loud.