by Rhys Ford
“He’s lying to you. They’ve been fed.” Deacon poured the macaroni mixture into a glass casserole dish. “Why don’t you go change into slacker clothes, and I’ll join you in the living room. Fire’s going. We can chill out for a bit, and I’ll catch you up on the kid.”
“Another deal,” he replied as he picked up the large orange cat as it tried to climb up his calf. Lang sniffed the cat’s face and wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, see, I can smell tuna on your breath, sir. You do not get more food. Yeah, let me change and I’ll be right down. I’ll take the ginger here with me. Maybe I can find the ghost one somewhere.”
“He’s in front of the fire. Cat’s quiet but not stupid.” Deacon chuckled at Fafhrd’s grumbling meow when Lang passed by. Then he said, “Yeah, love you too, asshole cat. Try to go for half an hour without biting someone, and we’ll talk about some cat treats.”
STRETCHED OUT on one of the comfortable couches in front of the fireplace, Deacon took a sip from his cider and rubbed at Gray’s belly when the cat rolled over and wedged himself against Deacon’s leg. At some point Gray had decided Deacon was going to be his human, and he sought him out whenever he was home. With Fafhrd’s attention on Lang and Zig, the smaller smoky-blue cat was a quiet companion while Deacon read or watched television.
He also had horrible gas sometimes, and Deacon eyed him warily when he snuggled down.
“Don’t make me regret giving you guys that scrambled egg,” he scolded Gray. The cat closed his eyes and kneaded at the air. “It’s too cold out to open the window if you firebomb us.”
“If you gave them an egg, then you deserve whatever you get from that end of the cat,” Lang warned as he walked into the room cradling his behemoth of an orange cat. “How long until the mac and cheese is done? Enough time to do nothing?”
“More than enough time. About half an hour. I’m trying Yvonne’s trick of not cooking the noodles all the way so they soak up some of the liquid from the cheese. She swears by it.” Deacon lifted his right arm so Lang could sit next to him. “And she said to cook it slower. Put the parmesan and cheddar on the last five minutes.”
He’d come a long way since the days of cinder block apartments and crashing on his mother’s boyfriends’ couches, but Deacon appreciated every bit of the life he’d stumbled into. They were living in a massive house that Lang inherited from his grandmother. It was furnished more for comfort than for show, but still, the dizzying number of rooms was hard to get used to. There was enough garage space for his battered truck and his motorcycles to fit in next to Lang’s practical SUV, and sitting on something that hadn’t been scavenged from a garage sale or thrift store took a lot of getting used to. Lang’s money took a lot of getting used to, and he’d been reluctant to enter into a relationship with the beautiful doe-eyed bookstore owner, who also held the title to a good chunk of the town they lived in.
Now he couldn’t imagine not coming home to the sweet quiet man who was settling in next to him.
“God, this is good.” Lang licked cider foam from his lips. “And it’s crazy out there. Kinda worried the kid’s out in it.”
“It crossed my mind to keep her in, but I think she needed the break.” Deacon stretched over to put his bottle down on a coaster. “Teacher today asked her—okay, the whole class—to do a presentation on the first Christmas they remember and to share some family traditions.”
“Wow. It gets kind of fuzzy, but I think I’d have to say getting our stockings down from this fireplace and digging through them. We always had Christmas here with Grandma. She went all out. Trees in every room.” Lang’s expression softened, and his gaze grew wistful. “It’s why I like having more than one tree. It feels like I’m carrying on that tradition.”
“Yeah well, the only tradition the Reid family carries on is shoplifting something from a store so they have a present.” Deacon kissed Lang’s growing frown. “My mom wasn’t one for holidays, and Deanna wasn’t much better. First holiday I had that was halfway decent was in juvie. First one Zig had was here with us. Foster family she was with did a couple of things, but that’s not the same. It’s not—”
“Not her family,” Lang whispered. Fafhrd joined them on the couch and jumped onto Lang’s lap, and he cradled the cat and stroked his massive head. “I don’t know what to say or what to do. Heck, Deacon, I want to give you the Christmases I had. I can’t fully understand what you both went through. I can empathize, but that doesn’t help Zig.”
“Babe, I’m glad you don’t,” Deacon replied. “Shit. There’s things we don’t need to share. Problem is, I don’t know how to fix this. She’s upset because she’s ashamed of where we came from, and she doesn’t want me to talk to the teacher about it. I’m kind of stuck.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. How about if I take her with me to the bookstore and see if I can’t figure something out,” Lang offered. “She expects you to fix things, but with me, she figures I’m her partner in crime in getting stuff past you. Maybe we can hammer something out together that’ll work.”
“I hope so.” Deacon sighed, and Gray snagged his hand and pulled it down to his furry belly. “Because, I can tell you this, Sir Didy, I’m lost right now. I mean, I get where her head’s at. I’ve been there. Shit, there’s days I’m still there when I come downstairs and feel like this place is too good for me… you’re too good for me. And before you say anything, just… listen. I’m not saying that I don’t feel like I belong here with you. It’s just it’s hard to get past that shit, but I’ve been living in that headspace a hell of a lot longer than she has. Maybe… I don’t know, maybe we can give her something to stand on. Our own traditions—ones that don’t include a five-finger discount.”
“Give me a day and let’s see what I can do.” Lang leaned over and rested his head on Deacon’s shoulder, much to the disgust of a now-squished Fafhrd. “And if I’m not mistaken, that’s the oven dinging away. Time for some fish sticks, because you know, it is Friday.”
Two
“YOU SHOULD just say it,” Zig called out from her perch on the couch as Fafhrd oozed over her lap and onto the throw pillows tucked around her. “I can hear you thinking, Dad.”
Lang put down the book he’d been flipping through by the cash register and stared at his daughter for a moment.
She stared back and lifted her eyebrows exactly like Deacon did when he was pointing out something obvious.
They’d come into the bookshop to cover the early shift, but the thunderstorms promised to keep all but the most stalwart of buyers from venturing out onto the waterlogged roads of Half Moon Bay. As usual Fafhrd came along for the ride, preferring to spend his days in front of the roaring fireplace at Between the Lines. Gray was the occasional visitor. Sometimes he jumped into the travel crate, but most times he turned up his nose at the invite and chose instead to while away his time at home, alone and free to sleep wherever he wanted.
Today was no exception. Lang got a hairy eyeball from Gray when he rolled out the steamer-styled travel case and a plaintive meow from Fafhrd to hurry up and open the damned thing so he could go to town. Gregarious and demanding, Fafhrd was a fixture in the store as much as the scatter of seating areas that were meant to draw readers in and entice them to stay a while. Except for the glut of cat treats and food people brought for the two felines that Lang usually ended up donating to the local shelter, it was a pretty good deal.
Fafhrd was Zig’s first friend in town, a furry peach welcoming committee who insisted on chin scritches and belly rubs as often as he could get them. Lang didn’t mind sharing the cat with Zig, but it smarted sometimes that Gray had abandoned him for Deacon, especially when the feline insisted the food Lang put down wasn’t good enough until Deacon picked up the bowl and then set it back down again.
Because somehow Deacon putting the bowl down made the food that much better.
Martha came through the front door and saved Lang from having to answer his daughter. Stamping her boots off outside the shop’s front door, hi
s shop manager shook off as much of the rain as she could under the overhang that covered the broad wooden walk around the building. Her umbrella made a thunk in the metal can next to the door, and she finally looked up, her fingers dug into her cropped-short magenta hair.
She gave him a goofy grin and said, “Just dyed it. Making sure it’s not wet or I’m going to have pink running down my face.”
“Your hair looks cool,” Zig piped up, her ponytail bobbing in time to her welcoming nod.
“Yours does too.” Martha patted the back of Zig’s head. “Like the shaved bits. I’m too chicken to do that. Suppose I’ve got an eye back there or something.”
“Wouldn’t you have noticed by now?” Zig made a face. “I mean, it would be hard to see, right? Like you see forward with your two eyes. If you had one back there, where would that show up? Like in your vision? Sorta like one of the car cameras?”
“Don’t look at me.” Lang held up his hands in retreat when Martha glanced his way. “You started that rabbit hole. I refuse to go down it.”
“Dad wants to talk about something, but he hasn’t. Probably waiting for you to come in so we can go take a walk.” Zig returned to scratching Fafhrd’s ears. “Maybe the ice cream shop is open.”
“It’s not,” Martha offered up. “Mostly everything down here is closed except for us and Reid’s. Can’t tell about Yvonne’s, but I didn’t see her car. Did we get anyone in to shop this morning?”
“Not a one,” he admitted. “But I shelved all of the go-backs and misfits.”
“I did nonfiction.” Zig leaned her head back and kicked her legs out. “We need more dinosaur books. There’s only stuff in the kids’ section.”
“Zig is of the opinion we need more science in general,” Lang said as he gestured to the back of the shop. “And she’d like to see it moved closer to the front so people don’t have to walk as far. I think she seriously overestimates the number of budding scientists we have in this town.”
“Dinosaurs are an evolving science. You could bring in something, and a month later, someone finds something and makes the book obsolete.” Martha shed her hoodie and crossed over to the old-fashioned hotel reception pieces Lang had set up as the customer service counter. She hung up the wet garment on the store’s coat rack and said, “Remember the whole ‘brontosaurus isn’t a brontosaurus then is a brontosaurus again’ thing?”
“No!” Zig scowled as she turned around to sit on her knees so she could drape herself over the back of the couch. The cat gave a mild grumble to express his contempt at being jostled. “How can you undo a brontosaurus?”
“They undid Pluto,” Lang pointed out. “Something I disagree with wholeheartedly. It will always be a planet to me.”
“You’ll have to go look up why they decided the whole brontosaurus thing.” Martha gave Lang a wink. “The thing about science stuff is you can’t just look at the new stuff. You’ve got to know what came before it so you know what happened. History’s as important as discovery.”
“Huh.” Zig cocked her head. “So, no ice cream?”
“No, but I grabbed some cupcakes from the Pizza Shack on the way over,” Martha replied as she drew out one of the Shack’s violent-neon-green boxes from her tote. “Your dad told me what to grab. I’ve got a German Chocolate Cake for you, a Lemon Drizzle Bang for Lang, and for me, a Super Caramel Chili Surprise.”
“Let’s do up some hot chocolate, stuff our faces with cake-things, and we can talk while I finish up time cards,” Lang offered. “And when I’m done, we can see what Deke’s up to. Maybe he can cut out early and we can grab burritos for lunch.”
Zig narrowed her wide green eyes suspiciously. “It’s never good when you give me something sweet before food.”
“Trust me, it’s fine,” he argued back. “You grab the cat. I’ll grab the pastries and make the cocoa.”
“And mini marshmallows. Lots of them.” Zig patted Fafhrd and then slid off the couch. “The last time you only gave me five.”
“That’s all we had, brat,” Lang sniffed at her. “I didn’t have any in my cocoa.”
“Well, that’s stupid. Family’s supposed to share.” She returned his sniff with a dramatic toss of her head. “This time, equal number of marshmallows.”
“Even Martha?” he teased.
“Well, yeah.” She scooped up the cat and struggled to get him cradled in her arms. “She brought the cupcakes.”
ZIG METICULOUSLY licked the frosting off her dark chocolate cupcake, her eyes fixed on Lang’s face. With the marshmallows evenly distributed, they settled down into a comfortable silence. She ate and read a book on the love seat beneath the high, long window of the office as Lang went through the piles on his desk. Working through the shop’s paperwork was easy, simply double-checking the timecards and signing off on invoices. He opted for tea to go with his lemon cupcake but eagerly took some of the marshmallows to eat.
His daughter waited until he tidied up his desk and reached for the teapot to refill his cup. Then she crossed her legs and said, “Dad told you about the Christmas thing, didn’t he? He wasn’t supposed to.”
“Not how the dad thing works, Zig.” Lang left a bit of room in his cup for a couple of sugar cubes and dropped them in carefully to avoid a splash. “Anything that affects you, we’re going to talk about it. All I know is what Deke told me, which is kind of secondhand, so maybe you want to tell me about it yourself.”
Zig studied him as she moved over to sit on the couch next to him. Adjusting the cat to make room, she kept her eyes down and said, “Nope.”
“Kiddo, I can’t help you out if you don’t talk to me,” Lang murmured as he set his tea down on the file cabinet next to the couch. “I’m not saying I’m going to jump in and fix things, because I can’t. But maybe we can work something out so you feel better.”
“Dad always thinks he can fix things.” Her lower lip jutted out, and a scowl so much like Deacon’s brought her brows together over her too-sharp eyes. “You can’t fix this. You can’t go back and fix things. You can’t fix Mom. You can’t do anything about it.”
“No, but we can do something about it going forward,” he proposed. “One of the best things your dad taught me is, even if I’m afraid, I should push on anyway. Because I’m either going to be moving and afraid or frozen in place. Better to be moving, right?”
Her scowl deepened. “I don’t get it.”
“Look, we can’t change the Christmases you had before Deacon adopted you, but we can sure as hell make our own traditions.” Lang picked up one of the marshmallows and held it out to her. “These are a tradition… kind of. Us sitting here and coming to the store is another tradition, another memory. That’s what Christmas—any holiday—is about. Just like Fridays. It wouldn’t be a Friday without fish and mac and cheese, right?”
“Yeah,” she grudgingly acknowledged. “But the assignment—”
“Fuck the assignment.” Lang smothered a grin at Zig’s astonished gasp at his swearing. “Don’t look at me like that. I swear. And there’s no reason you can’t do an assignment on establishing new traditions. Just say you didn’t really have any until you came to Half Moon Bay and talk about all the ones you’ve found now.”
“Like what?” She went back to nibbling on the top of her cupcake, but Lang could almost hear the gears in her busy brain churning away. “How long do you have to do something before it’s a tradition?”
“You sometimes decide it’s a tradition, or it just kind of becomes what a family does. Who decided Fridays were for fish sticks?”
“I dunno.” Zig kicked her heels against the base of the couch. “It just kind of happened.”
“That’s usually how it goes. My grandma liked to have Christmas trees all over the house, so I continue that tradition. You’ve had a small one in your room every holiday you’ve been with us, yes?” Lang pointed out. “I think you can do your presentation on your new traditions, and maybe we can explore a few we might want to make traditions.”
“Like what?” She was still thinking, pondering his words.
“I don’t know, but I’ve got a whole bookstore out there where we can look some of that stuff up, and well, there’s always libraries and the internet. We could even look at cultural things. I’m part Chinese. And maybe not everyone celebrates Christmas, but everyone’s got holiday traditions. We can maybe find something on your side of the family. Reid’s Scottish, I think. We can probably find something on your other dad’s side of the family.”
“He was a mutt like me.” Zig stared him down. “And his last name was Ziegfried.”
“We could—”
“No. I don’t want to look at his stuff. I only have two dads, and it’s you guys.” She shook her head. “I don’t mind looking like him. It’s not because I’m ashamed of me but not… anything from my other dad.”
“Babe, it isn’t just your dad. You’ve got roots in other cultures. Ones you should learn about too. Your grandma was from the South. Deacon said the family was from somewhere in Georgia originally, and then they moved to New Orleans. We can look up stuff from there. Maybe see if your great-aunt Markie can suggest something,” he countered. “Lots of things they do in that area that I don’t know about. The thing is, we can explore all of it and find stuff we want to do. And that’s what you can do your presentation on.”
“Even talk about the stuff I don’t like?” She didn’t sound convinced yet, but Lang knew he was slowly winning her over.
“Probably a good idea. But you just can’t say you didn’t like it. You’ve got to say why,” he replied. “And in the meantime, one of the dads is probably going to talk to your teacher, because sweetie, whether you like it or not, there are times when you’re going to have a different experience, and she’s got to understand that. It’s not fair to Mrs. Bryant or you to have expectations about stuff you’re not familiar with. Kind of like me and fish sticks. I thought they’d suck.”
