by Amy Lane
Quinlan swallowed once, twice, a third time, and Dustin put two fingers under his chin.
“You ready, baby?”
Quinlan snuck a look in through the glass doors from the hallway, and Petey waved at him excitedly, wearing his best suit—which was really Conroy’s best suit from Taylor and Brandon’s wedding and getting a little short at the ankles.
Quinlan waved back and winked, and Petey grinned, turning to Tay to point and tell her Quinlan and Dusty had arrived.
What was he going to do? Act like he didn’t know them? He’d changed those kids’ diapers!
“Yeah,” he said, looking up at Dusty and nodding. “I’m ready.”
“That’s my boy.” Dustin kissed him, just hard enough to give him strength, and then opened the door so they could step through.
“Quinlan!” Grandma Stacy said, sneaking around the other bodies in the room so she could greet him first. “Come here—have you seen Elena’s baby yet?”
Nica’s little sister had danced in the San Francisco Ballet for over fifteen years before she’d married and had her first child. She was still a lovely, willowy woman, with Tino and Nica’s extraordinary brown eyes and kind smile.
“Quinlan!” she said happily, her voice echoing seven Christmases of visiting her family and Quinlan being a part of that. “Come here—I understand Trina’s your baby fix until someone gives birth!”
Belinda came forward, holding the plumpest, squishiest six-month-old Quinlan had ever seen. Joachim, her dark-haired, dark-eyed boyfriend, was blowing wild bubbles on the baby’s cheek and grinning shyly when Trina giggled back. “C’mon, Q,” Belinda said playfully. “Elena’s husband says he’s tempted to move up here so you can watch her.”
Quinlan reached his arms out, and the baby rewarded him with a smile and a reach. And oh! Once he had her in his arms—all his fears, his insecurities, they melted away.
This he could do.
“I would totally stay home to watch this princess,” he said, winking at Elena’s husband, Mark. Mark wasn’t a handsome man—big of nose, stooped of shoulders, he had crooked teeth and was losing some of his ginger hair. He’d been Elena’s orthopedist when she’d been dancing, and every interaction Quinlan had with him had been funny, unselfconscious, and kind. The way Elena looked at him seemed to put a soft-focus lens around him for the entire family, and Quinlan was genuinely honored that such a sweet man would think he was worthwhile as a childcare provider.
Of course, he felt that way about Jacob and Nica as well.
“Elena would like to be closer to her family too,” Mark said, looking abashed. “But… you know. She’s going to be teaching dance at Emory and Barnes—”
“Children with disabilities?” Quinlan asked, smiling softly. Elena had always said it was what she’d do if she stopped dancing professionally.
“Yeah—they need another instructor and a stake. I was going to see if Jared would let me invest.” She smiled softly at her baby, who squealed back. “So anyway—you know. If you’re available after Christmas….”
Quinlan didn’t give Bobbie a second thought. “Absolutely,” he said, his heart beating a little easier just feeling the weight of trust in his arms.
“So, does that mean you’ll be available in August?” Belinda asked, rolling her eyes. “Because I could put off going to work until after the tour, but….”
Trina mouthed his brand-new power tie, and Quinlan let her. “Maybe no more tour,” he said, shrugging. He’d known this decision was coming—it had just hit him hard, now.
“I, uh… I mean, Kentucky was the worst.”
There was general laughter then, and Nica came around with her arms out. “My niece,” she said imperiously, and Quinlan passed her over with regret.
“Don’t look at me like that, Quin,” Nica told him. “We’ve got about five minutes to figure out how to make all these people fit around Mr. Wainscott’s conference table, and you and Dusty have to be front and center.”
“Aherm,” Tino said, rolling his eyes. “My niece too, for one, and Channing and I need a place at the table, for two.”
Nica’s look at her brother was more speculative than resentful, and she relinquished baby Trina much more quickly than Quinlan supposed. “You have something planned?” she asked quietly.
“Well, I assume you and Jacob have a few words, so you get a seat in the front too,” Tino told her softly, and then they both looked at Quinlan and smiled, all teeth, like foxes protecting their cub.
Without the baby in his arms, Quinlan remembered why they were there. “You guys,” he said sheepishly, “this doesn’t have to be that big a deal. I sign the paper, Mr. Wainscott takes care of the details—”
“Oh, Quinlan,” Channing said, throwing an avuncular arm around his shoulder. “You have such simple wants. But Tino and I… we get hungry, you know? All those years killing it in the business world? We have sharp teeth. We need the taste of blood. Are you okay with that?”
Quinlan thought about his mother and how she hadn’t even watched him leave.
“Yes,” he said, surprised at this. “You know—as long as her kid has resources. That’s the only thing.”
“Done,” Channing said. “We’ll even let you set the terms. Now who do we want nearest the door when they walk in? Taylor and Brandon, you think?”
Quinlan laughed weakly. Taylor with his scars and military bearing and his eye patch, and Brandon with his giant, muscular build.
“You really do want her to think you’re bloodthirsty, don’t you?”
“Her lawyer tried to bribe Mr. Wainscott to get you to accept half the offered amount,” Channing told him in an arctic voice that Quinlan would lay money none of his children had heard. “He tried to do this twice. I hope she wets her pants, Quinlan. I’m not going to lie. Now you two go in first. Dustin—remember. This is a family thing. We all want a piece of her.”
“Deal, Uncle Channing,” Dustin said dutifully.
“Wow,” Quinlan murmured for his ears only. “Hearing you be all obedient—it gives me chills.”
“You want to order me around later, you go ahead,” Dustin said cockily. “Just remember—we have to go out and eat after this, so you got to hold it together until we get home.”
Quinlan took a deep breath and clenched Dustin’s hand a little tighter.
“That’s wonderful,” he muttered. And he was torn—because it was wonderful. He was always up for another family gathering.
But it was also awful because… because he was the center of it. And because he had to look at the person who always made him feel like he should be on the edge of the photograph.
Still, they family-packed themselves into the staff room—Sammy managed to stand right behind Quinlan’s seat, so he kept a steady hand on Quinlan’s shoulder as they were waiting, and Petey sat on his mother’s lap, because he still could.
“Kids,” Nica said, pitching her voice above the general murmur in the room, “remember, when I give the signal, everyone under eighteen clears out, okay?”
“And those of us done with standing,” Belinda muttered.
“I’m there,” Elena told her, a thread of pain through her voice.
“Can I hold Trina, then, Aunt Elena?” Melly said with an obsequious little smile.
“You snot,” Keenan muttered. “I had dibs.”
“Yes, he did,” Elena laughed. “But Keenan, she’s getting fussy. Are you prepared to sit down and let her sleep on you?”
Keenan actually giggled, his usual suave demeanor disappearing into the adorable chuckle of a young man being solidly cuted out. “That’s the best!” he said, big grin stretching his cheeks as he took the baby.
Felicity shook her head. “It’s good and all, but no. You can have her, Kee.”
The babble got big for a moment as Keenan got cooed over since he had the baby, and suddenly, obeying a signal Quinlan didn’t see, it died down.
The conference room was dominated by a table that could have prob
ably sat twenty if they were all shoulder to shoulder. The family was ranged around it, packed into the corners of the maple-paneled room, with a bare spot at the end saved for the three people Mr. Wainscott had been told were coming.
Suddenly Taylor’s blunt voice penetrated the expectation in the room. “Yeah, this is the Quinlan Gregory meeting. No, we can’t clear out. We’re his people. The kid played at my wedding, lady—I see him at least once a month. I got way more right to be in that room than you do.”
“He played at my wedding too,” Brandon said, sounding perplexed. “Well, yeah—I was marrying that guy. That’s a problem?”
And then the doors swung outward and the tide of people parted as much as they could in the little room.
“We have some seats reserved over here at the end,” Mr. Wainscott said smoothly.
“My son isn’t accustomed to a mob.”
Quinlan got a look at her then.
It had been ten years—and she’d aged. She’d had work done—her lips were artificially plump, and the skin around her eyes was artificially tight. Her hair was dyed bright copper and curled in bold corkscrews around her face.
No amount of surgery or lipstick could make the lines around her mouth less bitter.
“Quinlan?” she said, as she made herself comfortable and pulled out a chair for the little boy next to her.
“Dorothy,” Quinlan muttered, gaping.
His father had dark hair and dark eyes—Italian ancestry, just like the Robbins family. His mother had brown hair—when it wasn’t dyed—and hazel eyes, which she altered with green contacts.
This child was blond and blue-eyed.
Nica leaned over and tapped his shoulder, speaking carefully so only Quinlan could hear him. “Does that kid look like—”
“No,” Quinlan said softly. “No. He’s not.”
Nica took a deep cleansing breath, and Quinlan could hear her whispering “I will not judge, I will not judge, I will not judge” under her breath.
“What are all these people doing here?” she asked peevishly, as a guy Quinlan had to admit looked very much like a blond Lurch sat next to her.
“We’re Quinlan’s family,” Jacob said calmly. “And don’t worry—only some of us are going to stay for the proceedings. But my kids wanted you to know something. Conroy? You were the one who was going to speak?”
Conroy stepped forward, looking enough like Dustin had at that age to make Quinlan’s heart ache a little. But Conroy’s eyes were his mother’s dark brown, and his hair as well, and the look on his face was so measured, so composed, he seemed almost sublimely tranquil in the face of all the chaos on the room.
“On behalf of myself, my brothers and sisters, and my cousins—all except Sammy, ’cause he gets to be a grown-up in the room—I’d like to say something.”
All the adults nodded encouragingly, and Quinlan smiled, moved.
“So, we just found out that Quinlan’s parents were total assholes—sorry, Mom, but they are.”
Dorothy jerked back—Quinlan couldn’t remember ever hearing her swear, but Nica just grimaced and gestured. “It’s fine, sweetheart. Carry on.”
“Anyway, we thought you should know what you were missing out on. When I was, like, ten, I went to my friend’s house, and we shotgunned all the Chucky movies, and I came back home and my sister left her Barbies in my room, and I had the most epic nightmare of all time. And I sat up in bed and started screaming, and my folks got there first, ’cause they live in the house, but Quinlan ran down from his apartment, through the garage and then upstairs to my room to calm me down. I mean, think about that. He heard me screaming in what was, like, the next house over, and ran two flights of stairs to make sure I was okay. And even though my mom and dad are pretty spectacular, I wanted him there, because Quinlan just makes things better.
“When my sister Melanie sprained her ankle before her audition, Quinlan held her when she cried. When my little brother Peter had the croup, my mom and dad were exhausted, and Quinlan made dinner for the whole family for a week and kept us going to school and kept laundry going. And I know someone like you who’d throw a kid away would say that my family paid him, but my sister Taylor had epic horror-movie diarrhea for two weeks when Quinlan first came to stay with my family, and there’s no amount of money that’s worth that.
“There’s no amount of money that could pay for someone who yells at the parents of the bullies on the playground and then doesn’t tell your parents ’cause you’re mortified. There’s no amount of money to give someone who takes over at your cousins’ house because the whole family is worried about Sammy and nobody’s functioning right, nobody except Quinlan, because it’s his job to take care of us. Not his job as in money, it’s his job in his heart. Except you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you just threw him away. So me and my siblings and my cousins and Letty, who’s my cousin but isn’t related by blood, we wanted you to know what you’d thrown away, and that it was the best thing that was probably in your life, and you were really fucking stupid and you don’t know what things are worth.”
“And we hate you,” Taylor added into the sudden silence.
“Honey, don’t say ‘hate,’” Nica mumbled, sounding dazed. “It’s not nice.”
“She’s not nice,” Petey said. “And she can’t have Quinlan back.”
“I wouldn’t go,” Quinlan mumbled, his throat so tight his ears hurt. In his head he heard Dustin’s voice talking about keeping his shit together until the end, and it was the only reason he didn’t lose it. “That was really sweet, Conroy. Thank you.”
“I had way more stuff I was going to say,” Conroy told him, and he was crying, hiding his face in adolescent shame. “But now I’m all mad.”
Quinlan opened his arms, and Conroy hugged him, and Tay and Peter too.
“You guys go outside now,” Nica said, hugging them too. Then she looked over to Quinlan’s mother, eye to eye. “Would you like to send your kid out with mine? They’ll watch him, and this next part’s gonna get a little boring and a little bloody. It would be the right thing to do.”
Quinlan didn’t see the expression on his mother’s face then. All he saw was the hunger on the little boy’s.
“Calendar,” Dorothy said stiffly. “If you like, you may go out into the lobby and play with your tablet there. But you may not speak to those other… children.” Ah, disdain. Quinlan remembered that tone of voice.
Calendar shot his mother a quick, furtive look and then smiled tentatively at Tay, who grinned cheekily back. “Okay,” he said, keeping his face hidden from his mother. “Thank you, Mother.”
He stood up shyly, and Quinlan’s family let him walk by before streaming noisily out. In the end it was Tino, Channing, Sammy, Cooper, Jacob, and Nica.
And Dustin.
Next to him Nica whispered, “I will not judge, I will not judge, I will not judge,” and Dustin leaned over and murmured, “Calendar? Jesus, Q, you got off easy.”
Quinlan managed a smile. “I’m betting our kids have him answering to Cal in the first thirty seconds.”
Dustin chuckled meanly, and even Nica snorted.
On her way out, Melly leaned over and whispered, “Cal, right?”
“Yeah,” Nica told her. “Definitely Cal.”
“I will not judge, I will not judge, I will not judge,” Jacob mocked his wife.
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll judge a little.”
“Conroy,” Jacob said bluntly. “You named our middle child Conroy.”
“Have you ever met a child more like a Conroy in your life?” she asked tartly. “Did you see that kid?”
Jacob’s sunny smile was one of the joys in Quinlan’s life. “Yeah. He was pretty awesome, right?”
“I had no idea that’s why he had that nightmare,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We couldn’t get him to watch anything but Disney movies for the next three years.”
“Can we get these proceedings started?” Dorothy interrupted as the last kid cle
ared the door.
Taylor and Brandon looked at each other, and Taylor said loudly, “Us and the grandparents are going to go ride herd. Mr. Wainscott, is there someone out there who knows where the bathrooms and the water fountain are?”
“Yes, Mr. Cochran—Jeannie, my administrative assistant, will be happy to help you.”
“C’mon, Brand—this shit’s above our pay grade.”
“Calendar,” Brandon said as they were walking out. “Like the thing with the naked firemen on it?”
Everybody on Quinlan’s side of the table choke-snorted.
“It was a family name of Quinlan’s father’s,” Dorothy said stiffly.
And suddenly the atmosphere in the room was anything but funny.
“Interesting, that,” Channing said behind Quinlan. “But ultimately not why we’re here.”
“Can Mr. Gregory sign the papers before we hear any more speeches?” Lurch—erm, Mr. Corso demanded, and Channing cocked his head at Mr. Wainscott.
“I’m afraid your papers are invalid,” Mr. Wainscott said smoothly. “They are based on outdated information regarding the value of the late Mr. Gregory’s holdings.” He pulled a file from the shelf behind him and gave a copy to Lurch, one to Quinlan’s mother, one to Channing, one to Tino, and one to Quinlan. “These are the current circumstances of James Calendar Gregory’s business and personal financials, and any paperwork young Mr. Gregory signs needs to take these figures into account.”
Across the table he heard Mr. Corso and his mother gasp in dismay, and Dustin pulled the paperwork from his unresisting fingers and started to look it over.
“Dude,” Dustin said, sounding gleeful. “This is fucking awesome!”
“Gimme, Dusty.” Jacob held out his hand. His evil chuckle filled the room. “Oh man! Tino—you sly dog you.”
Dusty’s Uncle Tino had a laugh just as evil as his brother-in-law and best friend since grade school. “Yeah. Channing and I were pretty damned proud.”
Quinlan cleared his throat as Jacob passed the paperwork to Nica, and she started to giggle. “Can somebody explain for the music majors in the room?”
