“Hey!” a little voice squeaked. “You big.”
Her mom was distracted with helping her up the curb and scolding her, so she didn’t notice when Canon mumbled, “Talk to it.”
Pasting a smile on my face, I replied through my clenched teeth, “What do I say?
“Just be nice. It’s not that hard,” Jarrod sighed, not bothering to be discreet but not drawing Heidi’s attention to us while she checked the kid over.
Making a decision, I squatted down in front of the tiny human.
“Yeah, I grew too fast. My brother’s taller than me so he’s a giant, but I’m older than him, so really I’m bigger.”
I watched Heidi while the kid spoke to Jarrod about a book and saw the similarities between them both. A glance back down at her ring fingers on both hands showed she wasn’t wearing a band and didn’t have a tan outline of one on either of them, but what did I know? Sometimes women don’t want to wear one, and marriage wasn’t for everyone, I guess.
Hearing the little girl tell Jarrod she wanted to be a pirate brought a smile to my face, and then she held her hand out to me. Here’s the thing, kids were okay, but I’d never had a lot to do with one aside from when I was one myself and my brothers had been born. Since then, the only kids I’d spent time with had been Katy’s niece, my friend’s kids, or one of the million Townsend offspring that seemed to pop up everywhere we went. Being around them was enough to make anyone wary of kids, so I had to think hard about what to say to her.
Remembering what Mom had been like with us when we were little, I glanced up at Heidi to make sure she was okay with me making contact with the girl. “My name’s Bond. What’s yours, little pirate?”
“Nay-mee.”
Seeing my confusion—hell if I knew if that was a common word for a human being her age—Heidi grinned. “That’s her name, but just not pronounced as dramatically as that. It’s spelled N-e-m-i and pronounced Nay-me.”
Ah!
“That’s a beautiful name, Nemi. My parents named me after a famous book and movie character who caught bad guys. The books were written by the author in Jamaica, where my mom’s family’s from”
Nemi’s eyes went almost round as she looked almost accusingly at Heidi. “We got dose movies?”
I was starting to put two and two together, and the four I was coming out with was unexpected. I’d heard that a lady in town named Heidi had a little daughter, but for some reason, my brain hadn’t put that Heidi with this one as being the mother. What else had they said? She was a single parent, wasn’t she?
I was so focused on desperately still trying to come out of this with at least a couple of answers to my curiosity, that I missed Heidi’s reply, as well as what followed it.
“You all like Rose boys?” the kid asked out of the blue, making me rock back on my heels with surprise.
Rose boys? What the hell were they?
“Twins,” Heidi explained, looking slightly flustered by the conversation. “She wants to know if y’all are twins or whatever four identical babies are called, like Rose and Raoul’s kids.”
“No, we’re not quadruplets or twins,” Canon said as he squatted down next to me. “We just look alike. Jarrod’s wife says we’re four versions of each other, so that’s kind of cool, right?”
This wasn’t something we hadn’t been told over the years, but Katy was the most argumentative about it being a fact. To us, we looked nothing alike, but to her, she said each of us shared identical features with another one, and that if we were to swap those features out, we’d end up with Jarrod. I think that’s because he’s her favorite—obviously, seeing as how she’d married him.
I’d allow that I looked most like Canon and that Jarrod and Reid looked more alike, but I wouldn’t go to the cutting and pasting extent.
Nemi nodded and squinted, looking back and forth between Canon and me.
When she moved so that her face was only a couple of inches away from mine, I automatically leaned back. Call me paranoid or dumb, but in this day and age—fuck, any day and age—having a kid you didn’t know leaning into your face like that was asking for trouble. I also didn’t want to make Heidi feel uncomfortable either, so it was almost instinctual to do it.
“Uh, what’s she doing?”
Heidi looked embarrassed as she tried to tug Nemi away from me until I had some breathing space and could relax again. “I think she’s trying to see similarities or differences.”
Reid snickered, “She’s adorable.”
“She’s something.” Heidi pointed over at the hair and beauty salon, Delicious Divas, where Sayla was standing laughing as she watched us. “Look, there’s Aunt Sayla. Let’s go say hi.”