Amara Anatole is
an Adult. Her fiancé Knox Nye is a
Young Adult. Their children Arden
Anatole, Elijah Anatole, and Xandra Anatole are Children.
* * *
Somehow the Anatole house had become the social hub of the
neighborhood. It seemed like most of the time half the kids Knox saw running
around weren’t even his.
Even so, now that the kids were older, they were a lot
better at taking care of themselves. Sometimes Knox even got a minute to
breathe, and while Amara could rarely say the same – she was still intent on
trying to earn their next promotion so they wouldn’t worry about whether the
next box of macaroni and cheese would drain their bank account – they even
found themselves able to spend a little time together every now and then.
“What do you think?” teased Amara one morning in the
kitchen. “Are things too quiet around here these days? Do you want another
baby?”
“Don’t even joke about that,” Knox responded.
Knox spent most of his time while Amara was at work playing
video games. He felt a little guilty about goofing off while she was hard at
work, especially on the days when the kids would come home from school while
the kitchen was still piled with dirty dishes. But he was secretly hoping to
surprise her by entering a tournament and winning some money for their wedding
fund – and if he wanted any chance of winning, he had to get better.
They had decided to postpone the wedding until they had
enough money to do it right. They had heard Phoebe Li’s descriptions of her
parents’ wedding. They wanted more than that for themselves. But Amara’s
promotion was taking longer than expected, and it didn’t look like they would
be getting any infusions of cash anytime soon. And the more they had to put off
the wedding, the more restless they got. They knew it didn’t actually matter –
they had gotten along just fine for years without being married, after all –
but the delay seemed pointless.
It didn’t matter to the kids when or whether the wedding
happened, but they had troubles of their own. Elijah was coming home from
school angry more often than not these days. The older he got, the more aware
he became of all the myriad injustices in the world, and the more he tried to
fix them – usually a futile effort. Knox couldn’t count the number of times he
came home fuming because he had gotten in trouble for confronting a bully. And
the more he got to know Phoebe Li, the more he learned about what her parents
were like, and the worse he felt for her – and there was nothing he could do
about it. He tried to convince his parents to let Phoebe live with them, but of
course they had to turn down his admittedly well-thought-out proposal, which
left him scowling and snappish for days.
Arden’s problems were of a different nature. He and Dzika
Fish had been friends for years. She had been the first friend he’d had outside
the family – the first friend any of the triplets had made outside their small
circle of three. He had always known she was older than him, but it hadn’t ever
mattered – not until now. But now she was a high school student, knowledgeable
and glamorous. The more he saw of her new sophisticated self, the more certain
he became that he wanted to kiss her someday. But by the time he got to high
school, she would have long since forgotten about him. She would have a
boyfriend, and he would just be the neighbor boy who ran around after her like a
puppy dog. He didn’t have a chance.
He didn’t tell his parents what was bothering him, because
he knew they would just laugh at him. Elijah and Xandra knew, of course, but
they didn’t really understand. Neither of them had ever been in love.
And then there was Xandra. She still hadn’t really made
friends outside the family the way Arden and Elijah had. At first she wasn’t
sure why – it was just a vague sense of reticence, a crawling discomfort
whenever anyone looked too closely at her. But as she got older, she was
starting to understand that what she was sensing was a disconnect between the
way people saw her and who she really was. She didn’t want to be the person
people saw when they looked at her. A tomboy, Arden and Elijah’s sister. She
didn’t want to be a girl at all. In her mind, the three of them were a matching
set, and her happiest moments were when the other two forgot and called her
their brother.
Finally, Knox got third place in a tournament and won that
wedding money he was hoping for. As he had expected, it wasn’t much, but it was
something. When he told Amara that evening, she had news of her own – her
promotion had finally come through. Not only that, but the bonus she had gotten
meant the wedding could happen anytime.
They got married in the park, with all their friends there to see them take the step they had waited for for so long. When they looked into each other’s eyes that day, they were each thinking
the same thing – that everything that had happened between them, from that
chance meeting in the club to the surprise triplets – had led them to this
moment, and that they wouldn’t take any of it back.
After the wedding, it was easy to forget they weren’t a
young couple just starting their lives – until, of course, their kids gave them
a reminder.
“So,” said Amara the day after the wedding, when things were
more or less back to normal again. “Now that we’re married, should we have a
baby?”
Knox didn’t think it was funny. “I told you not to joke
about that.”
