Heidi Betts: Loves Me, Loves Me Knot

“They’re great, thanks.”

“And you don’t worry about them?” Gage asked.

“ ’Course I worry about them. But that’s what this is for.” He patted his chest, his palm covering the small gold cross he wore there. Always, whether it was visible or tucked inside his shirt.

Gage shook his head. “No, I mean worry about them. With all the shit we’ve seen, everything that’s out there ready to take somebody down whether they deserve it or not… Aren’t you afraid something will happen to them?”

For the first time, Eric turned to really look at him. If anything, the eye contact, the sudden intense scrutiny, made Gage nervous. He felt like enough of a pussy bringing this up to begin with; he didn’t need a coworker peering too deeply into his soul.

“I suppose if I stopped to think about it, I would,” Eric replied. “But life’s too short, man. I mean, anything could happen to any one of us at any moment. You could walk out of this building and get hit by a bus. I could trip on a shoe lace walking down the stairs and break my neck.” He shrugged. “No one to blame. Nothing anyone did or didn’t do to cause it, just an act of Fate.”

“But bringing a baby into the world,” Gage pressed. “There’s some dangerous stuff out there. Don’t you worry something will happen to them? To this innocent kid who has no way to protect himself? To your wife?”

“My wife can take care of herself,” Eric said with a chuckle. “Hell, she scares me sometimes, so I have no doubt she could bring down any jerk-off who so much as looked at her funny. She can protect the kids, too, for that matter. But to be safe,” he said, voice growing serious, “I’ve shown her a few self-defense moves. Taught her how to fend off an attack and not be too squeamish to kick a guy in the nads, if she needs to.”

Gage thought about that for a minute. He’d seen Jenna pissed, and it wasn’t pretty. No doubt she could take a man’s head off at ten paces with nothing more than a book end. (Something he unfortunately knew from personal experience.)

For that matter, since she carried those damn knitting needles around with her ninety percent of the time, she could probably stab an offender in the eye, throat, stomach, groin, thigh… anywhere she could reach. And if he taught her how to do that effectively, how to use her keys as a weapon, her purse as a weapon, her entire body as a weapon…

“What about your kids?” he asked.

Eric considered that for a moment, then said, “You know, with the kids, you pretty much have to protect them twenty-four-seven the first few years. But there’s not a lot to protect them from, street-wise, so you just keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t swallow anything smaller than their eyeballs. After that, you start teaching them, too. You teach them to look both ways before crossing the street, not to take candy from strangers, to deal with bullies at school, say no to drugs… the usual.”

“It’s that easy?” Gage asked doubtfully.

“Not quite that easy, no,” Eric admitted with a small shake of his head. “But if you do it right and raise them to see and understand the dangers, then you don’t have to worry so much about them falling into something they can’t handle.” He paused for a moment, then gave a little hmph of sound. “I guess that’s the real secret. You do the best you can to prepare them to handle whatever situations they might come across, then you pretty much have to let go and pray they make the right decisions.”

The tightness in Gage’s chest and abdomen hadn’t abated, but his mind was running about a million miles a minute, and he was relieved when Eric didn’t ask why he was suddenly so interested in all of this. He pretty much let the conversation dwindle on its own, then went back to prepping for their drug-bust operation, and Gage did the same.

Could it really be as simple as his friend made it sound? Oh, he knew raising a child wasn’t a simple matter by any stretch of the imagination, but was it possible it wasn’t the nightmare of hidden traps and dangers he’d envisioned? Folks had kids every day, right? Yeah, one was occasionally found dead in a snow bank or wandering the streets alone. But a lot weren’t.

And he could cross the fear of parental abuse right off the list, because there was no way he or Jenna would ever hurt or neglect one of their own children. If he had his way, he’d pretty much smother them in bubble wrap from head to toe the minute they were born, so even getting a paper cut would be virtually impossible.

It was too much to digest all at once, but Eric had given him something to think about. Given his rock-solid determination of the past couple years to avoid fatherhood and vulnerability at any cost, he considered that progress.

When Charlotte pulled her long, wood-panel station wagon up to her house, she’d been gone almost a full two weeks, was running on Zingers and Mountain Dew, and had to tinkle like a toy poodle.

Jenna’s car, with its adorable magnetic daisies stuck all over, was nowhere in sight. Not that Charlotte was surprised. It was, after all, Wednesday night, and she only had about an hour to hit the potty, check her darling babies-oh, how she’d missed them while she was gone-unhitch the U-Haul from the car, and get to The Yarn Barn herself.

Throwing open the driver’s-side door, she scooted around the front of the wagon, then hotfooted it into the house and headed straight for the bathroom before the little fender-bender in that expo building parking lot became only one of the accidents she had to account for from her time away.

After taking care of business, she came back downstairs and made her way out to the barn. Her babies were all tucked into their stalls for the night, dozing or enjoying some munchies. They looked healthy and fit, and Charlotte ’s heart swelled with relief.

Not that she didn’t trust Jenna to take proper care of the sweet little beasts, but no one could look after them quite the way Charlotte did. She knew each of them by name, knew their individual quirks and personalities. Knew that all-white Snowball loved tiny pieces of apple and carrot, and that the black and white Domi (short for Domino) frightened easily. Really, really easily. And he didn’t just kick or spit, as was typical of alpacas when they got nervous or scared, but his eyes went wide and he also piddled a tiny bit down his leg.

For that reason alone, she didn’t race up to her baby boy’s stall and shout the joy of her return. Instead, she waddled quickly but quietly to each stall to greet her darlings individually.

Pumpkin, one of her favorite light brown darlings, lifted her head, spotted Charlotte, and trotted over to the half-door with a wide grin on her long, narrow face.

Most people would probably say Charlotte was crazy, that alpacas couldn’t grin. But Charlotte knew better-on both counts.

“Baby!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms wide to give the creature a giant hug.

Next came Sprinkles, Daisy, Snowball, Rascal, and finally Domino, all of whom got big hugs and kisses and tons and tons of super-special Mama lovin’.

She spent longer than she probably should have snuggling with her sweetie pies, but eventually she broke away, tossed them each a bit of extra hay for being such good furry babies, and reluctantly made her way back to the station wagon.

After dragging the bulkiest pieces of her luggage to just inside the house and unhooking the trailer hitch, she gathered her most recent knitting project onto the passenger side of the front seat beside her and cranked the engine. The ancient vehicle rumbled to life, purring like a big, happy jungle cat and lurching beneath her like an industrial washing machine.

Maybe this was why she’d had a thing for hogs in her younger days. The roar of an engine, the vibrating sensation that rippled through her entire body and set her skin to tingling. All that power. All that massive metal, with some big hunk of man perched on top.