In the garage at two a.m. Naomi stood waiting for Dave, waving a letter. “You’re not going to believe this. First someone pays off my student loan, and now our credit card has been paid off.”
Dave squirmed. He won every match, but it’d freak Naomi out that he’d replaced comics with Ultimate Fighting. But that meant keeping his earnings a secret. “That is strange. Who do you think sent the payment?”
Naomi shook her head. “Both com-panies couldn’t say.”
###
Dave burst in his sons’ room. Sat-urdays were now family time, but the boys found this hard to adjust to. “Wakey, wakey!”
Derrick moaned, but at least he got up. James continued to snore.
Adolescents. Dave poked the male sleeping beauty. “Is he in a coma? Might have to use electroshock to awaken him.”
James groaned.
“Come on, we’re going to spend time together as a family.”
“Can’t we go back to being room-mates?”
“Nope. Up and at ‘em.”
Dave elbowed his eleven-year-old. “Oh, come on, James. Admit it. You loved the horseback riding.”
James grunted and grabbed another tuna fish sandwich from the picnic basket.
With a mouth full of tuna, Derrick said, “I loved it, Dad!”
Naomi mussed his hair. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, mister.”
His sons inhaled two more sand-wiches. Derrick ran to the nearby play-ground. Dave glanced to James. “Go with him, scout.”
James rose and sauntered after his baby brother with the gait of an adolescent too cool to admit he wasn’t yet too old to enjoy a good jungle gym.
Dave held his wife in his arms and fed her grapes one by one. He smiled and stared deep into his wife’s eyes.
Powerhouse and the people he knew in Seattle seemed a million miles away.
Continued Next Tuesday
Tales of the Dim Knight is coming out as book later this Summer