“Hey, Uncle Dex,” Aiden said, tossing his floppy black hair off his forehead and out of his eyes.
I swung my feet around and accepted a mug of coffee from Banks, which I sipped gratefully. “Hey, man,” I said. “You’re playing hockey?”
Aiden had that slightly coltish way about him that teenagers who’ve just newly grown into their limbs and bodies often do; he shifted around, appearing slightly uneasy no matter whether he was sitting or standing.
“Yeah. I’m the goalie.”
This seemed improbable to me as I took in his narrow frame, but I was proud of the kid—he’d come a long way.
When Sunday and Banks had decided to adopt a little boy years before, they’d ended up with a five-year-old named Jax, who was now twenty-four and living in Maine, where he worked as a tree farmer. Over the ensuing years, Jax’s birth mother had gone on to have two more kids: the now twenty-year-old Padden, and then Aiden, four years later. Once the birth mother realized that Jax was with Sunday Bond, she’d readily agreed to surrender her next two babies at birth, and Sunday and Banks were first in line to adopt Jax’s little brothers, which they’d done. I admired their open-hearted commitment to adoption, and I loved being around their family full of rough-and-tumble boys, watching the kids grow up over the years and become young men with strong values and big dreams.
There had been a time shortly after Sunday and Banks adopted Jax that Ruby had mentioned the possibility of us considering it ourselves, but to be honest, by then I’d fully accepted the idea that we’d just travel and be a family of two, and the whole idea faded away pretty quickly. We were happy. We were also in awe and full of admiration for Sunday and Banks, but our lives felt complete.
“Will I get to see you play in a game while I’m here?” I asked Aiden.
“I just have practice today,” he said, looking at his dad as if he needed someone to reassure him that his words were right. “And then my next game is on the twelfth.”
“Maybe next time,” I said to Aiden, drinking my coffee. “Hey, are your brothers going to be around?”
Banks sat on a chair opposite me, watching Aiden with pride as he held up his end of the conversation, a task that was starting to seem impossible for young people of this generation. I assumed it was because kids these days had all grown up glued to phones and other devices and not making eye-contact, but Sunday and Banks had been almost militant about the need for them to learn manners, social graces, and conversational skills. Still, Aiden was shy and a little troubled, and this took some effort on his part. I knew he’d struggled mightily with anxiety and social cues, but he was turning into a solid young man.
“Jax is in Maine with his girlfriend,” Aiden said, eyes skittering once again over to his dad. “And Padden is in Belize with the Peace Corps.”
I set my coffee mug on the table in front of me and tried to fold up the blanket that Sunday had put over me when I’d shown up at nearly midnight the evening before. “Belize! Wow. What’s he doing there?”
Aiden was clearly at capacity for this conversation, and it was almost comical the way he looked at Banks with pleading in his eyes.
“Why don’t you go finish getting ready for practice, bud, and I’ll chat with Uncle Dex about your brothers.”
Aiden got up gratefully, leaving his hockey stick propped against the wall of the front room that looked out over the residential street they lived on.
"It's been the best thing I've ever done," Banks said after Aiden was out of the room. "But this guy isn't at all like his brothers. He's been challenging."
I knew this, but still I said, "Oh?" I wanted to give him the opportunity to share, if he felt like it.
"Jax and Padden were tough boys. Jax especially was stubborn and hard to get to know, but once he grew to trust us, he thrived. Padden was born knowing what he wanted to do in life, but he's gentle--a dreamer. Aiden is our limit-pusher. I have to tell you, Dex, at my age, I'm not sure I have much energy left to deal with anyone getting suspended for a fight at school, or for finding marijuana in a young man's bedroom." He laughed lightly. "I'm getting tired. Thank god we have Paddy to come home and act as our mediator whenever he's in town."
At this point, Banks was seventy, and Sunday seventy-five, but they still ran half-marathons together and traveled like their lives depended on it, so there was no shortage of energy and youthful vigor between them.
“Are you talking about Paddy?” Sunday asked, coming into the front room in a light yellow tracksuit that matched the style of Banks’s black one. They looked like they were ready to go and power walk inside of a mall together, but I knew them well enough to know that they were more likely to go to a protest at the Washington Monument on a Saturday afternoon than they were to stroll past a Macy’s on their way to use their senior citizen’s discount at the Cinnabon in the food court.
“I just heard he was in Belize,” I said, smiling at her as she sat on the arm of her husband’s chair, back straight, curly brown hair gone mostly gray. She was fit and just as bright of a spark plug as always.
“Oh, he is. We’re so proud of him,” Sunday said. “Of all the boys, really.” She looked at Banks just as he looked up at her, and I marveled, not for the first time in the years that I’d know them, over the way they radiated love and infatuation for one another. “Aiden is getting all A’s at school this year, and he’s getting quite good at hockey,” she added, glancing at his hockey stick. Sunday lowered her voice. “It’s fun watching him blossom, but that kid has really put us through it.”
I suddenly felt conspicuous in my slept-on hair, the jeans I’d worn the day before, and a wrinkled t-shirt, but I’d known Banks and Sunday for so long that I brushed away the thought that I must look like a hungover train wreck. I also cast aside any thoughts that Sunday might have been annoyed with me for arriving so late at night because I’d been out listening to her ex-husband tell stories about carousing and cavorting with every man in D.C. I knew her well enough to know that she truly would not have cared what Peter said at that point in their lives. They’d been divorced for so long that anything Peter Bond had done or said would have rolled right off of Sunday like raindrops down a pane of glass.
“And Jax,” Sunday went on, looking rapturous. “He is such a kind-hearted boy. Writes poetry. Wanted to live in Maine and work on a tree farm, and wouldn’t you know, the man who owns the farm has a daughter Jax’s age, and they’ve fallen in love. Corinne,” she added, nodding at a framed photo of Jax and a woman with curly blonde hair and a huge smile, that sat on the table next to the couch.
I picked up the photo to examine it. There was the boy I’d first met as a scared five-year-old, now a grown man with his strong, thick arm around the shoulders of a girl who looked like she’d fallen out of the pages of an L.L. Bean catalogue.
“They’ve all come a long way,” I said, setting the photo back down. “I feel like it was just yesterday when you guys brought Jax back to Shipwreck Key.”
“Oh, don’t we know it,” Sunday said. She shook her head in a way that seemed wistful. “The passage of time is always most evident in the way your kids grow and change. Of course we never age a day,” she said with a laugh, “but we can look at them and see how quickly it’s all going.”
Still sitting on the arm of Banks’s chair, Sunday couldn’t resist leaning down and giving her husband a peck on the lips.
“It’s true,” Banks said, balancing his mug of coffee on one knee as he held the handle firmly. “The minute Jax came into our lives, it was like someone strapped us to a rocket just before takeoff and sent us into the stratosphere. It’s been a fast trip for all of us, with a million adventures, hockey games, and holidays all folded into it.” One side of Banks’s smile lifted, and he looked out the window at the cloudy Saturday morning. “But we’ve loved every minute.”