Page 69 of Hideaway Whirlwind
“Killian Berenson would be a strong name for a boy, if you want to take my last name.”
“I do.” I give the kids my phone so they can sit in the corner and watch cartoons, then curl my finger for Elliott to come closer so the kids won’t hear me. “Palmer is just the last name the guy who forged our papers picked. It’s actually Chambers.” Though I haven’t been aChambersin so long that it doesn’t hold much meaning for me anymore.
“Teagan Chambers, huh?”
I’m a little sheepish when I confess, “It’s actually Tennessee, not Teagan. My grandpa named me.” Not to mention that Dustin and Sydney aren’t their real names either, but I neverwant to speak or even think of those horrible and ridiculous Zera-themed names again.
“Tennessee Chambers,” Elliott says, as if meeting me for the first time.
But I shake my head. “I’m keeping Teagan. Teagan Berenson. It would be confusing for the kids.” Speaking of them, I tell him, “It’ll be pricey, but I want to find someone here who can get us all new papers so—”
“You want to give the kids my last name, too?” He’s back to hiccuping again.
“Ourlast name. Dustin, Sydney, Kendall, and Killian Berenson.”
“Damnit, Birdie.” He uses my knit sweater’s sleeve to wipe his face. “I’m never going to stop crying at this rate.”
When the tech returns to clean the jelly from my stomach and print out the sonogram photos for us to take home, I ask her, “How do you become a sonographer?”
“Is that something you’re interested in?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say with a thought to my future and what I want to do with my life, but also with a ton of self-doubt. Elliott said I don’t have to work, but I want to…just with a few extra days off for vacation and family time, for once.
“You can do it, Birdie,” Elliott says as we’re walking to the Bronco after the tech explained all the years of schooling and specialty exams she had to get through. It’s enough to make my head spin.
“I don’t even have my GED,” I tell him. I had studied long enough, having found a used prep-test study guide at the women’s shelter after arriving in Las Vegas, plus a few free online courses that I took at night. But I was never able to sneak away from work, Quincy, and the kids long enough totake each of the four subtests. I’m sure that was another one of Quincy’s designs to keep me under his thumb and reliant on him.
“Then you’ll start with that and move on from there,” Elliott says. “I know you can do it.”
“I can do it,” I say to myself as much as to him, trying to make myself believe it. Then, with more confidence, when Elliott and I buckle the kids into their car seats, “Iwilldo it.” I repeat it in my head the whole way home until I well and truly believe it. I will go to school. I will take my subtests and exams. I will chase the dream I had when I was ten, and I will give my kids everything they deserve so they can go on and achieve their dreams, no matter what life throws at them.
And no one is going to stop me, or they’ll end up buried beside Priscilla, a mile and a half away from the cabin, where Elliott and I will be exchanging our vows atop a patch of grass that isn’t quite the same shade or length as the rest.
Elliott
There’s no preparing the kids for the arrival of Old Man Jones’s son, Peter, to pick up Storm. We’ve tried over the last week since Birdie’s appointment, when I got the call that he’d been able to schedule time off from work to come down to Texas.
“I’ll kill him if he tries to take her,” Dustin says, baring his teeth as he hugs Storm around the neck. She laps at his tears, his face growing wetter.
“Oh man, we need to do something about that,” Birdie whispers to me from the side of her mouth, sitting on theliving room floor with him while I rock in the recliner with Kendall and Sydney, reading another one of my old comics aloud, trying to distract them from what’s to come. With her eyes narrowed, she tips her head toward Dustin. “He can’t keep going around, threatening to kill people.”
“Why? Like mother and father, like son.” I grin, though it’s wiped clean off my face when Birdie scowls at me.
It’s the first time we’ve had a disagreement since they moved back home, and I have to say, I’m not too fond of us not being on the same page, especially where the kids are concerned. I’m the one who’s new to this whole parenting situation, after all, still finding my footing.
“Do you want him to end up in prison?” She raises a brow. “Because that’s how you end up in prison.”
And don’t I know it.
Storm lunges out of Dustin’s hold, her hackles raised as she howls and scrabbles at the front door, having heard the crunch of gravel beneath tires before anyone else as a silver sedan bounces precariously down our driveway, right on time, slowing when the front bumper bottoms out over the pit I still haven’t fixed.
Dustin surges to his feet, darting away quickly to escape Birdie’s reach when she tries to grab him. He balls his fists at his sides and screams, “I’ll kill—”
“Enough,” I say. Not quite a snap, but firm enough to get his attention. I wiggle out from under Kendall and Sydney to kneel before my boy, holding his hands. “I won’t tell you how to think or that your feelings are wrong, but you at least need to be careful about what you say and who you say it to, or else you’ll end up with a bad reputation and zero friends.”
“That is so not the problem,” Birdie says with another scowl,dragging her hands down her face.
My boy’s shoulders sag. “But Papa, he can’t take her. He can’t.”
