not to say in the house falls from my mouth as I burn the hell out of my hand. I drop the pan, grab a towel, and push the same pan full of bacon off the burner. A few slaps of the towel on the stove top and the fire is extinguished.
A squeal from upstairs causes me to lower my head. Rachel is going to kill me.
“Fire!” my five-year-old daughter yells. “We have to run! Stop! Drop! And Roll!”
Getting Ariel to stay still long enough to get her hair brushed on a normal day is like herding stray cats who have rabies. The fire alarm going off is only going to make life for my beautiful wife more complicated.
I head over to the fire alarm, reach up and push the button. The ear-piercing beeping ends and in its place are Ariel’s complaints that having her hair brushed is killing her. No kidding here—she makes moaning noises and declares she’s about to die. The edges of my mouth tilt up as Rachel says, “You’ll live.”
Patient. Rachel is always patient. Not a day goes by I don’t count my blessings that she and Ariel are in my life. Before the pancakes can burn, I race back over, use the spatula to slip them onto a plate and then set the plate on the kitchen table.
Footsteps echo along the hallway that leads to the front of the house, and I look up in time to see Rachel turn the corner. When I first met Rachel fourteen years ago, I thought I would never see anything as beautiful. I was wrong. Yes, Rachel was a dream at seventeen, but she’s redefined beauty in her thirties.
Her blond hair is thicker, more golden, and she’s filled out. Since Ariel’s birth, there are more curves to her body, and I worship each and every one. She’s in her work clothes of jeans and a nice button-down shirt. Her hair is pulled up into a ponytail and the ends are curled.
Rachel manages the business side of our automotive shop and occasionally still works on cars. I’m in charge of the shop, making the schedule, handling the customers and managing our employees. One of my favorite parts of the day is when she leaves her desk, shares a sandwich with me for lunch and then helps me out with a car. Rachel has always been and remains magic.
My angel pauses at the table and takes in the sight. I’ve made pancakes, sausage, bacon, toast, cut-up watermelon and two types of juice. Her eyebrows disappear beyond her bangs. “You remember Ariel’s five, and that lately her favorite food is air?”
“It’s her first day of school.” Of Kindergarten. “I want her to have a good start.”
Rachel eyes me warily. “At the end of the day, they give her back. We’re not sending her off for the year. It’s a lot like preschool, but she goes all day instead of half-day? And they’ll give her a lunch break. The state’s pretty adamant about the whole five-year-olds eating thing.”
“She’s my baby.”
“She’s a big girl at five and is going to be fine.”
A wave of uneasiness floods my system. Memories of my own school days haunt me. The boy who never had clean clothes. The boy who never had a stable home. The boy who didn’t have many friends.
As if sensing my unease, Rachel crosses the kitchen and places her hand over my heart, where two of the many tattoos on my body that represent my wife and daughter are inked. The tattoos she’s currently touching are of two sets of wings for my two angels—Rachel and Ariel.
I set my hand over hers, and her gorgeous blue eyes bore into mine. “She’s loved, Isaiah. Ariel’s going to be okay. She’s going to have good days and she’s going to have bad days, and whichever one she has today, she’s going to come back to this house and be loved.”
So far, Ariel’s life hasn’t been anything like mine. She has two doting parents, a home, and she is loved. Loved not only by me, but by Rachel’s brothers, Rachel’s parents, my family I hadn’t found until after I graduated from high school, and the expanded set of nonblood uncles and aunts Rachel and I have become friends with along the way.
Rachel reaches up and kisses my lips, and what I know was meant to be a swift embrace to calm my demons turns into something more as I weave my arms around her. One hand