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“Children?”
“Yeah.”
Piper laughed again. “Yes, I want some.”
“You know how much they cost?”
“I am aware children are expensive, yes,” Piper said, amused.
“And they don’t follow instructions at all.”
She poked me in the side. “You could connect with them on that.”
I rolled my eyes and stole the lemonade back, hanging on the fence post. Why she’d ever want one, I couldn’t understand. Without children, she could travel all she wanted and do whatever she wanted. What was the point? What was the lure?
Maybe she just wanted a messy house to clean.
“Ms. Fontaine?” A little girl moseyed up to Piper with a bunny in her arms that another volunteer helped her with. The bunny didn’t look exactly thrilled about being held with one arm around his middle, both of his feet sticking out. The little girl had stalks of hay in her blonde hair. There were clear signs of a struggle.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Piper murmured, kneeling next to her. Gently, she helped prop the bunny up and showed the little girl had to hold him properly so he wouldn’t be a potential aerial hazard.
I rested against the fence, watching them. “Wow, did you get into a cage match with a rabbit?”
The little girl ignored me, but Piper smiled wide.
“Looks like you collected all the hay in the petting zoo.” I grinned.
With a tiny frown, the little girl squinted at me. “Can you be quiet?”
“What?”
“I am trying to talk—to talk with her.” She held up a little hand to show I needed to stop talking when I tried to explain. “Please be quiet. Be respectful. Remember the five Rs? Do you know the five Rs? I don’t think you do. If you were in my class, my teacher would tell you to be quiet or go out to the hall.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded while Piper snorted into laughter. I narrowed my eyes. “Hey, I started talking to her first, kid. Be grateful I’m letting you have this time. I don’t like to share.”
“Adam,” Piper admonished me, like I was the one being rude.
“And you don’t like to be quiet either. Shhh.” The little girl held up a finger to her mouth and pointed it at me, more of a mean jab than anything else, before she leaned towards Piper and started whispering to her again.
What the hell?
Right behind her, Piper shot me a secret smile while she helped the little girl with the bunny. I couldn’t believe it. I lost my time hanging out with Piper to some grimy kid who couldn’t even hold a rabbit right.
The more I glanced between Piper and the little girl, deep in conversation about the evolutionary benefits of rabbit feet for some reason, the more a weird feeling settled over me. They looked so much alike. I mean, the little girl had dust smeared up to her eyebrows and hay poking off her clothes, but the blonde hair and the way she snapped at me was just uncanny.
If I didn’t know any better, she could’ve been Piper’s sister.
Or Piper’s daughter.
My eyebrows furrowed as Piper murmured something to the little girl and she giggled, petting the bunny, now calm in her arms. Yeah. She could be Piper’s daughter.
She could be my daughter.
I had never, ever wanted kids in my entire life. Maybe part of it was I didn’t want to put my kid through the same thing my parents had done. Maybe part of it was how appealing the bachelor lifestyle was. But I always thought about kids in a kind of abstract way, somebody’s kids, blurry motions out of sight, out of mind. I never thought about them like this.
Like little blonde kids with Piper’s gray eyes. A daughter rolling her eyes at me the same way her mom did. A son walking with Piper, hand in hand down the beach to check out some turtles on vacation.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, still gripping the fence.
