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With this settled, we all headed toward the chair lift and joined the queue. My shades had some marks on them, and I took them off to clean them. As I went to put them back on, I noticed a small girl toe to toe with me staring up at my face.
“You’re him,” she said, wagging a little pointy finger up at me. She looked about five or six years old, and I raised an eyebrow and decided as the chair lift was quiet, I’d play along.
“And who is him?” I asked with a note of amusement in my tone.
“The guy my dad argues with my mom about.”
“Uh oh, and what do I do that causes them to argue?” I glanced up at the two figures in front of her and noted a couple discussing a map between them.
“The guy from the internet that sings like this,” she replied and began singing one of our most recognizable songs and gyrating her hips in an exaggerated way that was more reminiscent of Elvis than it was of me.
Daisy and Belle started giggling. I glanced at them and bit back a grin as I turned back to look down at the kid again.
“That’s me?” I asked, widening my eyes in mock shock. “I think you have the wrong man,” I pleaded in a quiet voice, like we were sharing a secret. “Did your mom and dad not teach you that you should never speak to strangers?”
“You’re not a stranger, you’re Jamie Fontaine, my mom’s second husband,” she replied. Before I could say anything else, she turned and tapped both her mom and her dad on their backs.
“This is your second husband, isn’t it?” She tugged her mom’s coat as she asked. Her mom looked down at her child, and then up at me. I had quickly slipped on my shades and gently shook my head. Then in a mock Irish accent, I said, “Aren’t kids hilarious?” Her dad eyed me with caution as the mom kept staring at me, but Daisy and Belle started laughing and I cracked up laughing as well.
Figuring I was busted, I went to take off my shades, but the mom shook her head and bent to talk to her daughter. “This isn’t my second husband, baby. My man is Jamie Fontaine, this man is too skinny and not nearly as tall as him.”
The husband’s scowl turned into a smile as he eyed his daughter and looked back at me. “Sorry, dude, my wife has an obsessive crush on a rock star and has filled my poor daughter’s head full of bull. Poor kid thinks she’s actually going to meet this second husband someday.”
I chuckled again and shook my head. “No problem, but you never know, stranger things have happened,” I replied, still trying to keep up the Irish accent that had turned distinctly more like an Asian Indian one.
Daisy and Belle cracked up beside me. Bernie snickered and nudged shoulders with me. I glanced toward her and the smug look on her face made me believe for a minute she was going to ‘out’ me.
“Well, buddy, I know for sure, it’s not you. This asshat here would have peed her pants, and likely fainted as well, if Jamie Fontaine had been standing next to her.”
“No, I wouldn’t. You’re just jealous because he’s better looking than you,” the woman said as the chairlift swept around, caught the family’s legs and the three of them went jolting off up the mountain.
“Okay, well that was a near miss,” I said, still talking in my Irish accent.
“If you say so, Ghandi,” Daisy remarked in reference to how I sounded, and Bernie and Belle laughed harder. “If you think you fooled that woman with that stupid accent, you have another thing coming. I saw the way she eye-fucked you right in front of her husband. That guy is blind, I tell you.”
Grinning, I shook my head. “Nonsense, that woman had no idea who I was. That was your imagination working overtime because of jealousy, baby.”
The chairlift came around and lifted us off our feet. Settling in, I pulled down the bar to keep us safely in our seats and slung my arm around her.
“Baby, I think it’s cute when you get all fired up and jealous,” I said as we neared the station for exiting the chairlift.
“Yeah, and we’ll see how cute you are when you have to keep up that ridiculous accent if we bump into that family again.”
CHAPTER 22
Time passed too fast and before we had really settled into the cabin it was already time to head home. Felix had checked that our evening slot was still good. He then informed everyone else to be ready to leave as soon as we reached the resort.
On the way to the airport, I noticed a tremor in Paddy’s hands as he tried to eat a bread roll. I then realized how unsteady his hands were when he tried to curtail his drinking. I made a note to talk to him, to see how I could try to support him to seek help.
It had been a whirlwind five days, and not nearly enough time alone for Daisy and me but getting engaged was the start of our future. It had been quite a tough year full of partings between us since we’d met, but the outlook for us going forward felt brighter.
It was a relatively short trip to Burlington airport and thankfully the timeslot we had arranged for take-off wasn’t delayed due to the weather. The night flight departed on time, and we landed in Ireland at 5:00 am the following morning.
Still exhausted from the flights, skiing and the cold, we checked into our hotel, mumbled our goodnights and retired to our rooms.
We had arranged to stay in the same hotel in Dublin that we’d previously stayed in since Poppy was already staying in the apartment above the pub. Her friend from college who had been helping her had taken the second bedroom. But what Daisy didn’t know, was that my sister Catrina and my other nephew Nick, along with my bandmates, Fingers, his wife Kim, Ticker and Hogs had arrived in the city to surprise her.
“Don’t worry so much. She’s going to love it,” Roslin told me as I stood with her, Poppy, my sister Cat and Terry, Daisy’s barman. I must have looked as concerned on the outside as I had felt inside.
