Holding Liv with one arm, Dave reached over and took the phone out of her hand. “Sheriff Bell here. I attended after the shooting, and I can confirm it was a large Brown Recluse. I’ve got photos of some of the… uh… parts with a ruler next to them so that you can see.” He paused and listened for a spell. “Right. She has a seven-month-old daughter who could easily have been bitten though.”
“And her vagina,” Tabby whispered, getting a dirty look in return from her man.
I didn’t get to see what she did back, because I was distracted by Ellis using the phone call to get Liv back from Dave, before walking over to me, and completely ignoring the glare the man leveled at his back. “It could have been her,” he whispered, rubbing his cheek on the top of her head. Needing to feel her for myself, I reached up, wiggled my finger into the fist she had dangling down, and grinned as her fingers tightened around mine. Before I could say anything back to him, though, her eyes blinked open, and her big green eyes stared back at me as she slowly came out of her nap. Adults know the nap mentality well: you go for a ‘nap’, sleep more deeply than you would at night, then your body wakes up first while your brain crawls behind it begging for mercy. Babies have that same issue.
“Hey, baby,” I whispered gently, smiling when she grinned at me.
“Hey,” Ellis murmured absentmindedly, not realizing I was talking to her. “I’m thinking that y’all need to come and stay at mine. I got my house fumigated last week and I’ve got these plug in critter repellents, too, so there won’t be anything there that can hurt either of y’all.”
I never got the chance to answer, because Dave hung up the call and agreed on my behalf. “Yeah, we need to pack some shit up for them. Apparently, the dude who does the fumigations in Piersville is on vacation for the next two weeks, a lovely cruise around the Caribbean. I asked if there was someone in one of the other towns who could do it, but these guys are fully booked thanks to spider mating season and the fact that critters are crawling out of everywhere to fu…” he stopped when he saw that Liv was awake. “Procreate.”
“We can stay at a hotel,” I offered, hoping they’d all agree. I could do my work anywhere seeing as how all of it was done on either the computer, my laptop, or my iPad, so that wasn’t an issue. And surely hotels fumigated their rooms, so we’d be safe. Unfortunately, they weren’t in agreement with this, and I ended up watching as my laptop and my computer were put on the back seat of Ellis’s car, while Tabby packed a couple of bags with mine and Liv’s clothes and toiletries in them. The only time anyone listened to what I had to say was when they asked if there was anything else that I needed, which of course with a baby there was, and then we went around collecting it.
Just over an hour later, I was driving behind Ellis toward his house, with Dave and Tabby following behind with Liv in her seat in their car.
Thank you, you big assed arachnid bastard.Chapter 4Ellis
When we got to the house, Dave helped me carry Jose and Liv’s shit through to the room next to mine, and we’d set up the Pack ‘n Play that we’d brought, too. They made it look so easy on the instructions, but it had taken us a good thirty-five minutes to get all the bars to lock in place with the bottom of it flat. It was made by an evil genius who’d probably designed it to fuck parents up. Yes, I was that bitter about how complicated it had been, that I was looking at it as a personal vendetta type of device designed to drive this thirty-one-year-old man out of his ever loving mind. Objective achieved, my man, I’ll never look at one the same way again.
“We’ll see y’all tomorrow,” Tabby told us as she hugged Jose goodbye. “And we can all go out and get something to eat together at the festival.”
That’s right, tomorrow was the Piersville Pirate Festival, the day when we honored our founders. Piersville was named because roughly two hundred sailors, with their women and children, had sailed from Britain and set up camp here. The first part of the name, Piers, was after the pier they’d built on a beach for other ships to disembark onto, before traveling further into the country, away from where they could be spotted from the sea. The last part of the name, ville, was because it was French for city and sounded better than Pierstown or Pierscity. The head of the group had also been part French and his name had been Piers, but the residents had always chosen to go with the first reason, and not that one. Anyway, every year we held an anniversary celebration where we thanked them all for making the journey and creating our beautiful town by dressing up as pirates and sailors, except for the last three years, because the weather hadn’t been conducive with anything apart from staying safe from the rain that had hit.