Making It Last (Camelot 4)

“Yeah.”

After a moment there was a clunk, and then Jake’s voice. “Daddy?”

“Hey, buddy. How you doing?”

“I want Mommy.”

“I know. She’s here with me. I’ll bring her home.”

“When?”

“Soon. Tell me what’s going on, huh?”

While Tony listened to his son’s reply—I have a fever, Daddy, and Grandma says I need to lay in bed and rest, but I want to watch TV, so I told her—he opened up Amber’s purse and found her phone and the page torn off the hotel notepad where she’d jotted down her flight times and confirmation number for the trip home.

Tearfully, Jake explained that he hadn’t been able to sleep because his heart was too anxious, and that Ant had said Mom and Dad weren’t coming home, and Clark had said they were, stupid, but that they’d probably get divorced and then the boys would each have to choose which parent they wanted to live with.

His voice kept rising, and then it broke and he started to sob again, saying, “I d-don’t wuh-want t-to choose, Daddy. I want to live with b-both of you—”

And Tony interrupted, because it was too awful. “Shh, buddy, shh, that’s not going to happen.” He couldn’t take hearing his son’s worst fear and knowing it was the same as his. That they were the same, and he still wasn’t sure he could stop his marriage from sliding off the edge of the cliff.

Even after last night, he wasn’t sure.

He soothed his son and pulled up flight times on Amber’s phone.

When Jacob was calm again, he said, “Put Grandma back on, okay? I’m going to have her help me get the plane tickets changed, and we’ll see if we can get Mommy home to you tonight before you go to bed.”

“You, too, Daddy?”

“Me, too, bud.”

He spoke to Janet for a minute, asked her to take a look online for availability, and then got the customer service number from her. After they hung up, he booked the first flight home with open seats. It left early in the afternoon and would get them home right around Jake’s bedtime.

They’d have to leave for the airport in a few hours. Too soon.

Last night, he’d felt close to her. So sure of her, in a way that he hadn’t been since Jake was born.

Because it was Jake who had started the shift between them. Amber had been afraid to have a third baby—afraid, she’d said, that she would be consumed by another kid, that she would run out of energy, they would run out of love. And he’d been positive she was wrong. He was one of half a dozen Mazzara kids, used to thinking children ran in packs, that love would stretch as far as it had to.

More than that, Tony had thought seven years ago that between him and Amber, they could do anything. Business was good. They had plenty of money—enough for him to build her a house as big as she deserved, as nice as she ought to have—and they’d had these two awesome kids who were amazing, smart, making fatherhood so much more fun than he’d thought it was going to be.

He’d wanted to keep doing it. Turn great into better into fantastic.

And he’d been daring himself, too. Go all in. Dig yourself in deeper, because you’re not going to fuck this up. You’re not hopeless, you’re not nothing, you’re not doomed to fail.

Amber had given him faith that all those lessons of his early life were bullshit. He’d seen her with their sons and known that their boys weren’t going to grow up feeling like he had. He wasn’t going to be the kind of father his own dad had been. Even if he slipped, Amber would never let it happen.

So he’d pushed her. He’d campaigned, buying frilly baby girl dresses and talking up how cute newborn babies were, how hot she looked when she was pregnant, how the boys would be happier with another sibling and they’d all entertain themselves. How much fun they could have trying for a baby.

Amber had caved. Then Jake had come along and steamrolled over her at exactly the same time the economy was steamrolling over Tony.

And he didn’t regret it. He couldn’t. He loved Jake so goddamn much it hurt. They’d made the best of it. But it had been a hell of a grind, these last six years. Three kids wasn’t fifty percent more than two. It was this whole other stratosphere of parenthood. Outnumbered. Outgunned.

In those early months after Jake was born, when he was puking up everything he ate, not holding on to enough weight, never sleeping more than ninety minutes—usually more like forty-five—Amber had developed dark purple circles under her eyes and a steely sort of optimism that she wore like armor.

Everything will be fine, hon. Don’t worry about us today. I’ll try to grab a nap when Jake goes down—I can put a cartoon on for Ant and Clark. I’ll see you later, okay? Have a good day.

She would hand him his lunch when he walked out to the garage, and she would kiss him goodbye, but her mind would be elsewhere, on the battle that was her day. Holding her shit together. Keeping the house clean, the kids alive and fed and bathed and rested.