I sat beside him. “What are you doing?”
“Making them race each other until they’re exhausted.”
I sat back. “Good idea.”
I watched them for a moment. “I have to punish them, Dad. What do I do?”
“What you think is best.”
I snorted. “Thanks.” I waved my hand. “They keep doing stuff! Sneaking out to the pool, stealing the golf cart, messing around on the rocks.” I wiped my hand over my eyes. “Paige thinks it’s a phase, but man, it’s not ending. I got called to the school twice last week. Twice. The last week of school. Nothing should happen the last week of school.”
“What did they do?”
I scrubbed my face. “One of their teachers pointed a ruler at a classmate and informed him at the end of the ruler was an idiot. They both yelled out, ‘Which end?’ Caused total chaos in the classroom. They got sent to the principal’s office.”
He guffawed, slapping his knee. “You have to admit that was a good one. What else?”
“They snuck into the principal’s office and burped and farted into the loudspeaker.”
“Did they get caught?”
“Not while doing it, but they laughed, and everyone knows their laugh. Even the principal. He called me.”
They both laughed like braying donkeys—it was impossible to mistake.
“Amateurs,” Dad snorted.
“It’s not funny.”
“It is because I’m not dealing with it.”
I sat back with a groan. “It’s my fault. I was over the moon when Paige was pregnant. Twin boys. I thought it would be great.”
My dad turned in his chair. “Hey. They are great. They’re well-behaved, smart, nice kids.”
“Well-behaved?” I asked. “Did you just hear me about the school? Do you see the two delinquents in the pool at midnight?”
“They’re no different than you or your brothers were at that age. The four of you used to get into trouble all the time.”
“No, we didn’t.”
He scoffed at my words. “What about the time you threw manure over old man Tate’s house in town? He’d just had it painted, and you four got into a manure fight right beside his house. The four of you stank for days. I had to pay to have the house cleaned and repainted.”
“I remember having to do extra chores to pay you back.”
He snorted. “You got off easy. Then there was the time you jumped off the cliffs when we were on vacation? Almost gave your mother a heart attack. Or the time Ronan switched out oil for soap in the bathrooms at school? Or Paul freed all the frogs in biology?”
I had forgotten those incidents.
“You and your brothers used to break out of your rooms on hot summer nights and come for a swim. You’d also get hungry and raid the refrigerator at the Hub and pass out there. By the third time we found you missing from your beds, we knew where to check.”
“What about Ava?”
He shook his head. “She was the good one. The rest of you were little shits.”
I laughed at his description. “These two make the girls look like angels.”
Which they weren’t, but they were far easier to deal with than the twins. I never knew what they were going to get up to. My dad was right, and they were nice boys. Friendly and well-liked, they stuck up for other kids, did well in school, and never went so far across the line it gave me pause. But they were full of mischievousness.
They’d been ahead of the curve their entire lives. The largest percentile for height and weight, they were off the charts. They were born early, and they walked early, literally crawling one day and on their feet the next. They communicated with each other in their own language before suddenly asking for something in plain English far too soon in their childhood. They went from babies to toddlers almost overnight. Walking, running, escaping. Their cribs were useless at holding them. The big-boy beds we bought barely kept them contained. Childproof locks were a joke. Splitting them up was a no-go. They would simply march into each other’s room and crawl into the other’s bed at some point after we said good night. Eventually, we gave up, and to this day, they shared a room. Erin never wanted to move upstairs, so instead we switched things around and the boys shared the largest room on the second floor.
At four, they pulled off pranks that drove their sisters crazy. By five, they were whiz kids on computers. By seven, they could take one apart and put it back together. AJ loved to write programs, the language coming easily to him. Brock loved to dismantle and improve machines. The office I had built in the garage was now filled with computer parts and machines. Reid loved spending time with them, amazed at their brilliance. He taught and encouraged them. It was the only time I ever saw them sit still and be quiet.