me and Cal around the waists in a hug full of bosom and lavender.
She stepped back and rubbed each of us on the side of the face. “What have you boys been doing? Fighting? You’ve been fighting again, Cal. And, you! Look at you. You’re too skinny, Connie.”
Callin and I exchanged amused glances over her head, comrades for the moment. Our mother was, well, a mom. We received brief flashes of treatment as adults, but at the end of the day, she was convinced she should have never let us out of the house to fend for ourselves. “I missed you, too, Ma,” I said.
My father hugged Callin with a back pat, then me. If I was with my brother, it was always in that order. I often wondered if it was a subtle signal to Callin that he always came first with our father. I didn’t take offense. It was one of those things I noticed and could as easily mean my dad hugged in age order.
As I introduced Murdock, both my parents put on their professional smiles. I was sure they didn’t know what to make of him, a police officer giving off a druid body signature and wearing an iron weapon.
We wrestled with their bags as my mother pointed out one after another. She pushed back her thick dark hair and cast an appraising eye at us. “Let’s have the others sent on.”
Murdock, weighed down with two shoulder bags and a suitcase, looked at me. “Others?”
“This is an awful lot of stuff, Mom. How long are you staying?” I asked.
My mother and father exchanged glances as we moved toward the exit. “The High Queen sent us home,” she said.
I tried not to stumble. I loved my parents. I did. But I had gotten used to not making the obligatory weekly trips to visit since they had moved to Ireland over a decade ago to work for the Seelie Court. I didn’t know everything going on in their lives. The converse was true, but that was for the best. “Is something wrong?”
We piled the suitcases on the curb next to a black car. “Of course, but she didn’t say. She sent most of the court away. It’s all very mysterious. Is this us? I thought we ordered a limo.”
“I have a car,” Murdock said.
She smiled up at Murdock. “That’s so sweet of you. You can take those bags and meet us at the hotel.” She cocked her head up at my father. “Where are we staying, dear?”
“The Bostonian,” he said.
Murdock’s eyes went a little wider as Callin helped the driver pack bags into the trunk. I covered my smirk by slipping a suitcase into the backseat. “We’ll be right along behind you.”
My mother hopped into the backseat of the black car. “We’ll make room for you, Cal. The Clure can sit up front. See you at the hotel!” She waved as Callin squeezed in next to her and closed the door.
With a thin smile, my father lifted his head. “Got all that?” he asked.
I chuckled as he walked around to the other side of the car. “Got it.”
The car pulled away. I turned to smile at Murdock. The bags still dangled from his shoulders. With a flick of the wrist, he flung one at me, and I caught it with a laugh. “I wasn’t planning on chauffeuring you to a hotel,” he said.
I picked up the lone bag on the curb and walked to where Murdock had parked his car in the fire lane. “Oh, come on, Leo. It’s not like you don’t want to see more of this.”
He popped the trunk, and we pushed the bags in among his extra police gear, the spare tire, a milk crate filled with cleaning bottles, a pile of books, balled-up blankets, and a closed trash bag I was not going to ask about. It was cleaner than his backseat. “Oh, I think I’ve seen enough to get the picture,” he said.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said.
We got in the car, and he pulled into the exit lane. “Connie and Callie, huh?”
I glowered at him. “Oh, shut up.”
He giggled.
4
Despite mild pleading and promises of embarrassing family dynamics, Murdock resisted coming into the hotel. He helped unload his car onto a luggage trolley, then slammed the trunk and waved. “I have an appointment.”
“But you can eat all the olives in the minibar,” I said.
He smirked. “Bribing a police officer will get you a jail cell.”
I held out my hands, loosely together at the wrist. “Please?”
“Let me know if you get any leads on the dead elf,” he said, and pulled away. I didn’t mind. I loved my family, but having an independent ally around when we were all together would have been comforting. I pushed the trolley into the lobby, where a bellhop rushed to take it away from me.
The hotel suite had the hushed eloquence of money crossed with the generic style of hotel glamour. My parents weren’t rich, but they were comfortable. My mother appeared from the bedroom. She had removed most of the jewelry from the plane. “Why were you wearing everything you own?” I asked.
She hugged me with a chuckle, then settled onto the couch while the Clure rummaged in the bar. “People run up to you in airports and cut the strap off your carry-on.”
“Mother….” I said.
“They do! I read about it. I didn’t want to take any chances. Your father”—she eyed him dramatically—“thinks I’m alarmist, but here I sit with all my belongings.”
My father checked the view out the window. “Except for the diplomatic pouch with fifty thousand dollars you left in the coffee shop.”
Callin choked on his drink. “What the hell are you doing with fifty thousand dollars in cash?”
“Your mother was afraid the banks would fail while we were in flight,” my father said.
Callin stared at me, another one of our comrade moments, united in the baffling things our parents did. “Please tell me you have the pouch,” he said.
My mother tilted her head in thought. “Grey, you had the pouch last. Remember, I told you to tip the porter?” She used a pet name for my father in conversation, but when she used a name, it was Grey.
“You said give him the pouch,” he said.
My mother gasped in horror. “I said pound! Give him the pound! You had that change in your hand,” she said. When Callin groaned, my mother shot me an impish smile. She was not above playing on her son’s perception of her as crazy. She slapped Callin’s knee and laughed. Chagrined, he dropped his head back as he realized he had fallen for her act.
My mother and Cal worked like that, joking, chastising, teasing. They connected on a comfort level I never had with her. My parents were always my parents, loved and loving. I knew I could rely on them to fulfill certain needs, sometimes needs I didn’t know I had, but our relationships always remained child to parent. We weren’t friends in the sense that some parents became friends to their adult children, like Cal and my mother were. I didn’t resent it. It was who we were to each other.
Cal didn’t have the same relationship with our father that I had, and sometimes I wondered if he felt like I did about him and my mother. Thomas Grey was a man of few words and formidable intellect, someone whom I enjoyed, in the strictest sense of the word, spending an evening with debating politics or history or anything. He absorbed the happenings around him, picking up nuances, making connections that others failed to see. Even then, as Cal and my mother talked, I knew by the tilt of his head he was listening to every word even if he wasn’t cracking a smile. If Cal and my mother were friends of personality, my father and I were friends of the mind.
A burst of pink essence heralded the inevitable appearance of Joe to the gathering. He whooped as he circled the room, then plunged to my mother, wrapping his arms and legs around her neck. “Momma Grey!”
My mother took the assault with good nature. She and Joe were a mutual admiration society that served two members. “I was worried you had forgotten about me, dear.”
Joe reared back, mugging. “You? Forget you? Why I’d sooner forget to dress in the morning.”
My father gave a tired sigh. “Apparently, he did.”
Joe never wore more than his loincloth, and even that was a courtesy to nonflit sensibilities. “At least you don’t have to deal with his snoring,” I said.
My father tilted his head toward me. “And you haven’t seen the two of them in the garden after a few drinks.”
