Page 75 of Broken Chorus

“Unky Aaron?”

Her little voice yanked him out of the memory and brought him back to the problem at hand. Declan and his chair were about to be a temporary fixture around the property and the undercurrent of tension that had run between them at the show had never been resolved since he’d taken off for the airport the moment they’d come down off the stage.

Damn.

Fuck this was complicated.

He knew his discomfort around the chair was making it difficult for them to create together. Having Declan here, where he had no space to flee to get away from him…

Maybe he needed to just bite the bullet and have Hawk explain to her that Declan used his chair to get around and that it was different from the rolling one in the office. She was a little kid with a big imagination and her uncle had painted a pretty scary picture for her, in the hopes of keeping her safe. Shouldn’t Hawk be the one to explain the difference?

“Unky Aaron?” She said again, kicking her shoes against the base of her booster seat to get his attention.

“Yeah Dani?”

“Did Mr. Declan’s chair try and eat you?”

Well, that question had come from out of left field. Sputtering, he tried to figure out how to answer it and couldn’t think of a single flippant response.

“Dani, honey, we just went over this. Chairs don’t actually eat people. Your uncle Hawk was trying to use terms you’d understand. What he really meant, when he said the office chair might gobble you up, was that it could tip over on top of you and hurt you. It’s so much bigger than you, that we wouldn’t have even been able to see you if you couldn’t answer us, and we’d have been very upset if anything bad happened to you.”

“But if chairs don’t eat people, then why you scared of Mr. Declan?”

“Who said I was?”

“I heard you and Unky Hawk on the ‘puter, and you said you was scared. He is kinda scary. We be scared together.”

Awe shit.

“I…ummm, Dani, you see it’s, well it’s not exactly Declan that I’m scared of, or even his chair, though I wouldn’t want to get run over by it.”

“That would hurt!” She declared. “Liam ran over my foot with his peddle car and that hurted too!”

Would he ever learn to watch what the fuck he said? This conversation was not going well.

“I told Liam he should be careful,” she declared. “Want me to tell Mr. Declan be careful too?”

He could just picture her peeking around the corner at Declan wearing her sternest expression and a fairy princess tutu, wagging a finger at him while she lectured him, all while keeping well out of the way of that chair. The image left him laughing, shaking his head, and hoping Dani never stopped being her fierce, determined little self.

“How about we wait and see if he tries to run me over first, and then you can tell him to be careful if he gets too close?”

“But…what if it already too late? I don’t want you to get squishied like wildy coyote.”

In hindsight, the cartoons him and his bandmates had grown up with might not be the best thing for today’s kids. They might have to think twice about letting them watch old school Loony Tunes, at least until they could make certain the kids understood that real people wouldn’t just walk it off if you dropped an anvil on their head.

“I promise I’ll be extra careful.” Aaron said, hoping that would appease her.

“Pinky promise.”

“Pinky promise,” he assured her. “But only once we’re safely parked.”

“Okay,” she said, putting her little finger down.

He was failing at this conversation. In fact, he was a thousand percent positive he’d made everything worse. He should stick tothe things he knew, so in the spirit of that he told the vehicles smart speaker to pull up the playlist he’d made for the kids and let B.I.N.G.O. fill the SUV for her to sing along with. It produced the result he’d been hoping for. Dani fell asleep and stayed that way even after he’d parked the vehicles in the garage.

And now he was faced with another dilemma. Was he supposed to empty the vehicle and then bring her in, or bring her in, then empty the vehicle? Did it matter if the garage door was closed? They were in the middle of nowhere, it’s not like they were in some subdivision or parked on a city street.

The clock on the dash said it was almost lunch time. If he woke her and she was hungry, he’d have to choose between getting the perishables put away or getting her fed. With that in mind, he opened the door that led from the garage to the inside of the house and unloaded all the bags, lining the hall that led between the garage and the kitchen. At least doing it that way he was never far from Dani.

---