Page 14 of Prayers for the Prickly

Her eyes were alight with laughter, though, the same way they’d always been when I was a kid. Gramps still gave her a hard time about her free-spirited ways and teased Nana about hooking up with someone far softer and cuddlier than him. Now that I really thought about it, he said it all with the tiniest grin on that stern, gruff face. A grin similar to the one my father wore now, as he watched my mom cross the room to the dining room table, stare at all the pottery drying there, roll her eyes, and head for the kitchen, where at least we wouldn’t be trying to stare at one another over tall vases and flower pots.

“I’ll stop giving him a hard time when he stops finding new ways to confound and astonish me,” my old man told her. “You mark my words, he’s gotten into something. Judging from the way he’s standing there like he’s waiting for the floor to open up beneath him, I’d say it’s a doozy.”

“You just remember that he got that from you,” she told him. “That’s the same look you always gave me when something went wrong out there in the garage. And speaking of the garage…”

“No, we are not speaking of the garage at this moment,” he interrupted.

“Speaking of the garage,” my mom continued like he hadn’t said a single word. “This is the very last time I will ask you nicely to empty it out and take that mess to the thrift store. If it doesn’t go with you when you roll out of here tomorrow, you will come home to find it all on the lawn, along with anything else that needs donating from here and Mama’s house, too, while we hold a pop-up yard sale.”

While my old man sputtered and choked on a mouthful of beer, Mom led me to the kitchen and poured a couple of glasses half-full with grape lemonade before toping them off with sparkling cider. It was at the top of my list of favorite concoctions Mom had dreamed up, right along with mango lemonade sweet tea and pineapple mango mimosas. Now, I have never considered myself to be a mimosa sort of guy, if I was gonna drink something alcoholic, I preferred it to be beer, hard cider, or even harder whiskeys, but those mimosas had left me wanting to stick my pinky in the air like my little niece did when she drank her tea. Her mom was a proper European wolverine who’d happened to find her mate among a rough and tumble batch of slightly feral American ones. Sometimes she just looked at us like she was trying to work out why the goddess would give her such trying in-laws, but that always came right before she shucked off the air of priority that had been drilled into her and slogged out into the tide pools with the rest of us.

I came from a fishing family. With few exceptions, we all made our money off the water in some way. Even my shop, with its specific focus on driftwood, still relied on the ocean to season and shape the fallen limbs into something I could work with.

“In no way, shape, or form is their going to be a yard sale on my pristine lawn, woman!” Pops said as he finally came in and sat down.

There were a lot of things that got my old man’s dander up, a lot, lot of things, as in way too many to list, but right up there at the top of his list, jockeying for position withdon’t return my car with less gas than it had, don’t scratch my car, and don’t even think of touching my gear head magazines before I’ve had the chance to read them, was the grumpy, sour old man with a walker and a fifth of whiskey beside him bellowingstay the fuck off my lawn.

We’d set up a homemade slip and slide one time, with a roll of plastic contractor bags and several fistfuls of tent pegs, and he’d lost it, like literally lost it when he saw the crushed grass and long, slimy trail of mud underneath. I’ve never seen him put down a car magazine so fast, as when he’d rushed down to the corner store to pick up several lawn and garden magazines on his way to the super center for grass seed, fertilizer and lawn conditioner.

Seriously.

Lawn conditioner?

Who the hell even gets paid to dream up ideas like that?

If I knew where the hell their corporate offices were, I’d run right down there and tell them to sign me up. I was always coming up with ideas, some more ridiculous than others. My old man was right about that, but I’d never, not even once, hurt anybody who didn’t deserve it. I was definitely a fuck around and find out kind of guy, as many had discovered over the years, but I never ran around looking to start shit.

And speaking of starting shit, I still had no fuckin’ clue about how I was going to ease them into this conversation. Guess I’d better just go with the rip the band-aid off method. After all, that had gone over pretty well at the bakery with August’s family. Something told me those hedgehogs could be quite formattable when they got up in arms about something. The last thing this needed to turn into was one of those Shakespearean tragedies. I’d hated having to read the man’s stories back in high school. I’d like it even less if I was forced to live out the rest of my days trapped in such a worthless, hate-fueled scenario.

“I found my mate,” I declared as soon as my old man sat down with a fresh beer.

Mom sat up a little straighter, eyes sparkling as a bright smile crossed her face. When she clasped her hands to her lips and started dancing in her chair, I could practically feel the joy radiating off her, but would she still be that happy when she learned that August wasn’t a wolverine, a badger, or even a Martin?

“When do you plan on bringing them by so we can meet them?” Pops asked.

His expression gave me nothing, but then, he’d always been that way. Scowling and unreadable. It had always been difficult to determine if he was pleased, pissed, or hoping the conversation would end so he could get back to whatever it is he’d been doing.

“I wanted to make certain you would be okay with him first, before I brought him here,” I replied.

“Boy, we’ve known you were gay since you were thirteen, of course we expected your mate to be a man, how could they not be, when that’s who you’re attracted to?” Pops asked, forehead having grown more furrowed as he studied me.

“He’s not just a man, he’s a hedgehog, and I just, I wasn’t sure how it would be taken, that his flavor of shifter was so different from ours.”

Now my father sat up a little straighter and that pinched frown of his deepened even more.

“How do you feel about finding out that your mate is a prey animal?” Pops asked point blank.

“I didn’t even think to ask what flavor he was,” I admitted. “His aunt told me. All I cared about was that he smelled like sex and candy. I wanted to bury my nose in his hair and sniff every last inch of him.”

Pops never smiled.

Like seriously, the man barely managed a snarly feral grin most days, but today, the corners of his lips lifted briefly, right before he glanced over at my mother, his eyes brightening just a little. In it I could see the love he had for her and wondered if he was thinking back to when they’d first met.

“He and his people will be embraced with open arms,” Pops said, in that firm, no-nonsense tone of his.

And just like that I could stop worrying about Shakespearean tragedies and being the cause of a fracture within our family.

“I can’t wait to meet him, would the day after tomorrow be too soon to invite him and his folks over?” Mom said. “As long as we’re not out on the lawn trying to find a buyer for all the junk in the garage, your Nana and I should be able to whip up a bountiful spread.”

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