Page 28 of Nineteen Seventy-Six

Colleen accepted the cool drink from her husband, as he handed the other to Elizabeth. “Nothing like a little Dixie to get the Southerners animated,” she joked.

“I suspect some are wishing they were still there.”

“Some?” Elizabeth raised both cynical brows. “Look at these old men, slapping their knees and singing about cotton, dreaming about all the ways they could’ve turned the tide and won the War of Northern Aggression.”

“It’s the moonshine,” Noah said, giving her a soft elbow. “Kills brain cells.”

“Racism kills brain cells.”

Colleen shook her head. “We’ll raise our children to be better than that. I’d like to think the farther we get from monstrous acts, the better we are.”

“History tells us otherwise,” Elizabeth said, rolling Anasofiya back and forth. “Humans are always monsters, we just do better from time to time, and when the low bar is genocide, well, anything looks decent.”

Noah examined his Coca-Cola. “Maybe I should have upgraded to beer for this conversation.”

Olivia tapped Colleen’s leg. She looked down, and the little girl was pointing at her red can.

“Better not, sweet thing. Your mother would kill me.”

“You think those are the wide eyes of someone who’s seen a Coke for the first time?” Elizabeth quipped. “Someone’s been sneaking that kid some junk food.”

“When I look at her, it’s like looking at a baby Maureen,” Colleen mused. “They could be twins.”

“Thank God she doesn’t look like her father,” Elizabeth said.

“Hey, why didn’t Maureen come with us today?” Noah asked.

“I’m not real sure,” Colleen replied. “She said she was meeting someone, but didn’t say who or what about.”

Elizabeth snickered to herself.

Nicolas started slapping his feet against the stroller, making grunting sounds. Colleen lifted him from the stroller, and he wiggled until she let him down on the pavement, where he immediately found strong footing. He bucked to the music, laughing, emoting what Charles called his “baby language,” a series of incomprehensible syllables that seemed to make complete sense to Nicolas, and no one else. He talked to himself, to his toys, to his cousins, entire conversations, but nothing he said was a word anyone recognized. Charles told her only geniuses make up languages, like that guy who wrote Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien?

Eh?

The man who wrote… never mind.

Nicolas squealed as a float of Uncle Sam, decked in rich red, white, blue, silver, and gold, rolled by. Beads of the same colors flew from the top, and one landed at his feet.

“Dada!” he cried, and all three adults whipped their necks around.

“What did you say?” Colleen asked him.

Nicolas bent to pick up the beads, but Noah was quicker. “Captain Germ Away is here to save the day!”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

“Dada!” Nicolas cried, reaching for the beads.

“Should we tell him?” Colleen asked. “He’ll be so happy!”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Better to pretend when he hears it for the first time that it’s really his first word. His ego can’t handle his sisters hearing it first.”

“True,” Colleen said. She looked at Noah. “I think he wants those beads for his father.”

Noah smiled and slipped them into his pocket. “We’ll wash them up, then, so he can give them to Dada.”

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