Luckily, thus ended the fight, though Brock didn’t give up. He just quit shouting about it. However, when he couldn’t find his furniture, he gave up and gave in.

Weirdly (or maybe not), this elevated my new girlfriend status, seeing as they’d found out I hadn’t been with Brock for a few weeks like they thought but instead quite a bit longer. They sensed there was seriousness to our relationship. I shared a tragic circumstance the like of which had been visited on their family, which clearly moved them. And, although I couldn’t explain how they did it or all the reasons why, I knew I’d been welcomed wholeheartedly into the family fold.

Brock, seeing as he missed little (or possibly nothing), couldn’t have missed this and he had no reaction to it whatsoever except for settling naturally and casually into it.

It was safe to say I really liked Brock but I’d also spent a number of years huddling in my own space as a defense mechanism and a big, loud, interfering family kind of freaked me out.

I kept this to myself, thinking that if Brock and I survived for the long haul, I’d get used to it mainly because I wouldn’t have a choice.

The other big thing that happened was I met Rex and Joel. In fact, the Friday after Brock and I got back together heralded his next weekend with them. He picked them up from school and three hours later I met them at Beau Jo’s for pizza.

Brock was not wrong. His genes were dominant. I didn’t know what Olivia looked like but both her boys looked like miniature Brocks. Joel had Fern’s blue eyes; Rex had someone else’s nose but other than that, features, body shape, everything was so like Brock it was uncanny. It was different, unique to them but still somehow the same.

And he was also not wrong about something else. They were good kids. Polite. Soft spoken. Attentive. Well-behaved.

Maybe too much for kids their age, considering they weren’t much older than Grady and they had none of the exuberant little kid-ness of their cousins.

I saw Brock every night (and therefore every morning) but when Brock had his boys, these were the only times he and I spent blocks of time being apart. He explained this to me as being an attempt to introduce me slowly into their lives rather than shove me in their faces and force them to spend time with someone they didn’t know too well. So, after our first Friday night dinner together, I didn’t see Brock until Sunday night. And the next time Brock had them I saw them again on Friday night and then didn’t see Brock until Sunday.