Xavier was born with a thick head of dark hair like mine. Yet he awoke every morning with the same mess of hair like his mom. Often during our breakfast runs next door to the store, Harlow and Xavier simply wore hats to avoid dealing with their wild bed heads. I always made sure to run my fingers through my well-behaved hair to ensure I received a sexy pout from my wife.
Our life in the city was everything I'd hoped. I worked a lot from home and spent most of my time with Harlow. My coworkers were like me, wanting to settle down after years of spilling blood all over the world. I no longer accepted dangerous assignments, instead playing bossman and organizing jobs for the others. By the time Nadine was born, I stopped looking over my shoulder so often. I was also ready to move to the suburbs.
Harlow loved our condo and didn't particularly want to move. I smiled when she listed all the reasons four people in a fifteen hundred foot condo made sense. My woman always clung to what she knew.
A new build house wooed her away from the condo. We enjoyed picking out flooring, paint, and other features. Mostly, I picked and she agreed. Harlow had no eye for design. She was just curious at how an empty plot turned into our dream house.
The plan was two kids, yet we fortunately overbuilt the house and added extra bedrooms. Blessed with a boy and a girl, we had a child for each of us to focus on when we traveled. As I told Harlow though, life did what it wanted and planning often proved pointless.
Quentin was our last. I had a vasectomy afterwards, just to be sure. The guys at the office teased me about getting neutered.
"When you're this much of a man," I told them, flexing my muscles, "you have nothing to prove."
With our brood in tow, we often spent time in Ellsberg at a small house we bought. Every summer, the crew played convoy with our RVs, traveling farther each time. In Houston, I enjoyed Saturday date nights with Harlow and Sunday dinners with my parents.
My life was damn near perfect. Those years in Mexico stained a decade where all I knew was blood and violence. The next decade with Harlow and our three little ones erased the pain that came before. They reminded me of the beauty in the world and inside of me. Anchored in the present with my dreamcatcher, I never suffered another fitful night.