I raised my eyebrow. She hadn't answered my question and she knew it. "Mother?"
She chuckled and came over, sitting in the small chair next to the table I was using for my work. "Son, in so many ways in life, you have had me as someone to both get advice from and to help you with decisions. Not that I’ve always agreed or seen eye to eye with what you have decided."
“When your father said that he would train you in the same arts that made him his fortune, I was dead set against it. We may be Romani, and yes there are those that are more than willing to relieve a fool of his money, but I didn’t agree. You were just a child then, perhaps you didn’t understand, but he and I fought bitterly about it. But he was set on it, and in the end, I relented. After all, it was just training, games for a boy to learn, a skill like you have with the violin or your brother does with his cooking. Later, when you said you were going to follow in his footsteps, I, at first, disagreed, but held my tongue."
"Why?" I asked. My mother was many things, but she was not a woman known for holding her tongue if she disagreed with something. It had even caused Grandfather headaches.
"Because sometimes, a man, a real man at least, has to go out and do what’s right for him," she said. "If you love Jordan, then my opinion, or anyone's opinion, shouldn’t matter. The only thing that should matter is what your heart says, and what her heart says."
She patted me on the shoulder and kissed my forehead like she used to do when I was much younger. She went to the door, pausing before she left. "But if you must know, I like her."
We exchanged an embrace, and I left the house and went out to the barn, where I found Francois and Jordan training. Francois had opened the large doors on each side to give Jordan a bit more light to use, something I thought was a good idea. Father's ideas may have had a purpose for training the next generation of great thieves, but for training a young woman who wanted to just exercise while spending time with the men she loved, it was a bit much.
When I came in, she was trying her best to maneuver the monkey bars that stretched in an S-shape along one side of the area, her hair pulled back and braided into a thick red tinged brown cable that stretched halfway down her back.
"Come on, you're getting close," Francois said, positioned close behind her. His hands were ready to give her a support platform for her feet if she needed it but wasn't touching her. I thought back to when he and I had done the same thing Jordan was doing now. Of course, we were much smaller. "Five more rungs."
Jordan gritted her teeth and made it without having to put her feet into Francois's hands, dropping down to the dirt in a puff of dust on her dismount. "I swear those rungs get further apart the longer you go down the ladder," she huffed as she rolled out her arms. "Don't try and tell me they aren't."
I clapped in appreciation, getting their attention, Jordan smiling and blushing at the same time. "You’re right, they do," I told her. "I measured it myself once. Not much, but just enough to make it tougher.”
"Really?" Francois said, surprised. "I never knew that."
"I wondered why Father kept having us start on the same end of the ladder, so one day I took the measuring tape from the kitchen and checked for myself. How’s everything going?"
Jordan grinned. “Great. I crossed the first beam today."
I smiled. The barn was crisscrossed by a series of beams, some of them originally meant for support of the structure, but Father had installed others as well, narrowing until there was one that was actually just a strong steel bar one inch wide. The first beam was actually four inches wide and was one of the original timbers used to construct the barn. Not much of a challenge in terms of balance, but doing it nearly twenty feet in the air made it a mental challenge for sure. "Good. I’ll have to come watch the next time."
"What about you?" Jordan asked. "I've seen what Francois can do, what about you?"
"Yes, come now, Felix, we can’t spend all day just taking walks and working on the computer," Francois taunted me. "Surely you can do a little bit."
I cocked an eyebrow and crossed my arms over my chest. While it was true that Francois was better than me at the gymnastic challenges the barn presented, I was no couch potato. "Do you really want to go there?"
"I do," he said. "Would you like to place a wager on it?"
I thought about it, then nodded. Why not? It wasn't like our wagers were ever for anything serious, usually a silly prank or someone doing something for the other. One of our father's rules was that we were never to put money between us, and we had never broken that rule. "All right. What's the challenge?"
"Serie 4," Francois replied. "What are the terms?"
"If I complete it, then Jordan has to play guitar for our mothers after dinner tonight," I said. "If I lose, I play violin solo."