#4: "Key to Her Skate"
A mighty thump from above. Erin shriek. Hawkeye shout.
In a second, B.J. was around the desk, across the hall, and up the stairs two at a time. Hawkeye's had Erin in his lap on the top step, a welt on her shin, dress disheveled. She was crying with all-out abandonment. He looked frightened and furious.
"Dammit, Erin, no roller skates on the stairs," Hawkeye said.
"I leh-left my skate key - in my room," she gasped over her hitching sobs.
"Deep breaths, honey." B.J. sat on the lower step beside his kid and put her wounded leg in his lap. She was fine, just a bump. "What did she do?" he asked Hawkeye.
Hawkeye felt her skull, irritated and worried. "Tried to climb the stairs in her skates and tumble back down like Jack and Jill."
"And broke my crown." Erin wiped her face on her arm. Hawkeye mopped her snot with his handkerchief.
B.J. lifted the tin skate key from around Erin's neck. "It's right here. Did you forget?"
Erin pushed her sweaty curls away from her face. "Yes."
B.J. glanced at Hawk. They shared a Mature Adult conference over her head. She was lying. B.J. unlocked the skates from Erin's red Buster Browns.
"No more skates today, Erin, you're scaring the hell out of me," B.J. said while he chipped his nails on the tiny, tight buckles.
"But I forgot it!" Erin said. Meaning it wasn't her fault she'd been forced by circumstances to be naughty.
Hawkeye set her up on her feet. She wobbled on the step, skidding her hand on the wood railing, looking up at the two men who loomed before her, not buying it. Her little feet turned inward, one Mary Jane toe covering the other.
"Are you sure?" Hawkeye said.
Erin squirmed like she had to go potty. "I was gonna see how far I could go on my skates if I slid down the railing and jumped."
Hawkeye turned, coughing. B.J. closed his eyes.
"Back steps," he said. "Go sit, five minutes."
"But I could do it, Daddy!"
"Five minutes, no talking, no toys." B.J. pointed at the kitchen door, shouting as she went. "You could have broken your neck! Do you know what happens to little girls who fall on their vertebrae? For the rest of your life, you're just a head!"
"I know, I know," Erin said as she thumped down the steps. She did her elephant feet in the hall and banged the kitchen door hard enough to bounce it off the wall. They let it slide.
Hawkeye was snickering to himself as they walked up to the landing on the second storey. From here, they could see their small back yard, Erin's reading tree, and the angry five year old, the top of her head, as she plopped hard onto her designated time out step.
"She could have killed herself," B.J. said.
"We should put her in tumbling class," Hawkeye said.
"Or sell her to the circus. World's tiniest death-defying acrobat on roller skates. Is this the kind of thing I should spank her for?"
"Do you want to?"
"No," B.J. admitted. "I spanked her once in her whole life and I still haven't forgiven myself. Maybe that's why she's a hellion."
Hawkeye touched his back, lumbar area, affectionate and soothing. "She's just got a lot of creativity."
"Did you hear her fall?"
"I went into my room for just a second." Hawkeye held up two fingers a hair's width apart: that much time. "I came out to tell her to take it easy on the flooring and I got as far as, 'get those things off your feet' and she just sailed backward. I mean, I actually imagined her for a second on the operating table with an intracranial hemorrhage and her whole body one big maraca. I grabbed her by the arm and she just crumpled - Beej, I almost missed. She could have gone down like - like I don't what I think about what."
B.J. rested his arm on Hawkeye's shoulder. Erin was stomping her feet on the rotted step for the simple satisfaction of destroying something. Hawkeye rapped his knuckle on the glass. She looked around, not knowing from where she was being observed. Both men jumped away from the window. It was a useful tool in child-training: don't let them know the source of your omnipotence.
"She's fine," B.J. said. "Of the three of us, she's the least upset."
"She's five," Hawkeye said. "All she cares from is we took her toys away."
"Do you remember being that invincible?" B.J. said.
"Yeah. I do."
B.J. put his arm around Hawkeye's waist; he covered the hand with his own.
"You're good with her," B.J. said.
"She's here every other week," Hawkeye said. "She's almost like my . . ." he stopped.
"She is," B.J. said. "We can be a - I don't know. Two good friends who raise a kid together? Why doesn't she call you 'uncle' anymore?"
"Because she knows we're not brothers."
Hawkeye was thinking of the factual way that children state things. But the words echoed up in the silent hall. His feelings for B.J. weren't as a brother and he could think of a dozen instances when B.J. displayed beyond all doubt that he didn't think of him in a family manner, either.
They turned, still wrapped up together. B.J. ran the backs of his fingers down Hawkeye's cheek.
"Hawk, why did you move across the country?"
Hawkeye sought for an answer. The best he could come up with was a kiss.
This was right. This was them. An expected outgrowth of all they had been creating, first in their tent during the war, the OR, the foreshortened half-start in Maine, and the gradual trust they'd been building for six months in their house in San Francisco. And it was their house, their life. They didn't have to live by the expectations of God or Peggy or Daniel Pierce or even - though they loved them - their queer family of friends. They were building something new and unique and scary, but it was theirs.
Everything changed with that kiss. For Hawk and Beej, everything already had.