BONUS EPILOGUE
Hayes
There’s a vast difference between living a life of obligation and living a life of joy.
I’ve found I prefer the latter.
Even when it comes with two hundred screaming adolescents hyped-up on sugar sitting in an outdoor amphitheater for campfire skits and the end of the summer marshmallow roast.
Yes, yes, I’ve spent most of the summer hiding in the main house or the offices, or utilizing the private areas that Begonia insisted be roped off from the campers—and by roped off, she means triple-gated with fences and hedges and trees and monitored with cameras and motion detectors like a prison, because she did grow up as a camper and knows what they’re capable of.
And we do enjoy all manners of adult activities inside and out of the old farmhouse that we’ve renovated.
But it’s been a remarkably good first summer of camp, especially considering this is the last place that would’ve ever crossed my mind as a place I’d be happily settled with a woman I found naked in my bathroom just over a year ago.
I insisted we add a few touches as only Razzle Dazzle can, and so the camp food is edible, the beds are comfortable, and the entertainment has been top-notch. It’s been a lot of hard work, but at my entire family’s insistence, we’ve intentionally taken a loss on this division in order to fully staff the project and keep Begonia and myself from overworking ourselves.
I barely make forty hours most weeks.
Begonia, meanwhile, squeezes seventy-four thousand hours into every single day, and still has time to sit and eat dinner with me each night, walk our private trails on the land surrounding the campsite that I’ve acquired for additional privacy, and dance beneath the stars while the woodland creatures watch.
Plus, I insist she takes at least a week off every month. Call it privilege if you must.
I call it making sure Begonia takes time to experience the world instead of making her world solely exist inside the camp boundaries. We often head to Maine, but we’ve also been to Portugal, Argentina, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, and a number of European countries, some merely for dinner and the plane ride.
But not Paris.
Despite my regular contributions of a dollar here or five dollars there, and her comfortable camp art director salary that she insists is too much, Begonia is still somehow three years from saving enough for Paris.
It seems she can’t help donating to good causes when she has a few dollars in the bank, which suits me just fine.
And I utterly adore watching her occasionally count her piggy bank, and then yell at me when she realizes I’ve helped.
We’ve also seen the world’s largest ball of string, spent a week at Razzle Dazzle Village with Hyacinth and her family, took a train ride through the Rocky Mountains, attempted to learn fly fishing, got lost in Tennessee and accidentally crashed a wedding, and got lost in Iowa and accidentally crashed a funeral.
I’ve never known so much joy in my life, nor had beverages so regularly come out my nose at the dinner table, as I have since finding Begonia singing in my bathroom.
Full disclosure: the nose beverages are generally a result of Hyacinth’s visits, and not because Begonia enjoys torturing me.
I’m beverage-free as I stand at the edge of the campfire circle, which is a phrase that does not do the amphitheater justice. Three teenage girls have just re-enacted a pivotal scene from the latest Razzle Dazzle film on the stage, and Hyacinth has shoved her youngest at me so that she can clap the loudest. “That was way better than any acting Jonas Rutherford has ever done!” she calls.
“I can hear you, Hy,” Jonas says from my other side.
“She’s aware,” my mother tells him dryly.
Begonia, who couldn’t possibly let the final campfire of the season go without insisting her job as art director also made her final campfire director tonight, squints past the campfire, trying to see us. “Would you look at that?” she says to the campers. “I think my twin sister’s here. I can’t see her, but that sounded like her. Who wants to see me get doubled?”
All forty-two million pre-teens and teenagers erupt in screams of joy.
To meet Begonia is to love her, and I’m reasonably confident she knows every last camper by name.
“This suits Begonia,” my mother says as Hyacinth leaves two of her children with us and bounds down the stairs. It’s odd how natural it feels to hold her baby, who’s a slobbery little boy with mischief written in every ounce of his being. Unless he’s cuddling, which he’s perfectly content to do right now, and I’m perfectly content to let him.