Susan clucked her regret. “Mr. Sterling is on a plane en route from Fort Lauderdale. He won’t land in Savannah until—” she paused and Jo distantly heard papers rattling “—six-fifteen.”
Bent double and holding Billy’s hand rigid, Jo said tightly, “I have a very important meeting in an hour and a half—what am I supposed to do?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Susan chirped.
Biting her cheek to gather her patience, Jo took another tack. “Do you have a list of sitters Mr. Sterling uses?” Jo glanced over to see Jamie standing on a tall, rickety sofa table, holding the end of a thin curtain sheer and gauging the distance to the ground. Surely he’s not going to jump.
He brandished a plastic sword in one hand to an imaginary enemy on the floor. “Off with your hand, Cap’n Hook!”
He’s going to jump. “Jamie!” Jo shouted, half lunging toward him, but she wasn’t quick enough and the phone cord brought her up short.
“I’m Peter!” he yelled as he grabbed the curtain with his free hand and leaped from the tall table.
“Watch out!” Jo yelled as the curtains fell. Jamie was buried in an avalanche of dingy sheers. She dropped the phone and rushed over to the little boy. “Are you all right?” she gasped. Billy cheered for his older brother.
After a terrific ripping sound, Jamie’s head popped up. He grinned. “That was fantabulous!”
Jo exhaled noisily, then commanded, “Get out from under there and sit still until I get off the-phone.”
Rushing back to the swinging handpiece, Jo shifted Billy to her other hip and said, “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” Susan said, her voice smug.
“So, do you have a list of sitters?”
“I used to.”
“Used to?”
“It became a short list very quickly after Mr. Sterling moved to town. Now there isn’t a day care in town who’ll take the boys.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m quite serious.”
“Well, if you won’t help me, then I’ll find someone myself.”
“Good luck,” Susan said, and hung up.
Claire emerged, empty-handed. “We’re out of diapers.”
Jo closed her eyes and counted to ten. “Claire, is there a neighbor you can stay with for a few hours until your dad gets home?”
The little girl shook her head. “We’re not allowed to go to the neighbors’.”
“Not even in an emergency?”
Claire shook her head more emphatically. “They posted signs to keep Jamie out.”
“I’m Peter!”
“Your neighbors posted signs?”
Claire nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’m probably going to regret asking this, but why?”
“He set off smoke bombs in all of their garbage cans.”
“Cub Scout training,” Jamie injected proudly.
“Claire, do you have a list of sitters your dad uses?”
“It’s in the back of the phone book.”
Jo could feel a new kind of wetness seeping through her dress and eyed Billy warily. “Did you pee-pee?”
Billy grinned. “Uh-huh.”
She groaned, then said sternly, “You have to get down for a few minutes until I can change your diaper.” When the little boy resisted, she shushed him. “Just until I make a few phone calls.” Claire took Billy’s hand and tried to divert him.
Jo pulled out the phone book and turned to the back page. Fifteen names or so had been handwritten below “baby-sitters,” but each had been struck off with a black marker. Jo decided to try anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Jo said pleasantly. “Is this Carla?”
“Yes,” the girl said cautiously.
“My name is Jo Montgomery and I need a sitter for John Sterling’s kids—”
Click.
“Hello?” Jo asked. “Hello?”
After receiving the same response from the next two sitters, Jo glanced at her watch nervously. If she missed the meeting at four, she’d sacrifice the biggest deal of her career, and possibly jeopardize her entire business.
She scanned John Sterling’s card for his office address. Maybe she’d just leave them with good ole Susan until Mr. Sterling arrived. But the address was across town, and Jo knew she’d never be able to make the trip and get back to her own office in time to meet with her client.
Frantically, she redialed Susan’s number.
“This is Jo Montgomery again. I’m taking the children to my office for a few hours.” She gave the secretary her number and address. “I’ll bring them back here once my meeting is over. Could you let Mr. Sterling know so he’ll be home as soon as possible?”
“Sure thing,” Susan said cheerfully. “I hope you have good insurance.”
Jo hung up, and muttered, “What a witch. Okay, kids,” she announced with much false bravado. “Everyone’s going with me.”
“We can’t,” Claire said, her face serious. “We’re not supposed to leave with people we don’t know very well.”
Jo nodded patiently. “And that’s a very smart thing but right now, I have no choice but to take you with me. Tell you what, why don’t we write a note to your daddy about where you’re going, and we’ll leave it for him in case he comes home before we get back, okay?”
Claire considered the situation, then relented. “But I’ll write the note,” she said in a superior tone.
“Fine,” Jo said, glancing at the boys’ painted bodies. “I’ll get these two cleaned up. Where’s the bathroom?”
Jamie led the way up curving stairs to a cyclone-tossed bedroom with two beds on the floor. “This is our room,” he announced. “Me and Billy.”
Jo smiled woodenly, her nerves fraying at the sight of the unkempt quarters. Toys lay broken and strewn, bedcovers loose and knotted in disarray. The dingy off-white walls were punctuated with small holes and marks from shoes, paint, markers and crayons. Juice boxes and food wrappers dotted the floor. An aquarium bubbled in the corner on a brokendown desk, its water suspiciously purple. Goldfish darted from corner to corner, apparently unaffected. At Jo’s unasked question, Jamie offered, “If you mix red and blue food coloring, you get purple.”
Jo picked her way through the mess and at last they entered a spacious bathroom. A shower curtain hung from three rings. The mirror above the toothpaste-caked sink was cracked. Gaping holes and scars above the naked window testified to another set of curtains Jamie had bested.
“Well, now,” Jo said cheerfully, “out of these clothes and into the shower.”
“We don’t take showers,” Jamie said, his arms crossed. “We take baths.”
“Showers are much quicker,” Jo cajoled. “Besides, I know for a fact Peter Pan took a shower every day.”
“Nuh-uh,” Jamie said warily.
“Uh-huh,” Jo said, nodding. “He hung a bucket with holes in it from a tree and stood under it for his shower.”
Jamie’s eyes lit up. “Let’s try that—I’ve got a bucket and there’s a big tree in our neighbor’s backyard!”
“Whoa,” Jo said, catching the boy as he started to run from the room. “We’ll save that for another day. Right now, we’re in a hurry.” She leaned into the tub and turned on the faucet, adjusting the water temperature.
Jamie obliged by stripping off his shorts and underwear, then winding them up and zinging them past her head into the bedroom. Completely comfortable with his nakedness, he jumped into the tub and squealed with glee when Jo turned on the shower.
“Where’s the soap?” Jo asked, opening the vanity drawer but coming up empty.
Jamie’s face fell. “We gotta use soap?”
“Definitely.”
“It’s under my bed,” he grumbled.
Jo sighed and returned to the bedroom. She lifted the corner of the covers falling over the edge of the first bed and reached underneath, terror bolting through her when her hand touched something warm and furry. Jo fell bac
k, screaming as a creature lunged at her from the darkness.
“What’s wrong?” Jamie yelled, running into the room, dripping wet.
“A rat!” Jo shrieked, jumping out of her heels and onto a chair, peering all around for the rabid creature.
Jamie giggled. “It’s just Tinker, my hamster. She got loose.” He bent over and scooped up the fuzzy brown animal. “Thanks for finding her, Jo.”
Jo’s shoulders went limp. “Anytime.” She climbed down from the chair and reclaimed her shoes, then gingerly stuck her hand back into the darkness. She sighed in relief when her hand closed around a bar of dust-covered soap. Victorious, she ordered Jamie back to the shower. She returned to the bathroom and finally managed to undress Billy, then shrank back from the horrible odor as she peeled away the heavy diaper. Jo gagged twice, fighting for control of her rolling stomach.
“Peee-yuuuuu!” Jamie yelled from the shower.
“Pee-yu.” Billy giggled, his hands immediately finding the smelly mess.
“No!” Jo yelled, grabbing his wrists. “I don’t believe this,” she muttered. Holding his hands high with her one hand, she stuffed toilet paper in her nostrils to ward off the fetid smell, then washed Billy’s hands in the sink.
“Are you finished, Jamie?” she asked.
“I’m Peter!” he roared.
“Are you finished?”
“Yeah,” he said, emerging to stand on the bath mat Jo had spread on the floor.
One glance at his still-paint-streaked body and Jo jerked her thumb toward the tub. “Back in, mister, and lather up.” She stood Billy in the shower and ordered Jamie to look after him while she went in search of a scrub brush. Claire helped her find one in the utility room. “I need you to find a washcloth and take care of Billy,” Jo said, rolling up her sleeves and heading back to the bathroom. “I’ll handle Jamie.”
“How much?” Claire asked, rooted to the spot.
Jo turned back. “How much what?”
“How much are you gonna pay me?”
Jo’s jaw dropped. “Pay you? You’re kidding, right?”
Claire pursed her lips and shook her head slowly.
Glancing at her watch, Jo decided to postpone the lecture that came to her lips. “One dollar.”
“Two dollars,” Claire said stubbornly, her expression never changing.
Jo crossed her arms. The little chiseler! “A buck fifty.”
After another adjustment to her glasses, Claire said, “One dollar and seventy-five cents.”
“Okay,” Jo agreed tiredly, taking a step toward the bathroom.
“Cash in advance,” Claire said, primly holding out her little hand.
Jo stopped, sighed and reached for her purse. “I see we have a budding lawyer in the family,” she declared as she counted coins. “Now, let’s get your brothers washed up.”
Jamie was blasting out an ear-splitting rendition of “I’ll Never Grow Up,” and Billy was sitting in the front of the tub, safely out of reach of the cleansing spray, seemingly fascinated with the water swirling down the drain. He giggled and hiccuped, and Jo watched in amazement as a huge soap bubble formed in the O of his mouth, then popped out and floated away. Billy laughed and more bubbles floated out.
Jamie stopped singing long enough to join in Billy’s laughter. “He took a bite out of the soap,” he informed Jo, pointing to a missing chunk.
“Oh my God!” Jo yelled, reaching in the tub to grab Billy by the shoulders. She hardly noticed her hair and shoulders were being splattered. “Shouldn’t we call poison control or something?”
“He’ll be all right,” Claire declared. “He’s done it before, that’s why we have to hide the soap. He’ll have the poops for a couple of days, that’s all.”
Billy giggled again and blew bubbles into Jo’s face. She leaned back on her heels and clutched her hand to her heart in an effort to slow her pulse. “Let’s get to work,” she instructed Claire.
“Yeooowwww!” Jamie screamed when Jo reached in and raked the brush across his back.
“Stand still,” she ordered. “It’s soft and it won’t kill you.” She ruthlessly scrubbed every stain from the boy’s body in between his protests. With some aggressive cleaning, Claire managed to remove most of the paint from a protesting Billy. Jo glanced at her watch again. Forty-five minutes left, and the drive would take fifteen.
Claire had found two towels and the boys were soon rubbed dry, their skin now glowing pink.
“Get dressed,” Jo commanded Jamie.
“We’re out of diapers for Billy,” Claire reminded Jo.
Jo expelled a noisy sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, summoning patience. “Find a white hand towel.”
Once Claire had provided the towel, it took Jo several minutes to persuade a wriggling Billy to lie still while she found a way to pin it around him. After several false starts and a couple of bloody stabs into her own fingers, she finally fashioned a passable diaper and fastened the sides with two lapel pins from her ruined dress. “Shouldn’t you be potty-trained by now?” she mumbled to the bejeweled toddler.
“He’s difficult,” Claire repeated.
“I’m ready,” Jamie announced.
Dressed in a green sweat suit, à la Peter, he stood proudly, arms akimbo, a black towel tied around his neck and trailing down his back.
“What’s with the towel?” Jo whispered to Claire.
“It’s his shadow,” she whispered back. “Don’t you know anything about Peter Pan?”
Jo took a cleansing breath. She instructed Claire to find clothes for Billy, then herded everyone downstairs. Hurriedly, she added a few sentences to Claire’s note to John, then locked the front door with a key Claire produced on a chain around her neck.
As Jo unlocked her sports sedan, however, Claire balked. “Where’s the car seat?”
Jo blinked. “Car seat?”
“For Billy, he has to sit in a car seat.”
Jo chewed her bottom lip. “Really?”
Jamie frowned, disgusted. “Aren’t you a mommy?”
Foolishly feeling as if she’d just received the ultimate insult, Jo cocked an eyebrow and leveled her gaze on him. “As a matter of fact, no, I’m not a mommy.”
“We have an extra car seat in the house,” Claire offered quietly, pushing her glasses up.
The trip back inside for the car seat was followed by another for Billy’s bedraggled blankie, then one more to retrieve another book for Claire. Somehow in all the commotion, the girl had managed to finish reading the first one.
By the time she strapped everyone in, Jo had eleven minutes left to make the fifteen-minute drive. As soon as she turned over the engine, her car phone rang.
Jo picked up the handset as she pulled out of the driveway. “Hello?”
“Josephine, where the green blazes are you?”
Jo smiled at her aunt’s familiar habit of misspeak. “Hattie, I’m on my way. Have the Pattersons arrived?”
“With shoes on.”
“You mean, ‘with bells on’?”
“No bells, dear, just shoes.”
Jo shook her head and muttered a prayer for strength. “Stall them—I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Jo, how was the Sterling appointment?”
At that precise moment, Billy’s blankie slid to the floor. On cue, the toddler’s bottom lip jutted out, his head dropped back and he howled.
“Jo? Do I hear a baby?”
“Shh, shh,” Jo breathed to Billy, and switched the phone to her left shoulder. Keeping one hand on the wheel, and one eye on the road, Jo stretched as far as she could, but couldn’t reach the blanket without risking life and limb of everyone in the car.
“Jo? Are you there?”
Billy’s cries had reached a crescendo when he saw even Jo couldn’t get his blanket back. “Hattie,” Jo gasped. “I’ll be right there.” She slammed down the receiver and tried to console Billy, but he thrashed his arms in fury.
&n
bsp; Jo looked in the rearview mirror for help, but Claire had buried her nose in the new book. Without glancing up, the little girl did offer one morsel of wisdom.
“He’s difficult.”
Jamie seemed quietly preoccupied with making tortuous faces at the little girl in the car next to them. Both of the older children appeared adept at tuning out their little brother—an acquired skill, Jo noted.
She welcomed the next red light, and used the-opportunity to unfasten her seat belt and retrieve the blanket, but Billy was wound up and not ready to relinquish his control over his captive audience. The car to her left honked and Jo looked over to see the woman passenger had rolled down her window. Jo frowned and did the same, only to hear the woman screech, “Can’t you control your own children? That boy of yours is scaring my Kathy.”
Jo craned her neck in time to see Jamie cross his eyes at the little girl. “Jamie!” she admonished over Billy’s cries.
“I’m Peter!”
“Stop making faces!”
Jamie glared, and sat back in a huff, then shouted, “Itsy, Bitsy Spider.”
“What?” Jo asked, wincing at the decibels Billy reached.
“Sing ‘Itsy, Bitsy Spider,’” Jamie yelled. “It’s Billy’s favorite.”
Jo rolled her eyes, and declared, “I don’t sing.” But minutes later when Billy had turned blue from his efforts at breaking the sound barrier, she sighed and started singing low and off-key.
Billy stopped midscream and looked at Jo expectantly.
“You gotta do the hand motions,” Jamie supplied in a bored voice.
Jo leaned forward and slowly banged her forehead against the steering wheel.
2
JOHN STERLING shifted in his first-class seat, then folded a stick of sugarless gum into his mouth and began chewing to ease the pressure in his ears. Somewhere behind him in coach an infant started crying, and he hoped the mother knew enough to give it a bottle or a pacifier to suck on. An instant later, he bit down on his bottom lip and shook his head in self-recrimination. As if he were some parenting guru to dole out advice.
The faces of his children passed through his mind—Claire and Billy so blond, Jamie as darkly redheaded as himself. His heart wheeled, as it always did when he thought of his rambunctious crew. Once the plane reached cruising altitude and the drink carts emerged, he inserted a credit card into the phone slot on the seat in front of him and released the receiver. Within a few seconds of dialing, the flat peal of his home phone sounded in his ear. After five rings, the recorder picked up and Jamie’s gruff little voice came on the line.
Kids Is A 4-Letter Word Page 2