Congratulations to Taint and Lily
As they announce the gender of
The latest addition to the
Townsend family xxx
Underneath it was a picture of the scan we’d given him after the appointment yesterday. Seeing my baby and the message made it easier not to be irritated by him calling me Taint, just. There he was, my son – perfection in a belly. His thumb was in his mouth, he looked like he’d swallowed a tennis ball, two arms, two long legs, a button nose, a huge head that the doctor assured us wasn’t abnormally sized… it was the most beautiful sight in the world.
That was until I looked more closely at it and saw that the asshole had photoshopped a pair of horns onto the top of my kid's head.
Fucking devil horns on my baby.
“Don’t worry,” he said, walking up behind me and smacking me on the shoulder. “I made sure I sharpened the picture for you before I sent it to the newspaper to announce the upcoming arrival of the latest Townsend,” he whispered in my ear, like he was doing me a favor.
Not letting anyone see that it had gotten to me, I grinned at him and turned around. “Don’t think you’re off his shit list,” I warned, nodding my head in Gramps direction. “He’ll make sure you suffer too.”
“Nah, he said if I did this, he’d cross me off his…”
“I lied,” Gramps hissed as he walked past us on his way to the doors at the front of the house. “Pinata anyone?”
Glaring at my brother one last time, I walked up and slipped my hand into Lily’s. We’d organized this part of the party, so at least I knew it was safe.
Until I saw there were actually two of them.
Shit!
Going over to the first one with my arm around her, we stared at the giant sperm dangling from the tree with a huge smile on its face. Down the side of it in pink and blue lettering were the words ‘Who dunnit– the X or the Y?’.
Feeling Lily’s shoulders shaking beside me, I leaned in and acted like she was crying to make the old bastard feel guilty.
“Don’t encourage him, think what the boy’s first birthday will be like,” I muttered, patting her consolingly and glaring at him.
His shit-eating grin said it all.
“I am,” she snickered. “That’s what’s so funny. Oh shit, what are my parents faces like?”
Chancing a glance at them, I saw her mom reacting the same way as her daughter, while her dad pinched the bridge of his nose. Yeah, dude, I feel you. Beside them, my mom was standing with her mouth open, and then she turned and glared at Gramps. Dad on the other hand was laughing loudly while he held his side.
“Oh, Jesus. That’s freaking hilarious,” he howled.
“Be grateful it wasn’t a taint,” Gramps said loudly, smiling smugly at me.
“West field, old man. I’ve got a direct line to the people who’ll make it happen,” I snapped back, watching as the smile fell off his face.
Yeah, I thought that would work. Once upon a time, most likely during the Prohibition period, he’d wanted to be buried there. The bull my uncle owned had somehow caught wind of that plan and refused to go to the bathroom anywhere but there. That meant that unless he wanted to be buried under a pile of crap, or have his ashes dug up by the big fella when he scored the ground with his hooves, he’d had to abandon that plan.
Just then, Grams and Mom started humming the song We Are Sailing, and quickly switched to Leaving on a Jet Plane, both of which were sore points for him. He didn’t want to have his ashes scattered in the sea thanks to movies like Jaws, and not long ago he’d announced he was going skydiving with a friend of Noah’s, and had then promptly changed his mind after a news report about a man who’d tried to kill his wife by cutting the cords on her chute.
“Anyway,” Levi drawled, nodding at the pinatas. “As fun as it is tormenting him, and trust me, I intend to do that myself,” he glared over at him. “We’re here to find out if we’re having a girl or boy…”
“It’s a boy,” I said loudly, but they all knew I didn’t know that for sure.
They’d be sorry when the Mayans and Chinese proved them wrong in a second.
Not missing a beat, he continued, “So, let’s get whacking the big giant sperm.”
“Now there’s a sentence you never thought you’d say,” Noah chuckled, pulling Luna into his side and smiling down at Jamie who was playing with her feet in his arms. “Uncle Levi said they should whack the big giant sperm,” he told her in that voice you can’t help using with a baby. “Isn’t he silly, he is, yes, but there’s a big sperm right there. You’ll never need to know what that is, because Daddy and your uncles will shoot the ass…”
“Noah!” Luna snapped, glaring at him and then smiling down at her daughter who was laughing uncontrollably – probably at her dad’s face because I know it made me laugh when I saw it. God, I loved my niece.
“Let’s go,” Lily muttered, picking up the stick.
Hanging from another branch was the pinata we’d ordered in a normal circular shape. It had seemed innocent and non-gender specific at the time, but now it looked like the sperm was heading toward the egg. My fucking family!
Sighing, I waved at Senor Spermatozoa. “Hit that one first.”
With strength and anger that surprised me, Lily started hitting it. When nothing happened after ten conks to the sperms noggin and tail, Archer walked into the house and came back out with the bat he’d used when he was in high school. “Here, use this.”
Taking it from him, I walked up to the still smiling jizz monster and gave it my all. What felt like a thousand hits later, but was only thirty-seven when we counted thanks to the video Levi had taken, it burst open and out popped… condoms?
“You’re welcome,” Gramps shouted as he started picking up handfuls and handing them out to all the members capable of making babies.
Why did I think it would be nice to have him here? In fact, why didn’t we just hold this gender reveal somewhere like Mexico, where no one would fuck it up?
Glaring at him, I turned back around as Lily started beating up the round pinata now. Because this one wasn’t made of concrete, it only took three hits of the bat to open it.
I held my breath as the hole in it got bigger and waited to see a color come out of it.
What came out was a rainbow of colors – in the shapes of kids' toys, balloons and candy, and all with The Little Mermaid as the theme.
“What the hell? Are you having a fish?”
* * *
Hanging up the phone, I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes shut.
The woman had one flipping job to do – one. Put the right colors into the pinata, seal it up and deliver it to my parents. How was that so hard?
Apparently it was very hard when you hired your five-year-old twin nieces to do the job because you were understaffed thanks to the stomach bug that was going around.
How is this my life? Seriously, someone explain that to me.
The woman was also worried because we’d chosen to go with shapes for our colored confetti pieces too – specifically blue penises with balls, and pink vaginas that looked like the devil’s head. It’d seemed funny at the time because the likeness between the female reproductive system and the head of the big man in the fires of hell was uncanny.
Now, as there was none of those left in her offices, she had to assume that somewhere, a little mermaid was crying because her pinata looked like the ultimate lesson in how babies were made, sponsored by Satan himself!
Those poor kids.
As for us, we were going to have to wait for an appointment with our OB/GYN to get another scan done. And just to add that little bit more to the shit storm, my family were taking bets on the gender as we sat around eating vagina cake. Thirty-five percent were going with a girl, forty-five believed the Mayans and the Chinese too, but for some reason twenty percent were saying it would be both a boy and a girl. When I found out who Gramps had bribed to say that, I was going to string them u
p.
This was the worst, and I’d bet the most surreal, gender reveal party ever.
I’d grudgingly admit that the cake tasted freakin’ outstanding – so long as you closed your eyes and didn’t think about what it was that you were eating, that was.
Sixteen
Lily
I was now thirty-seven weeks pregnant. Remember the old lady from the Titanic saying it had been eighty-four years? Well, that’s the length of time that had passed since I’d last seen my feet, my vagina, the floor and since I’d last been comfortable. For the last eighty-four years, I’d waddled like a penguin, my vagina had split into a thousand pieces, I’d been sick every time someone asked for ketchup, I’d heaved when I’d smelled onions, I’d peed every five minutes… pregnancy was for the birds.
There was no grace and dignity with pregnancy, none whatsoever. You know those photos of famous people in the magazines, wearing tight dresses and heels with a huge bump – lies, all lies!
And, I now had the precious words of wisdom that had been thrown at me by every woman who’d ever had a baby, that there was even less dignity giving birth. Oh no, a team squatted at your vagina, shoved their arms up it, it opened up to the size of a bucket, and then you shit yourself and had a baby.
Fucking awesome!
“Oh, when are you due?” a woman wearing an obnoxious perfume said as she grabbed – yes, grabbed – my stomach and gave it a shake.
Keeping my face blank, I cocked my head and asked, “What do you mean?”
“The baby. When’s the baby due?” she gave my belly another shake.
This was hugely irritating to me for many reasons. She didn’t know me, so why would she grab hold of my belly? Also, she was shaking my baby around and doing fuck knows what to its developing brain. And finally, my bladder, which I’d just emptied, was now screaming at me again.
And that was why I did what I did next and let the tears that never seemed to be too far away visibly build up. “I’m not pregnant. Why would you be so mean?”
The woman went bright red and flicked her hair over her shoulder as she looked down her nose at me. “Well then, maybe you should wear clothes a size bigger.”
Oh, that bitch!
“Maybe you should go back to your surgeon and tell him to even up the fake tits sticking in opposite directions on your chest?”
It was the hormones, I swear! I’d never been this bitchy in my life, and I didn’t seem to have an off-switch for them. Ninety-nine percent of the time I was smiling and happy, but for that other one percent, I was a freaking mess. It was also probably down to the fact that Annie wasn’t working tonight, meaning I had to dish out the bitch myself instead of letting her do it for me. The woman just had a way with words that no one could ever match.
“Go lose some weight, you fat cow!” she sneered and then walked away.
I was about to yell something back, but Dad’s hand closed over my mouth stopping it before I even started. It was closing time, and she’d been the last of the patrons, so really it wouldn’t have been that bad if I’d yelled what I’d wanted to. Apparently Dad didn’t feel the same way sadly.
“Let her go,” he rumbled. “She’s not worth it.”
Turning around to face him, I looked up at him, and then burst into tears.
“She called me fat,” I wailed into his chest. “And… and… she had a really bad boob job.”
My head started moving as he burst out laughing. “She really did,” he agreed, laughing even harder. “Why don’t you go clean up and sit down in the office. That man’ll be here to pick you up soon, and he won’t like it if you’ve been crying.”
Grinning into his chest, I wiped my face with his soft flannel shirt, then wiped my nose with it too. Dad still hadn’t warmed up to Tate and only referred to him as ‘that man’ or ‘asshole’. Deep down, I knew he liked him, but he held a mean grudge, and knocking his daughter up warranted a lifetime of it, apparently.
Going onto my tiptoes, I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Ok. If you need a hand just yell.”
“Will do, cupcake!” he nodded, lying out of his ass, as he pushed me toward where the door to the office was at the end of the bar.
I stopped before I got to the end and shouted over my shoulder, “You need to call him by his name one day, old man.”
“I do,” he yelled back, locking the front door of the bar. “I call him asshole.”
I couldn’t help bursting out laughing. “I mean his real name.”
“Never!”
God, but I loved that man. I also loved Tate and knew he had a lot of time for Dad too, regardless of what he called him. I’d asked him why one night and he’d said it was simple – he was my dad, he loved me, he was important to me, and Tate understood why he acted that way. He’d also added that if we had a daughter one day, after the son he was so sure we were having was born, he’d act the same way if a guy did the same thing to her.
This had led to another argument over the sex of the baby which we still didn’t know seeing as how it was a prude and kept its legs together every time we had a scan now. We could have found out another way, but in the end, we placed our bets in with the family’s and let it be a surprise.
I was buying girl stuff though, and Tate was buying boy stuff.
That’s how life went with us. We’d been together for almost nine months now, and I didn’t want to tempt fate, but it was just so easy. Carly was in prison and her trial was coming up soon, so we didn’t have to worry about her. Initially, her lawyers had gone down the insanity angle, but it quickly became clear she was just a psycho with a bunny boiling type crush on Archer, so she was being tried the old-fashioned way. Chris was nowhere to be seen either which I knew worried Tate, but I preferred to just not think about him at all.
So, to sum it up, aside from my blood pressure being a smidge high, my ankles now being the size of my thighs, my thighs being the size of Chewy’s body, my stomach looking like I’d swallowed Shamu… it was all going fantastically.
Washing my face in the sink in the bathroom that was attached to the office, I got rid of the remainder of the tears that I’d cried over fake titty woman. Maybe she should look in a book and find a new nose, the one she’d chosen last time was five sizes too small.
Jesus Christ, these hormones!
Smelling something burning just then, I turned around to see if I could see anything that would cause a weird smell in here. Lifting up one arm and then the other, I ruled out the possibility of it being some weird pregnancy body odor, and opened the door of the bathroom.
Nothing looked like it was burning in the office, and I couldn’t see any smoke? But the smell was getting stronger.
Walking through the office to the door, I opened it and saw thick black smoke building in the hallway.
The panic was instant, not just for me and the baby, but for my dad too.
“Dad!” I screamed, sticking my head out quickly and seeing flames across the end of the hallway that led to the bar area. “Dad!”
Slamming the door shut, I spun around and tried to think. I needed to call someone. Who?
Running over to the phone on the desk, I picked it up and not hearing a dial tone slammed it back down again. Remembering I had my cell in the top drawer of the desk, I pulled it all the way out, and snatched my phone up as the rest of it fell to the floor.
I could do this. Come on, Lily, you’ve got this.
If you’ve ever watched a true crime episode, you’ll be familiar with the fact that we think we know fucking everything. We say we wouldn’t have done what they did, and we’d have done this or that.
I’m telling you this – that is the biggest pile of bullshit in the world.
Unlocking my screen, I almost dropped it twice as I tried to dial the number for the emergency services. Then, my finger slipped, and I dialed 9-1-5 instead. On the fourth attempt, I got the right numbers and hit the green button, then put it on speakerphone because my hands were shaking too hard for me t
o hold it.
I heard once that relief was a measurable emotion. You could measure the scale of relief you felt each time you felt it. Until now, I’d only felt relief on a handful of occasions – when my dad survived his heart attack, when Tate came back after helping his cousins and wanted the baby, when his family believed it was his baby I was carrying, when we found out the baby was healthy, when I met Hurst properly and got to truly appreciate him surviving his own heart attack, when Tate told me he loved me…
Hearing that voice say, “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” though, that had to top the list.
Just as I was trying to give her the address and tell her what was happening, something exploded in the bar, and the force of it knocked the door off its hinges.
“They’re on their way, Lily,” the woman’s voice said as I tried to breathe. “Stay with me, ok?”
Tate
“You can’t go in there,” Levi yelled in my face, tears running down his own as he held me back. “Tate, use your fucking head. You’ll get burned if you go in.”
Gulping in mouthfuls of oxygen, I put my hand over the pain in my chest and bent over. “My entire world’s in there,” I gasped. “She’s… the baby…”
“I know man,” he rasped as he rubbed my back. “I know.”
“EMT, get the EMT! We’ve got three.” A voice yelled over the shouts of the men fighting the fire.
Just as I looked up, a man whose face was covered in black soot came out carrying someone, followed by one of the firemen who had someone over his shoulder.
“He can’t carry her like that, the baby,” I shouted, trying to push through to get to them.
That’s when I recognized Chris’s face underneath the dirt smeared across it and then saw the long hair of the person he was carrying.
Lily!
“You son of a bitch. You mother fucking son of a bitch!” I bellowed, not even recognizing my own voice.
Tainted Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Three Page 18