Providence Series Books 1-4

by Mary B. Moore

  Walking into my Mom’s living room, I stopped as I looked around the place. There were kids sleeping in one corner, old people sleeping in another, blue shit everywhere, animals hanging in the doorways, food on every available surface, a scary blue teddy bear in the middle of it all that if the finger swipes through the frosting was any indicator it was, in fact, a cake. This wasn’t the frolicking heaven that I’d had in my mind.

  At that moment, Gramps woke himself up with a loud fart that had the living breathing occupants of the room stopping mid-sentence and turning to look at him in horror. Making a grunting noise, he sat up and looked around his audience with wide eyes until the stench hit him and then started gagging and waving a hand in front of his face.

  “Jesus, your Gram stinks,” he wheezed as Gram sat upright and started gagging alongside him.

  “The hell that’s my ass, you stinky old bastard,” she said through her coughs. “That one smells of five-year-old blue cheese…”

  “Please, tell me that we aren’t going to end up like this,” Ebru whispered beside me, drawing my attention away from whatever else Gram was going to say. I’d been worrying the same thing, but I was adamant that I’d never wander down that road to hell.

  Discreetly, in a dance perfected from birth, Ren, Brett and myself walked over to the doors and opened them under the ruse that we were looking out to see if someone was coming or we’d thought we’d heard someone outside, before returning back to where everyone else was. I’d just gotten back to Ebru and was reaching for a little pig in a blanket when Luke walked in with his parents. He was just starting to grin at Isla when the smell hit them and the smile on his face fell faster than a hookers panties while George and Christie discreetly covered their mouths and noses and looked towards the open door longingly. This totally wasn’t how they’d sold the idea of a baby shower to me on television.

  Who makes a party where you can’t drink? I’d looked everywhere and there wasn’t even a whiff of a beer and I needed one. One of my grandparents friends had come and I’d gone to shake his hand when Ebru, the evil cow, had reeled off facts and statistics about how it held a dick at least four times a day and how few men washed their hands properly so I’d probably end up with penis cells on my hand. Fuck that! Then, after half an hour of staring at the cake, I’d finally given in and hacked into the poor bear’s leg. Gram and Gramps had been right beside me and Gram had proven how bloodthirsty she was when she started heckling at me to just hack it off when I couldn’t decide how to approach the first cut. In the end, I’d apparently had enough time to be a man and had failed so she’d marched through to the kitchen and come back with a meat cleaver which she promptly lifted above her head and brought down faster than any of us could believe. That poor bear never saw it coming.

  “Fuck me, she gave it a vagina,” Gramps whispered beside me as we stood staring in horror at where the meat cleaver was now wedged in between the poor bastard’s legs. I’m pretty certain she’d gone all the way through the cake board into the wooden table underneath it too.

  Mom came running over and tried to negotiate the release of the cleaver’s handle before she ended up hurting someone, but Gram wasn’t having it. “No! I want some damn cake!”

  Wafting a plate with a slice of cake on it under her nose, Gramps tempted her away from the cleaver. Every time she’d look back at it, he’d pick up the fork that he’d snatched up on his way past the cutlery and make a move to eat a piece. Once she was settled in the corner, he came back and stole the piece of cake that I’d just cut for myself and went to sit beside her. Joining them with my own cake, I took my first mouthful of the heavenly bear and groaned.

  “I’m so sorry, Ebru,” I was moaning around a massive mouthful of cake. “I just cheated on you. Oh my God, this cake is…”

  “So, so moist,” Gramps groaned out, getting a matching groan in return from Gram and making me pause the fork that was headed toward my mouth for a second.

  “It melts in the mouth,” Gram said just as I’d taken my next massive mouthful.

  “Who baked the cake? I’ve never had such a moist cake before,” Gramps said loudly making the entire room look down at the slices of cake that they’d been enjoying. “I need to buy one every week. Look, it’s practically glistening it’s that moist…”

  The clatter of forks hitting the plates at the same time woke the sleeping babies up. I don’t care what anyone says, there is never a good time to say the word ‘moist’ and then use it in conjunction with ‘glistening’ and shit like that. Now the cake was ruined for all of us.

  If we’d been paying attention to the old farts, we might have seen the smug smiles and discreet high fives that they gave each other as they devised a plan on who would get what part of the cake once they got it home.

  “So, I guess Eb’s going the natural birth route,” Ren said as he sat back in the chair with Crystal asleep on his chest. She was such a Daddy’s girl.

  I was about to reply when Ebru waddled into the room wearing a shirt that looked like it was about to burst open. The button across the biggest part of her bump was straining so badly, that it was a miracle that it was still there. Plonking herself beside me, she put her feet up on the padded stool that I scooted with my foot toward her.

  “Yeah,” she sighed as she rubbed her stomach and I saw Ren eyeing the button worriedly. “My Mom was telling me about this Doula-“

  “You are not doing that,” I jumped up from the chair and yelled it at her.

  “It’s safe,” she began, but I was putting my foot down on this.

  “You are not having a douche,” I growled. “What if you wash the baby out?” I looked over at Ren who shrugged as he gently rocked Crystal on the sofa.

  “It’s a Doula!” Ebru said sounding like she was torn between laughing and killing me.

  “I don’t care how you pronounce it. You are not hosing my child down in the womb!”

  At that point, she gave in and laughed. The straining button lost its last hold and went flying across the room hitting Ren on the chin. Sighing, she got up and waddled back out of the room, most likely to change her shirt.

  “At least it’ll come out clean,” Ren shrugged as he rubbed the red welt on his chin, leaving me with mental images of my kid going through a car wash in the womb. Over my dead body!

  Chapter 8

  Cole

  M y son was due to arrive in just a few weeks and I was panicking the fuck out. What if he didn’t like me? What if I did something like accidentally picked up the wrong baby? I’d seen it in a magazine once; this guy was in the hospital and picked up someone else’s baby and didn’t know until like five years later. What if I forgot about him and left him behind somewhere?

  “You’re doing it again,” Ebru said, her eyes not leaving her Kindle once. She was so calm and relaxed about the whole thing and it was blowing my mind. Did she not realize that she was going to have a blue whale coming out of her blow hole?

  “I’m gonna fuck up,” I said as I paced in front of her and pulled on my hair. “And you’re gonna have Jabba The Hut breaking out of your…”

  “She’s also gonna bleed for weeks,” Maya scared the shit out of me by suddenly appearing out of fucking nowhere. Then what she said sank in and I started retching. “Like legit, murder crime scene.” She put Crystal on the floor to crawl around and remained squatting and made sweeping motions with her hands like a waterfall from between her legs. “Seriously, it’s all CCI.”

  “CCI?” Ebru got out through her laughter.

  “Yeah, Crime Cooter Investigation. No need for luminol though because the source of that waterfall…”

  Holding onto my stomach, I ran to the closest bathroom and just got there in time to say hello to my lunch again as it made it’s way back up through me. I don’t think I could do this. I mean, Carrie coochies…that thought set me off again and everything I’d ever eaten in my life came back into the world, taking my lungs with it.

  Ebru

  Tw
o hours later…

  I shouldn’t have laughed as hard as I did when Maya was joking about the Crime Cooter Investigation stuff, but Cole’s face was just so fucking funny. Tony had come over to join us and play with Crystal after Cole got a call from his Dad asking for help with one of the cows that was calving.

  We were all lying out watching some ghost finding program on the television and I kept getting pains in my stomach. At first I thought it was needing the toilet or trapped wind, but nothing had helped. Just as something went flying across the room that the ghost hunters were in and they screamed, a huge tightening hit me and I screamed at the same time making Maya and Tony jump and scream too.

  “What the fudge is wrong with you, woman?” Tony snapped, holding his chest. “What the hell are we watching this for if you’re gonna try and make us shi-” he broke off as I held my stomach and grimaced. “Oh no. No, I refuse. No. Make it stop, stop doing that! No, don’t you dare pant.” He yelled as he pointed at me, before turning to Maya. “I’m not going through this again. Make it stop, Maya, I demand it!” He even punctuated it by stamping his foot.

  Baby Crystal was fast asleep on her mother’s chest as she lay out on the couch, but seeing the strength of the contractions, Maya sat up and placed her on the cushions. “Now might be a time to call Cole,” she suggested, coming to stand beside me as she looked at her watch. Another wave of pain hit me and Maya paled slightly. “Uh Tony, call Cole now. The contractions are quite close together, so we’re gonna need to make a move soon.”

  Tony snatched his phone up off the coffee table and touched the screen. The sound of a phone ringing in the other room had all of our heads snapping in its direction. “I’ll fucking kill him,” I growled as another contraction hit.

  Pulling her phone out of her pocket, Maya started pushing the screen too. “I’ll call Jack and get him to pass the message on.” There was silence as she listened to the phone ringing on the other end until it went to the answering service. She tried a total of five times before she rang their house and Colette answered. There was a scream as Maya explained what was going on and I answered it with one of my own as my body tried to cut itself in half. “Right, they’d already called Colette a couple of minutes ago to say that the calf was born, all was well and apparently they’re on their way back. Tony, you go out in the direction of the birthing barn and tell them what’s going on. Eb, let’s get you ready to go.”

  Tony ran out of the door as Maya tried to get me off the couch, but I couldn’t move anywhere. The contractions were too close together and the pain was too much. I was pretty sure that I was about to shit myself too.

  “I can’t!” I groaned through the pain and pushed her away.

  “Shit,” Maya shouted, and I heard her talking to whoever on her phone asking for help right away as I panted. “Okay, we need to move you over to this chair,” she pointed at Cole’s favorite chair. The asshole had got me in this situation so his chair could die as retribution.

  “I can’t find them,” Tony shouted as he ran back into the room. Seeing Maya settle me on the chair, he snatched up a still sleeping Crystal and put her in the pack n play that was in the dining room before running back. “Poor little flutter has just been through this, she doesn’t need a replay. When are we going to the hospital? Are we waiting for them?”

  “There’s no time,” Maya grumbled as she lifted the leg rest on the chair and put the blanket from the couch over my lap. “Okay, you need to take the leggings off.”

  I listened to Tony panicking and Maya threatening him if he so much as took a step in the direction of the front door as I scooted them off my legs. The sound of running footsteps broke through Tony’s screaming, and just as Maya lifted and opened my legs to take a look, Jack, Ren, Colette and Cole ran around the corner.

  “Look away!” Cole yelled, standing in front of everyone with his arms open. Ren and Jack were groaning and rubbing their eyes as Tony started banging his head off the wall. “Why?” he whined. “I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve always given to charity. Why does everyone show me their taco?”

  Colette pushed around Cole and walked up to us. “The ambulance is on its way sweetheart. Everything will be okay.”

  Her attempt at soothing me had the opposite effect as I started to remember Amy telling Maya about fudula rippage when she gave birth to Crystal. “Did you rip?” I grabbed her hand and pulled her down so that she was only about an inch away from me.

  Cole had walked up by this point and kept asking, “Rip? What rip? Who cares about shit ripping? Ebru, you really need to focu-” I cut him off by grabbing his balls and squeezing. Tony was still whimpering and trying to get to the door, but one look from Maya stopped him each time. Jack, Ren and now Brett who had joined the party were holding their crotches and looking at Cole with horror and pity.

  “Listen, asshole, I might have bat wings after this baby comes out, so you’ll excuse me if I’m a little bit fucking worried that if the bat signal hits the skies that I’ll be expected to answer the motherfucking call of fucking duty!” I screamed and squeezed a bit tighter.

  “Aw fuck me, that’s graphic,” I heard Brett groan before the sound of retching filled the room.

  “Or you’ll look like the joker with a smile from side to side on your…” I glared at Maya and lifted my free hand in her direction. Her life was spared by my asshole trying to make its way out of my vagina.

  “Oh fuckingshitstainingpissfartlickingmotherdickingshitfucker,” I screamed.

  “What did she say?” Jack asked.

  “I think she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich with some of that German sauce shit from the store that no one can pronounce,” yet another voice said and I opened my eyes to see that Hurst and Linda were now here, as well.

  “At this rate, it’ll be a family reunion around my vagina,” I snapped through the pants. “What no s’mores? What about a weiner?”

  “That’s what got you into this predicament,” Tony mumbled from his corner of the room where he’d moved a chair in front of himself.

  I let go of Cole’s nuts and pointed in Tony’s direction. “Bring him to me…”

  All I saw was Tony shaking his head like he was having a fit as Ren walked in his direction with a big grin on his face, before an overwhelming amount of pressure in my lady garden took over and I screamed harder than I’d ever screamed in my life.

  “Ah how lovely,” Linda crowed. “There’s the baby’s head.”

  Having recovered from his balls being crushed repeatedly, Cole crouched beside me and started saying frantically, “Okay, I know how you’re feeling. The electric current is going to go from an eight to a nine in a minute. You’ll feel like you’re shitting, but you’ll only do it if you’re a pussy like…”

  “Don’t you fucking dare!” Ren fumed as he dragged Tony toward me.

  Ignoring him, Cole continued, “Once you hit a ten, we’ll take the pads off and you can go to the toilet. The pain stops almost immediately so don’t worry…”

  Grabbing him by the nose, which was the closest and easiest thing to grab, I screamed, “I’m having a fucking baby, you anal licking butt monkey. There are no pads, only a jesus screaming sumo wrestler trying to get out of a straw!”

  Cole and Ren both went white and fainted at the same time. Cole had still been squatting so he just twatted his head gently off the floor as he crumbled. Ren had hold of Tony still and went out cold, taking Tony with him. All we heard was a squeal and a thump and then Hurst was saying how this was gonna go viral. Looking up, I saw Tony flat on the floor with Ren out cold over him – crotch to face. Being a big guy, it wasn’t easy for Tony to move Ren’s body, specifically his crotch, off of him so all you could see was his lower body twisting and his legs kicking.

  A laugh burst out of me and that was when I felt it. “Oh shit on me, I’ve just pee’d everywhere,” I said, absolutely horrified. I was surrounded by the most irritating people in the world who had memories like elephants. I’d never live this dow
n.

  “No sweetheart, it was your water breaking,” Colette cooed as she stroked my hair off my sweaty face.

  “My chair,” I heard mumbled from beside me, indicating that Cole was now awake again. “No,” he whined. “Not my chair! Get a bag, Ma!” his voice got stronger and louder as he struggled up off the floor.

  “Ah, he’s starting to come out now. You need to take a deep breath, Ebru, and on the next contraction give a big push,” Linda instructed as she and Maya guided me through the process of ejecting a nuclear warhead from a pin hole.

  Doing as I was told, I pushed on the next contraction. And screamed. I definitely screamed. This was fucking hell; who did this more than once? How the hell did Isla survive doing it twice in a tiny period of time? It wasn’t natural. Why was I the asshole who didn’t get the drugs?

  “You’ll get them, Eb. The ambulance will be here soon and the nice paramedics will give you the good shit, okay?” Colette said and I realized that I’d asked all of that out loud.

  “Oh look, there’s his eyes and the tips of his ears,” Maya said as she grinned down at my goblin garden. Cole, Ren, Jack and Hurst all turned to look before they could help themselves and the sounds of four big fat assholes hitting the floor filled the room at the same time.

  “Once I’ve shit Shrek out, I’m gonna kill all of them,” I shouted as I started to push again. All it took was two more pushes and my son came into the world, right into his great grandmother’s arms. At that exact second, there was the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway as Coleman let the paramedics into the house. “Add them to the list,” I pointed at the two men that I knew from the hospital as they entered the room.

  To add insult to injury, one of them put a backpack down beside me and said to the other one, “You can put the narcotic bag back in here, but have the birthing kit ready so that we can clean up the baby. Do you have a Zip Lock?” He asked one of the standing women because I was still attached to my son, but my mind was stuck on the narcotic bag. Pain relief would have been available if they’d actually done their jobs and fucking hurried.