Chapter Twenty-Four
1992
John didn’t give her girls. He gave Phoebe three boys, each the spitting image of him. On the outside, there wasn’t a hint of Phoebe on a single one of them. But she’d made her mark on the inside. They were headstrong, stubborn to a fault, and had little regard for consequences.
And most days, Phoebe couldn’t imagine her life any other way.
But not today. Today, she was deciding which one of those little monsters she was going to murder first.
Carter, the leader at six, still held the kitchen shears proudly in his little hands. He stood next to his younger brother Beckett. At four, Beckett was the middle child, and despite what so much psychology touted, the kid would never be overlooked. At least, not with the haircut his big brother had just given him.
There were bald spots. Bald spots for God’s sake on his little head. And he was strutting around as if he’d just dropped eight bucks at the Snip Shack for a professional job.
Phoebe rubbed a hand over her face, her wedding band cool on her overheated forehead. Usually she looked at the slim gold band and sent up a prayer of gratitude for her husband. Tonight, however, she cursed his name. John Pierce had done this to her.
She had a master’s degree for God’s sake. That was no preparation for dealing with these hellions.
“Okay, boys,” she breathed, trying to lull them into confessing with a calm tone. “Carter, why did you think Beckett needed you to cut his hair.”
“Well, Mom.” It was always ‘mom’ from Carter, never ‘mama’ or ‘mommy.’ Beneath his six-year-old surface, the kid was forty years old. “You said you had to give us all haircuts ‘cuz of pictures, and you know Beckett gets scared of the clippers. So I used scissors.” He was so proud of his problem-solving.
Oh, my God. The family pictures John had scheduled for them at Sears.
“You like it, Mama?” Beckett grinned, showing two missing teeth. One had been a legitimate loose tooth. The other a casualty of little brother Jax shoving him off the merry-go-round at the park.
Speak of the devil, bare feet hustled down the hallway. “Mama, I no feel good—” Jax, two, with only a diaper and t-shirt stepped into the kitchen.
“Honey, where are your pants?” The damn kid was constantly stripping.
He didn’t answer. At least, not with words. With the natural forces of a volcano, Jax spewed vomit in a perfect 180-degree arc.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” For one shining moment, Phoebe felt a deep and abiding sense of gratitude that they’d decided to get one more year out of the hideous orange linoleum floor.
Forgetting about the older two non-puking sons, Phoebe grabbed Jax under the arms and put him in the sink. He went yellow again, and she had just enough time to hand him a soup pot to throw up into. The phone was ringing, and Phoebe gathered every dish towel from the drawer and sprinted for the puke pond. She tossed the towels down and snatched the phone off the wall.
“Hello?” she shouted into it.
“Is now a bad time?” her dearest friend Elvira asked. Phoebe could hear the smile in her voice.
“Why did you let me get married and have three boys? Why didn’t you tell me to buy a nice little cottage in the woods and not drive myself insane?”
“What’s that beeping?” Elvira asked.
Phoebe muttered a string of curses. “Just the smoke detector. I apparently just charcoaled dinner.” Her beautiful casserole, one of John’s favorites, was pumping black smoke through the oven vents.
She pushed the towels through Jax’s puddle and went running for the stove when it registered. “Oh, my God, Jax, why is your vomit blue?”
“Mama,” Jax wailed, hot tears streaming down his chubby little cheeks.
“What did you eat?” Jesus, did he find drain cleaner somewhere? “El, what color is drain cleaner?”
“Green, or yellowish green I think.” Phoebe breathed a sigh of relief and switched off the oven knob. “But laundry detergent’s blue.”
“Jackson Scott, did you eat laundry detergent?” Her voice was so high Murdock, covered snout to stump in mud, came charging into the kitchen from the side door. His fur was ruffled, ready to fight off whatever invader made his mommy scream like that.
“Mom, I saw him eating booberry pie upstairs,” Carter announced helpfully.
“Blueberry, honey,” Phoebe corrected him automatically.
“That’s what I said. Booberry.”
“Where did he get—” Phoebe turned in his direction and shrieked. “Beckett! Stop cutting your brother’s hair this instant!”
Beckett did a little dance and pointed at his brother. “Look, mama. We match!” Carter was indeed now sporting his own bald spot and lopsided bangs.
“Oh, shit.”
Carter’s little mouth formed a perfect ‘o’. “Mom, that’s a bad word!”
“Murdock, NO!” Phoebe’s scream was loud enough to be heard halfway into town, but it had no effect on the dog that made a beeline for the pile of barf and towels. “JOHN!”
Her husband, her hero, the man who loved her even when she was shrieking like a banshee, sprinted into the kitchen from the side door. The sloppy yellow lab hot on his heels. His entrance scared Murdock who skittered through the outskirts of the puddle, leaving puke paw prints in his dash, to the relative safety of the kitchen table. Phoebe didn’t realize she was still holding the phone, its cord stretched across the room. John didn’t see it either, and it caught him like a trip wire across the shins.
All six-feet two-inches of him went down in a heap. “Mother of God, what am I laying in?”
“What the hell is happening over there? Do I need to call Hazel?” Elvira demanded.
“I gotta go, El. John just fell in blueberry puke.”
--------
Ten minutes later, John stripped to his underwear was giving Jax and Murdock a bath in the sink while Phoebe worked the vomit and child hair and mud into a manageable pile. Carter and Beckett were sitting at the kitchen table eating cold cereal for their dinner. The casserole had finally stopped smoking on the counter.
“We’re going to need a new broom,” she said, eyeing the bristles of the one she held with the emptiness of a survivor going into shock.
“Do you remember your first summer here?” John asked as he used a dish towel on Jax’s head.
Phoebe closed her eyes and remembered it wistfully. “Just you and me. All those long nights and quiet mornings.”
“No one wanting to watch Mr. Rogers,” John continued.
“Mr. Rogers on, daddy?” Jax asked hopefully.
“No, buddy. Not tonight.” His words were gentle, loving, even though Phoebe knew he was as close to the breaking point as she was.
At least she’d been dead right with that choice. Her husband, the love of her ridiculous life, was a constant source of joy and support and commiseration.
“Maybe we should take Rose up on her offer to take the b-o-y-s for a week?” Phoebe suggested hopefully.
John shot her a look. “What has your sister ever done to us that would deserve that?”
“I’m desperate. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m one tiny infraction away from burning this house down and walking away, talking to the voices in my head.”
The doorbell sounded, and before Phoebe could decide to just hide under the table and wish it all away, Beckett charged down the hallway to the front door.
“Hi ya, Evywa!”
“Hey, cutie. Is your Mom still alive?”
“She wooks stressed,” he said as if a four-year-old knew what stress was. “Is dat pizza?”
On the word “pizza” Carter hurdled the puddle of nasty and joined his brother at the door.
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Normedann,”
Oh, hell. Phoebe was not prepared to deal with Mrs. Nordemann.
“Nordemann, sweetie,” Mrs. Nordemann corrected him.
“That’s what I said!”
They trooped back the hall, each footstep sounding to Phoebe like the arrival of a firing squad. Elvira poked her head into the room and shook her head. “Bet you’re never going to question my life choices again,” she teased Phoebe.
Phoebe burst into tears.
Mrs. Nordemann hopped neatly over the vomit and mud and towels and patted Phoebe on the back. “There, there, my dear. Everything is going to be just fine. This is nothing we can’t handle.”
“We?” Phoebe wailed.
“We’re all family. No one can do this,” she gave the chaos a sweeping glance, “alone.”
“First thing’s first. Boys, pizza. Oh, dear lord, what happened to your hair?” Mrs. Nordemann clapped a hand over her mouth.
“We cutted it!” Beckett announced.
“With scissors,” Carter added, eyeing up the pizza boxes.
“Well, we can’t do anything about that right now,” Elvira sighed. “Go, upstairs and wash your hands and bring a diaper and pants down for your brother.”
Phoebe watched in teary disbelief as her boys scrambled to obey.
“What magic power do you have?”
“It’s called Peace of Pizza,” Elvira said, wiggling the box. “In my experience, men do anything for food.”
“Peesa, daddy! Peesa!” Jax squealed.
“Jesus, kid, didn’t you just puke up a week’s worth of pie?” John asked, plucking his son out of the sink.
“I’ve got him,” Mrs. Nordemann announced, plucking the wet and wiggly toddler out of John’s hands and wrapping him in the only clean dish towel left in the house.
“Watch out,” John warned. “Sometimes he pees after a bath.”
“I peed in da sink,” Jax said, stretching his arms out for the pizza across the kitchen.
“Add disinfect sink to the list,” Mrs. Nordemann called out to Elvira.
The doorbell rang again, and Carter and Beckett opened it on their way downstairs.
“Hi, Unca Mike! Come in!” Beckett said grandly.
“There’s pizza,” Carter told him.
The boys, followed by Michael Cardona who was holding his son and an overnight bag, returned to the kitchen.
“Mom, here’s the pie plate. Found it in Jax’s room,” Carter announced, flinging the empty dish at her.
“Jackson, you ate an entire pie? That was for the bake sale tomorrow.”
“Elvira, add pie to the list,” Mrs. Nordemann said, expertly diapering Jax.
“What list?” John asked, coming up behind Phoebe and wrapping his arms around her as if they were a rock in the midst of a storm.
Michael plopped his son down at the table. “Stay there and have some pizza, Donovan,” he told the little blond boy.
“’kay, daddy!”
Beckett leaned in and put his arm around his friend.
“Can someone tell us what’s happening?” Phoebe asked weakly.
Elvira shoveled the mass of mess away from the door and straightened. She handed Phoebe a set of keys.
“You two are packing a bag and spending the night at my house. There is a bottle of pinot on the counter and a six-pack of Budweiser in the fridge. If any ‘activity’ happens in my bed, you will wash the sheets before you leave.”
Mrs. Nordemann deposited a freshly diapered and dressed Jax at the table where he promptly stole Carter’s slice of pizza.
“Hey! That’s mine! M-O-M!”
“Do not respond to that,” Elvira said, shoving Phoebe and John toward the stairs. “Pretend they do not exist. Jillian and I are cleaning and baking. Michael and I are spending the night. Hazel’s on call, but she’ll be here in the morning.”
“We can’t ask you to do that—” John’s argument was interrupted by Elvira’s shake of her curls.
“This is what we do. Parenthood is a festering nightmare dotted with moments of truly blissful wonderment. This is not one of those moments. This is a time when we can step in and give you a bit of breathing room so you can come back tomorrow with some sanity.”
Phoebe opened her mouth to say thank you, to argue, to tell Elvira she was the most wonderful person in the world. But all that came were more tears.
“Before you feel like a charity case, we do this for everyone. There has never been a couple with kids in Blue Moon who hasn’t needed and deserved a break.”
“Get the hell out of here,” Michael called from the kitchen doorway. “We’ve got this covered.”
“Are we havin’ a sleep over?” Carter’s voice piped up from the kitchen.
“Sure are, bud,” Michael told him.
A chorus of “yays” echoed through the kitchen.
“Cardona,” John began.
“You guys took Donovan overnight last month when we were four seconds away from locking him out of the house and pretending we moved,” Michael said, cutting off any argument.
“Donovan is one extra kid to us,” Phoebe told him. “This is three extras. With access to blueberry pie and scissors. And sometimes Jax wakes up in the middle of the night—”
“We’ve got this,” Elvira said, nudging her toward the stairs. “Go pack a change of clothes, and I don’t want to see your face before ten tomorrow morning.”
“The dogs need fed. The cats, too. The cows and horses are done, I think. John did you feed the donkey—” Phoebe ran through her mental list.
Elvira pinched Phoebe’s lips shut. “We’ve got this. No one is going to starve to death or be neglected by 10 a.m. tomorrow.”
Phoebe’s brain did the math. Sixteen hours of uninterrupted peace. Sixteen hours of not hearing “Mom, Mama, Mom.” Sixteen hours of peeing by herself. My God, she could take a shower! She looked at John and saw the spark of hope in his beautiful gray eyes. Sixteen hours of enjoying each other.
“Yeah, I see that look. Wash my sheets,” Elvira reminded them.