If You Only Knew

If she does answer, I can’t hear her over the banshees in my kitchen. “Charlotte!”

She’s in my bathroom, sitting in the sink, idly kicking her feet and looking out the window. “Auntie!” she exclaims happily. “I’m peeing, Auntie!”

I mutter a curse. She’s peed, all right. She failed to take off her overalls, however, and that means a whole new outfit.

There’s a crash from downstairs. I don’t have time to change Charlotte, so I pick her up, grimacing, and dash downstairs, where I find three broken mixing bowls, apparently pulled from the cupboard.

“Is anyone bleeding?” I ask.

“I bleeding,” Rose says. “Right here.” She holds up her hand, which is unmarred by blood.

“You’re not bleeding.”

“Inside, Auntie. I bleed inside.”

Shit. Could she be right? Is she hemorrhaging? Should I call Rachel?

“Here.” Grace opens the baking supplies cupboard and pulls out a bag of chocolate chips. “This fixes bleeding.”

“Fanks, Grace!” Rose says happily, tearing open the bag. Two pounds of chocolate chips scatter far and wide.

“Poop! It poop!” Charlotte shrieks, wriggling like a fish in my arms.

“It not poop!” Rose screams.

Grace begins stomping on the chips.

My God.

I look at the clock. It’s 3:30 p.m. I have four hours to go till bedtime. Minimum! An hour and a half till wine is socially acceptable. But no, I can’t have wine! I’m the only adult on the scene. This is terrible news!

The front door opens and in comes Loki. And Leo.

“Hey,” he says, looking at my nieces. “Shut up, okay?”

They fall silent. “Who you?” Rose asks, folding her arms over her chest.

“I’m Leo.”

“Why you here?”

“I own this building. Why you here?”

“Aunt Jenny, that why.”

Wait. He owns this building? Since when?

Charlotte is lying on the floor, eating chips without the use of her hands. Talented child. “Leo,” I say, “meet the triumvirate of terror better known as Grace, Charlotte and Rose Carver, my beautiful and angelic nieces.”

“What you dog’s name?” Rose asks, sidling up to Leo and looping an arm around his knee as she sticks her thumb in her mouth.

“Loki. He eats noisy little girls.”

Rose smiles around her thumb at that.

“He’s not very frien—” I start to say, then stop as Loki lies on the floor and rolls onto his back, offering his stomach. Leo kneels down and takes Rose’s hand.

“He wants you to pet him,” Leo says, and sure enough, Loki’s stumpy little tail starts wagging. Grace and Charlotte join in, chattering at once. “Loki, that’s a funny name,” “Loki, don’t bite me,” “Loki likes me,” “Loki no eat me!”

Leo looks up at me. “Want company?” he asks. “My lessons are done for the day.”

“God, yes,” I tell him.

Thirty minutes later, the kitchen is cleaned up, Charlotte is in a fresh outfit and Leo and the girls are sitting at the table, making things out of an organic version of Play-Doh from a kit nauseatingly called Little Minds Create, which I have on hand for their visits. Charlotte is not creating, opting to smash blobs of clay into the seams of the table.

“Sing us songs,” Grace demands.

Leo glances at her. “There once was a girl called Aunt Jenny,” he begins obligingly. “Her nieces were Pooh, Plum and Penny. They loved to make messes, and dress up in dresses, which was fine because Jenny had many.”

“Not bad,” I murmur. He has a nice singing voice. Of course.

“Juilliard. Limerick Songs 101.”

“I not named Pooh,” Rose says, putting a blob of Play-Doh in her mouth. “I Rose.”

“Not for eating, sweetheart,” I say, scooping out the blob. Child care is not for the squeamish.

“What are you making, Leo?” Grace asks.

He holds up his sculpture, which is made of pink clay and has bulbous green eyes and four legs. “It’s Loki,” he says.

The girls laugh, the sound so beautiful and pure my heart squeezes. “Loki’s brown and white and gray and black,” Grace says. “Not pink.”

“He has hints of pink,” Leo says. “Also, sparkles.” He takes some of the sequins that come with the Little Minds Create kit and makes his clay dog a collar. “We can’t forget his purple spots,” he adds, reaching for the lavender clay.

“Loki not pupple!” Rose says.

“Or the yellow stripes,” Leo says, winking at her. She smiles back, another female succumbing to his charms.

In the end, Clay Loki looks like a demon, but the girls adore him. “Can I have him?” Charlotte asks.

“Mine!” Rose yells.

“I want Loki the most!” Grace says.

“It’s for your Aunt Jenny,” he says, handing the sculpture to me.

“Girls,” I say, “would you like to watch a movie?”

When they’re lined up on the couch, mesmerized by My Neighbor Totoro, I get started on cleaning up the craft mess in the kitchen. Leo comes in, stepping over the real-life version of his dog.

“Thanks for coming up,” I say.

“I owed you.”

“Did you?”

He shrugs.

I get a toothpick to dig out the clay from where Charlotte squished it.