Family Counsel (The Samuel Collins Series Book 2) (2 page)

I turned around and caught my wife’s infectious smile.  Maddie
did something to me that was indescribable.  I’d always prided myself on being
a prick, but I couldn’t do it with Maddie or the kids.  They brought out some
absurdity in me that made me want to smile all the time when I was with them. 
Maddie passed the baby on to Penny, then hugged me around the neck and kissed
me on the lips.

“Well?”  With her southern drawl, it sounded like
whale
,
but with two syllables. Maddie’s eyes were sparkling for the first time in a
month, and I remembered why I’d set up the weekend in the first place.  “Are
you ready?” she asked, barely able to contain her excitement.

“Hell yes, I’m ready!” I said, feeling more secure by the
second.  If just thinking about being alone for the weekend put that kind of
gleam back in her eye, I could only imagine how she’d feel upon her return. 
“We’re going to have a great time, aren’t we Morgan?” I said, reaching over for
the baby.  Penny grudgingly handed her over and I gave the kid a big smooch to
show Mom how comfortable we were together. 
No problem here
.

“I’m going to miss you guys,” Maddie said. 

“We’re going to miss you too,” I said, and as the words came
out, I realized how true they were.  “A lot,” I added.

Maddie looked at her watch and took a deep breath.  “Okay.  I
guess I’m going then.” 

We did kind of a group hug and I kissed her again.  “Don’t
worry about a thing.  We’ll be fine.”

“I love you two,” she said, kissing first Morgan, then me. 
“I’ll see you Sunday,” she said with a huge smile.  She handed over a
preposterous, frilly pink diaper bag and I slung it over my shoulder, then she
blew us a kiss from the door and waved.

And my weekend had begun.

If I believed in omens, I would have said that the weekend was
doomed to failure from the get-go.  It started as soon as we got to the boys’
preschool.  I unbuckled Morgan from her car seat – which is no small feat – and
we made our way to Max’s classroom.  I’d only been to the school a couple of
times and it took me a while to find the right room, but when we did, I got a
warm reception from Max. He came running up and threw his arms around my legs.

“Daddy!” he yelled enthusiastically.

“Hey Max!  How’s my boy?  Did you have a fun day with your
friends?” I asked, rumpling his hair.

He made some noise to his friends which must have been a coded
message, because suddenly I was surrounded by a pack of grubby 2-year-olds. 
They were all trying to touch me, grabbing at me and pulling on my pant legs. 
They had Cheeto fingers and applesauce faces, and one had some florescent blue
crap all over his face and shirt.  I was horrified. 

“Whoa!” I said, stepping backward onto someone’s backpack. 

Thankfully, one of the teachers called them off.  If ever there
was such a thing as cooties, these kids had them in spades. 

“Daddy look,” Max said, and he held up a tiny cement mixer.

“That’s cool, Max,” I said absently.  I was trying to gather
his things as quickly as I could so we could escape before the mob returned.  I
handed Max his lunch box and grabbed a stack of artwork and his backpack.  We
thanked the teachers and I made a beeline for the door.  Three steps out the
door, I realized that Max had absconded with the cement truck. 

“Oh.  You can’t take that with you, Max.  That belongs to the
school.”  I tried to take it out of his hand, but he had a grip of steel.

“Mine!” he said defiantly, clutching it to his chest.

“No, it’s not yours.  You need to take that back to the classroom. 
Now, come on.  Let’s go.”  I turned back to his room, but Max ran the opposite
direction.  “Max!” I said, trying to put some authority into my voice without
raising it.  “Get over here, right now.”

“Mine!” he yelled adamantly.  He came closer, but he was
clutching the toy so tightly that his knuckles were white.

“No.  It’s not yours, Max.  But you can play with it again when
you come back on Monday.” 

“No!”

“Let’s go talk to your teacher about it,” I suggested, and
surprisingly, he was completely agreeable.  He willingly followed me back to
the room.  I opened the door, hoping not to draw the attention of the dirty mob
again.  The teacher looked up in surprise.

“Max walked out with this toy, and he’s very adamant about not
returning it,” I said, hoping that she’d know the magic words to get him to
release his grip.

The teacher looked at Max and then at me.  “He came in with
that this morning.”

I got this sinking feeling and I looked down at Max, who was
nodding his head vigorously.

“That’s yours?”

Nod. 

“Where’d you get it?”

“Tore.”

“At the store?”

Nod.

“This morning?”

Nod. 

“Sorry, Max.  I didn’t know it was yours.”

“Mean Daddy.”

We left Max’s classroom and went upstairs to get Oliver.  “Look
what I have!” he said, holding up the identical toy.

“Mom got you those this morning?”

“Yeah.”  He looked thoughtful for a second then he asked, “What’s
a wiener?”

“A
wiener
?” What were they teaching him at that school? 
“A wiener is a hot dog,” I said, but he didn’t look convinced.

“Mean Daddy,” Max said.

Oliver laughed.  “Max said you’re mean.”

That was how the weekend started, and from there it only got
worse.  It took an eternity to get the three kids strapped into their car
seats, and we’d barely made it two blocks when the next portent of disaster
loomed before us.  I’m not a superstitious person, but when a scrawny black cat
appeared out of nowhere and started limping across the road directly in front
of my path, I felt a kind of doom spread through my body, starting at the
temples and working its way down to my feet.  Had it been any other weekend, I
probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but there was no denying the
feeling of dread.

For starters, I’d never been a cat person.   An enormous
Siamese had adopted me the year before, and even though I’d actually grown fond
of him, I didn’t extend the affection to other cats.  This one was dragging his
back left leg, taking all kind of effort just to get across the street.  I
couldn’t tell if the leg was a new injury or an old battle wound, but he was
taking so long to cross in front of my path that I had to slow to a stop to
avoid hitting him. 

“Why are you stopping?” Oliver asked, wiggling in his seat,
trying to see what I was looking at.

“There’s a cat,” I said.

The cat actually looked up and made eye contact with me, as if
to make sure that I saw him and wasn’t going to hit him.  I waited.  He moved
in slow motion.  I waited some more.  And then, no sooner had he finally gotten
across and stepped a front paw onto the sidewalk than there was a huge jolt, the
sound of crunching metal, and my Suburban lunged forward.  The timing was so
incredible that for a split second, I actually considered that the black cat
had hexed us. 

Oliver and Max started screaming, Morgan started crying, and in
the faint background over the commotion in the car, I was pretty sure I heard a
cat yowl.  I looked in my rear-view mirror and the woman who had hit us was
sitting with her hands on the side of her head with a stupid expression on her
face, making no attempt even to get out of the car.

“Is everyone okay?” I asked, trying to hide the shock in my
voice.  “Oliver, Max, you guys okay?” 

“What was that?” Oliver asked.

“The moron in the car back there hit us,” I told him.

The baby was in a rear-facing seat so I couldn’t actually see
her, but by the way she was wailing, I figured she must be fine.  No way could she
cry that loud if she was really hurt.  I got out and went around to her side of
the car to check on her and that’s when I saw the cat lying on the sidewalk. 
He hadn’t made it out of the street before the impact, and there was a tire
mark on his hip. 
Damn it to hell
.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, squatting down and running my hand over
his dirty fur.  I couldn’t tell how badly he was injured, but it was obvious
that he’d been in bad shape before I hit him.  There were bald patches in his
fur, the membrane was sticking out around his eyes, and he just looked old and
tired.  Oliver opened the car door, took one look at the cat, and burst into
tears.  I unstrapped Max, then the screaming baby, and I bounced her up and
down on my shoulder trying to get her to stop crying. 

Max joined Oliver and looked down at the cat.  “Mean Daddy.” 

The moron still hadn’t bothered to get out of her Volvo.  I
walked the screaming meemie back to the car and shouted through the closed
window, “Get out of your car!”

Her eyes got big and she shook her head no. 
Unbelievable.

“Then open your window!” I said, mouthing the words in case she
was deaf
and
dumb.

No response. 

I threw my free hand in the air to express my exasperation and
stomped off to the Suburban to call the police.  They arrived shortly
afterwards to find a screaming infant, a sniffling 5-year-old, a cursing
2-year-old, a dying cat, and the woman responsible for it all, locked up tight
in her car. 

With the officer’s arrival, the moron decided it was safe to
come out.  The locks popped up and she squeezed her large frame out from behind
the wheel and waddled over to where we were. 

“What happened here,” the officer asked me.

Before I could say anything, Oliver pointed at the woman, “That
moron made my dad run over this cat,” he said matter-of-factly.

The woman glared and the officer stifled a grin.

I smiled down at Oliver. “That’s pretty much what happened,” I
agreed.  I was glad Maddie wasn’t there to be mortified.

There wasn’t a lot of damage done to my Suburban, but I got the
woman’s insurance information.  The officer took some information down and
within 20 minutes I was getting the kids back into their car seats.  The only
loose end was the cat. He didn’t look like he was going to survive the ordeal,
but I couldn’t very well just leave him, so I scooped him up and laid him down
in the back of the Suburban. 

On the few occasions when I’d taken the Siamese to the vet, the
bastard had yowled continuously during the short car ride.  This one didn’t
make a sound from the minute I laid him down in the Suburban to the time we
pulled into the Feline Clinic parking lot in Hollywood Park.  I feared the
worst. 

I looked through the tinted window into the back of the car,
and was surprised to see that the cat was still alive.  Oliver disembarked, and
I unstrapped Max and Morgan again.  It occurred to me that a large portion of
Maddie’s day must be spent strapping and unstrapping kids from car seats, and I
wondered if I were her, if I’d even bother to venture out unless it was an
absolute necessity.  Even the most trivial of outings became a huge hassle with
that many kids. Tack on a dying cat, and I was definitely feeling overwhelmed. 

I had Morgan in one arm and the cat in the other, and Max
holding my pant leg.  Good thing Oliver was going through a phase where he
liked to show off his muscular strength; he  had become the official family
door opener.

“What do we have here?” the woman behind the desk asked.

“I ran over this cat,” I said, handing him over to her.  “He
was limping before I hit him.”

“A moron made us hit him,” Oliver added.

The woman looked at me with raised eyebrows and I shrugged my
shoulders.  She cradled the cat in her arm and made some cooing sounds that
reminded me of Penny, and the cat actually started to purr.  The four of us
followed her into an exam room. 

“How’s the Siamese?” she asked, feeling the cat’s stomach and
hind legs.

“He’s fine.  What about this one?  Do you think he’ll make it?”

“She,” the woman corrected.  She gave the cat the once over and
shook her head.  “I don’t know.  Can you leave her here for a couple of hours?”

A couple of hours? And then what?
  I’d never considered
that the cat might actually survive. I’d just sort of assumed we’d be putting
him out of his misery.  I didn’t want another cat but I wasn’t about to say
anything in front of the boys.

“A couple of hours?  Sure.  Should I call you or do you want to
call me?”

“We’ll call you.”

We left the cat and went through the car seat ritual again, and
I decided right then that car trips would be kept to a bare minimum for the
rest of the weekend.  There was plenty to do around the house.

But for some reason, the house seemed so empty without Maddie. 
She was almost always home when I got there after work, and if she wasn’t, it
was never too long before she arrived.  It had been an easy change, adapting to
the lifestyle of a husband and father; coming home to the aroma of a
home-cooked meal, with a beautiful wife to greet me.  It was something that I
had not yet taken for granted, and walking into the house, knowing that Maddie
wouldn’t be there for days, bummed me out.  The baby had fallen asleep in the
five minutes it had taken to drive from the vet’s office, and notwithstanding
Oliver’s explicit instructions on how to get her out of her seat without waking
her, I’d managed to wake her.  She was screaming again, and I was at a loss
what to do.  I laid her on the floor on a blanket while I heated a bottle, and
Oliver was trying his best to amuse her.  He’d finally had his limit and I
could hear him in the other room saying, “Be quiet, Morgan!” 

I took the bottle out of the microwave and was about to fetch
the screaming meemie, when Max came into the kitchen with a weird look on his
face. 

“What’s the matter?” I asked. 

I fully expected him to say I was mean, but instead he held his
hands up for me to hold him.  I was glad he’d decided to forgive me, and I squatted
down so that we were eye level. 

“Just a second, okay Max?  Let me get your sister and we can
all sit together on the couch.” 

Without warning, the kid opened his mouth and threw up all over
me.  I jumped up and yelled involuntarily and he threw up again all over the
floor.  It was something straight out of a horror movie.  I picked him up and
held him over the sink, although by that time, the kitchen floor was a
write-off.  All I succeeded in doing was extending the mess and stopping up the
sink.

After my initial outburst, I tried to get my shit together and
comfort Max, but my shirt and arm were covered in spew and I was so grossed out
that it was difficult to be soothing.  I felt very unfatherly.  Oliver had come
running in to see what was happening and he slipped in his socks on the vomit. 
He took one look at the mess and gagged.

“Don’t look at it!” I yelled.  “And hold your nose!”

Max was standing there looking dazed, Oliver was gagging,
Morgan was crying and I was covered in vomit.  I heard the front door open and
close and Felicia appeared in the kitchen.   She’d changed her hair color again
– red, it must be summer – and I didn’t even recognize her at first.

“Holy smoke,” she said under her breath, taking in the scene. 

I was never so happy and relieved to see anyone in my life. 
“Felicia!” I exclaimed, knowing full well the height of my hypocrisy. 

She set her purse down on the counter and started rolling up
her sleeves.  “What can I do?”

I looked around at the mess.  “Feed the baby,” I said
decisively, and I passed her the bottle. 

I took off my shirt, thanking my lucky stars that it buttoned
and didn’t have to go over my head; I stripped Max down to his diaper; and I
helped Oliver out of his socks and shorts; then I threw all the clothes out the
back door.