Family Counsel (The Samuel Collins Series Book 2) (4 page)

“Please, Sam.”

“It’s not going to do any good.”

“It might,” she argued.  “If we talk to him now, he can get
started on it right away.”

She was sounding desperate and I could tell she was going to
bug me until I broke down.  I might as well spare myself from having to listen
to her whine.  I huffed audibly to express my irritation, and I picked up the
phone and dialed Niki’s number.  Felicia stood there jumping up and down, that
red hair beaming like something out of Star Trek. 

“Settle down, Oliver,” I told her.  She laughed and took hold
of my arm, then she stood right next to me waiting.  “Go away,” I said, trying
to disentangle her with my free arm.

She let go of my arm and shook her hands.  “I’m so nervous!”

I pointed to the other side of the kitchen.  “Go stand over
there.” 

She was just as disobedient as Max.  Niki’s voicemail picked up
and I left a message asking him to call me when he got a chance, hoping that
the wording would leave the impression that it could wait until Monday.  No
such luck.  He called back within five minutes.

“Hey asshole.”

“Niki.  How’s it going?”

“Good.  What’s up?”

I told him about Felicia’s brother and gave him all the
information we had, and he said he’d get someone right on it.

“I’ll be in San Antonio for a week, starting tomorrow.  Come
over tomorrow night and we’ll barbecue.”

“Maddie’s . . .” I considered lying, but I knew he’d bust me. 
“Maddie’s out of town for the weekend.”

There was a conspicuous silence while he absorbed the info.  “Who’s
watching your kids?”

“I am,” I said, only slightly offended that he’d have to ask.

Niki laughed out loud.  “Get a baby sitter and we’ll go have a
drink.” 

I made uhmming and ahhhing sounds.  “That’s probably not a good
idea.  If I got arrested, there’d be no one to take care of the kids.”

“You’re not going to get arrested!” I could hear someone
telling him something in the background, then he laughed again.  “Hey, I’ve got
to go.  Stacy’s about to kick my ass.  I’ll call you tomorrow when I get in town.”

He hung up before I could tell him not to.  Felicia didn’t even
give me a chance to relate the conversation before she bombarded me with
questions.

“What did he say?  Is he going to do it?”

“He said he’d get someone right on it.”

“What do you mean
someone
?  Why doesn’t he do it
himself?”

“It’s called delegating.  He has a very capable staff,
Felicia.”

“Are you sure this guy is good?”

“Niki Lautrec makes MacGyver look incompetent.   If Niki can’t
find out about your brother, no one can.”

“So how long did he say it would take?”

“He didn’t.”

“It took the PI that I hired to find my mother six months.”

“Six months!  What kind of a PI was he?”  She looked blank. 
“Let me guess. He charged you a monthly fee while he conducted his
investigation.”

“Yeah,” she said skeptically.  “Meaning what?”

“Never mind.  It’s not going to take Niki six months.  I
guarantee it.”

I was saved from further interrogation by sounds coming from
the baby monitor. What an ingenious invention; except you had to watch what you
said if you were by the transmitter.  It was a great way to spy on my kids. 
The sounds started with Morgan cooing, and then Oliver and Max talking.

“Where’d you get that?” Oliver asked.

“Duh dawage,” Max said.

“The garage?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?  Eewwww!  Max, that’s gross!” Oliver exclaimed,
and then there was ear-splitting, “
DAD
!” that I thought might blow the
speaker.  Morgan went abruptly from baby sounds to crying.

“That’ll be for me,” I said without enthusiasm, and I set my
beer down on the counter.  “God knows what he has.”

Oliver met me at the kitchen door.  “Max has something really
gross!”

I couldn’t think of anything that qualified as gross that we
kept in the garage.  Anything poisonous or dangerous was locked away, and there
wasn’t that much stuff lying around in there.  Except maybe . . .
the litter
box
.

When I reached him, Max was in the process of trying to share a
cat turd with his baby sister.  My voice came out as kind of a half-yell,
half-groan, as I lunged at his outstretched hand.

“Nooooooooo!” 

The turd was coated in cat litter; it looked like Almond Roca. 
I swatted the thing out of Max’s hand and rushed him to the bathroom. 

“Did you eat that, Max?” He looked at me like he wasn’t sure
what to say.  “Did he eat it, Oliver?”

Oliver shook his head.  “No.  He was just playing with it.” 

I was so grossed out that I wanted to puke.  “Open your mouth.”

He actually did it, and I was immensely relieved that there was
no overt sign of anything in his teeth.  Felicia had come back to Morgan’s room
and had gotten Morgan out of her bed. 

“He ate cat shit?” she said in disbelief.

“Apparently he just played with it.” I was amazed that I could
say it so casually.  I’m certain that if I’d found cat shit in his mouth, I
would have gone straight to the phone and called Maddie to come home.

I washed Max’s hands with industrial soap and made him brush
his teeth; I disposed of the cat turd; and the five of us retreated to the
family room.  Maddie had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare and freeze our
dinner, but I was so mentally drained that I didn’t even feel like having to
heat it up and serve it. 

“Who wants McDonald’s?” I asked.

“Yeah!” Oliver and Max cheered. 

I turned to Felicia.  “I’ll pay you one hundred dollars if you
go get it.”

Felicia ended up staying until almost 8:00, when things looked
like they were winding down for the night.  When Maddie called that night, I
could honestly assure her that everything at home was fine.  I was sitting in
bed watching TV with a sleeping Morgan in my arms and my boys curled up on
either side of me, sound asleep.  I was feeling very fatherly after all.

My grandmotherly across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. Howard, had taken
to bringing me muffins on a daily basis when I’d first moved to the Park. I
assumed that when Maddie and I got married, Mrs. Howard’s daily-bread delivery
would come to an end.  After all, cooking for one is not the same as cooking
for four, but she persisted in spite of all the mouths.  She’d changed from
little bite-sized muffins to cupcake size, but that was the only thing that
changed.  One day I was single, wolfing bite-sizers, and the next I was married
and graduated to the big ones.  Like overnight, the muffins and I had grown
up.  Maddie and the boys settled right in to the ritual.  Every once in a while
I felt guilty about the trouble Mrs. Howard went to, but my culinary
satisfaction far outweighed my conscience, so I kept it to myself until the
thought passed.

Like clockwork, Mrs. Howard was on my doorstep at 8:00 a.m. on
Sunday, her gray hair pinned up in a tidy little bun on her head, basket of
muffins in hand. She gave me her toothy grin as she handed over the goods.

“Good morning, Mrs. Howard,” I said, peeking under the cloth
napkin. “What do we have today?”

“Apple pecan,” she said, her eyes sparkling. At 81, Mrs. Howard
was by far my favorite little old lady.

“Mrs. Howard!” Oliver exclaimed, hugging her around her legs. 
“Max threw up and I slipped in it.”

“Oh my. Is he better now?”

“Yeah,” said Oliver.

“Guess what I have in my back yard?” Mrs. Howard exclaimed like
she had just remembered, then she answered before either of us could guess.  “A
mama fox and her babies!”

“A fox?” I said skeptically.  “Are you sure it’s not a coyote?”

She looked at me like I was an ignoramus. “I call her Foxy
Mama,” she said, without dignifying my question with a response.

“Can we come see ‘em?” Oliver asked.

“Well sure,” she said.  “Go get Max and you boys can come with
me.”  

Oliver and Max took off with Mrs. Howard, and Morgan and I went
to retrieve them after she woke up from her morning nap. Sure enough, there was
a fox, not a coyote, with her four babies, playing in the back yard.

“They’re called kits,” Oliver informed me. “Baby foxes are
kits.  And look, Tag and her babies are here too!”

Before my arrival in the Park, the Town had started trapping
deer and moving them to ranches to control the numbers in the herds. One doe
that was carted off to a near-by Army training facility made her way home with
a red ear-tag still intact. We took to calling her Tag.  Tag had been having her
babies in Mrs. Howard’s back yard every year for more than a decade, and she
was back there with her twin fawns, alongside the family of foxes. Between them
and the birds hanging out around Mrs. Howard’s bird feeders, it looked like a
bona fide wildlife sanctuary. 

“The boys tell me you have a new cat,” said Mrs. Howard.

“Not by choice,” I said.

Mrs. Howard patted my arm.  “Two cats are no more trouble than
one,” she asserted.

“Oh yeah?” I said, looking around.  “Well I notice you seem to
be lacking in the cat department. Why don’t you take it?  Every little old lady
needs a cat.”

“Are you saying I’m old?”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Come on,” she said, turning me toward the house. “I’ve got
some chocolate we can eat while you take a look at my leaky faucet.”

“Leaky faucet?  But what about the cat?”

“And I’ll take that precious baby while you fix the faucet,”
she said, reaching for my kid.

“And I’ll take your complete indifference as a
no.
”

Toothy grin.

I filled in Mrs. Howard about the weekend activities while I
fixed her leaky faucet. All in all, things had improved immensely after the
first day. There was no more vomiting; no more cat turds; Black Cat had settled
in like she’d lived there all her life; and even the Siamese was keeping his
hissing and growling to a minimum.  In terms of action, we didn’t see much.  I
turned down Niki’s offer to go for drinks.  I did manage to get some things
done around the house while Max and Morgan napped, but everything required two or
three times as much time and effort as it should have, depending on how many of
my kids were awake.  I decided that practicing law was a breeze compared to
child rearing.  Full-time fathering was exhausting. 

My bride arrived home that evening right in front of a huge
storm system that had been making its way up from Mexico.  According to the
weatherman . . . excuse me, the
meteorologist
. . . that kept breaking
into my TV show, the storm had dumped six inches of rain in neighboring
counties over the past two hours and carried with it tornadic
cells. 
Tornadic
cells?
   I love it when professional people make up words.  I made up a
word in a brief one time –
philanderacious –
and the judge actually
called me on it in a footnote of his opinion, but it didn’t stop him from
ruling in my favor. 

The first sprinkles were just starting when Maddie came in, and
the four of us went out to greet her.

“Whale hello all of you!” she exclaimed, giving us all a
collective hug.  “How did it go?”

“It was great,” I said.  Now that she was home and I could put
the experience behind me, it
was
great.  “But we missed you, didn’t we
kids?”  Lots of shouts from Oliver and Max confirmed that it was a huge
understatement.

We got inside and I set Maddie’s bag down on the floor and I
watched her with the boys.  I was still holding Morgan, who much to my surprise
wasn’t even trying to squirm out of my arms to her mother, and I realized that
it was more than my just missing Maddie.  I was completely lovesick for her. 
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, with a kid in each arm,
laughing and kissing on them, making them laugh in return.  I was the luckiest
man in the world. 

She must have noticed me staring at her.  “What?” Maddie asked.

“What what?” I said, trying to shake the ridiculous smile that
certified how whipped I was. 

She came over and kissed me. “You did miss me, didn’t you?” she
said, and she was practically laughing. 

“It’s that obvious?”

“Yep,” she nodded.  “How ‘bout we put these guys to bed?” 

I handed the baby to Maddie and in one fell swoop, I had Oliver
under one arm and Max under the other.  “Bed time, guys!”  And I raced them
back to the kids’ wing while Maddie dealt with Morgan. 

It was a record-setting tuck-in session and when we met in our
bedroom 45 minutes later, my lust for Maddie was way out of proportion to the
time we’d spent apart. But the truth was, mentally, she’d been gone a lot
longer than three days, closer to a month.  And she was definitely back. 

That night, we took our time enjoying each other’s company,
first drinking champagne in the Jacuzzi in our candlelit bathroom, then moving
on to our absurdly enormous bed.  We pulled the velvet drapes around us and
laughed while we got reacquainted.   

Sometime later we were sitting in bed, eating ice cream out of
the carton, as I filled Maddie in on my first solo weekend with the kids.

“Whale it sounds like you did great,” she said, nuzzling her
head into my neck.  She kissed me below the ear with cold ice-cream lips.

“Oh, and your cousin Felicia came over,” I said, half
suspecting that Maddie had put her up to it.

“Fee?  Really?”  If she was guilty, she wasn’t going to fess
up.

“Yeah, and apparently she’s got a brother somewhere.  We’ve got
Niki trying to locate the guy.” 

I filled her in on the gory details, at least the few that we
knew, and when I finished she exclaimed, “Oh my gawd!  I’ll have to call Fee in
the morning.  I have another cousin!”  She clapped her hands together and
laughed, just as a huge clap of thunder struck so loud that it shook the
house.  We both jumped and Maddie screamed. 

“Damn!  You scared the crap out of me,” I said.  I gave her a
shove and she shoved me right back. 

“Sorry,” she laughed.  “That was loud.”

Another boom rattled the windows.  Maddie screamed again then
she clamped her hand over her mouth and burst out laughing.  It was exactly 15
seconds before Max and Oliver came running in.  “We’re scared,” Oliver said. 
“Can we sleep with you?”

“Sure. Come on up,” Maddie said without even consulting me. She
leaned over and helped Max up and Oliver scrambled up on his own.

“Did the storm wake you up?” she asked.

Oliver nodded.  “I’m scared of the thunder.” The boys settled
in between us, and just like that the party was over.  “Can I have some ice
cream?” Oliver asked.  I handed him my spoon and he dug in.  “Mom,” he said
with a  mouthful.  “What’s a wiener?”

Maddie looked at me, then back to Oliver.  “A wiener’s a hot
dog.”

“Nuh uh,” Oliver said.

“Yeah it is.  There’s even a song about it. 
Oh I wish I were
an Oscar Meyer wiener
,” she started singing.  Oliver watched in rapture
while she continued until she’d sung the entire song.

“Sing it again,” he laughed.

I’d been subjected to Maddie’s singing for over a year.  It
didn’t matter how stupid the song was, Maddie would gleefully sing it at the
top of her lungs. “Don’t get her started,” I told Oliver.

Maddie laughed. “Come on, honey,” she said, reaching over and
trying to take my hand. “Sing it with me!”

I looked at my two-year-old.  “Let’s get out of here, Max!” and
I lifted the sheets over our head and we disappeared under the covers
laughing.  And before the four of us fell asleep that night, Oliver had learned all the words to the song.