Mom Over Miami (2 page)

“Because somewhere in a warehouse in Pakquipsee there’s a footstool with our name on it.”

“You sound just like Payt.”

The boy grinned at the comparison to the latest in a long line of father figures he’d known in his young life.

The sight both warmed and wounded Hannah’s heart. “The topping is ready. Go tell the team to come and get it.”

He started off.

“Oh, and put ‘Squirrel’ out, so we don’t have a repeat of last time.” Hannah pulled up a stack of disposable bowls from the towering package she’d gotten at the warehouse club, dropped a handful of greasy corn chips into it and stood there waiting for the onslaught.

A dozen eight-year-old boys stumbled and pushed each other, trying to be first in line, and Hannah knew why.

“Mrs. Bartlett, is this snack homemade?” A black-haired boy with skin the color of dark chocolate took the bowl from her hand. He raised it up until it hid his grin, and just his brown eyes peered over the rim. “Because the snacks are always homemade at
my
mama’s house.”

She drizzled the melted cheese concoction over the boy’s chips. She knew what he wanted her to say in her distinct central Kentucky accent, but she just didn’t think she had the energy to play the game today. “Hunter, honey, I’m afraid our cheese-making equipment and smooth stones for pounding cornmeal into chips are not unpacked yet, so I couldn’t make any of this at home.”

“But at
my
mama’s house…”

Hannah raised her head. “Next.”

“Mrs. Bartlett!” The boy shifted from one foot to the other. “At
my
mama’s house…”

“Mine, too,” the next boy said, cupping the bowl she’d given him in both hands.

“Everything is homemade at
my
mama’s house, too, Mrs. Bartlett,” Third-in-line chimed in.

They were not going to give up until she gave them what they wanted.

“At
my
mama’s house…” Hunter started again.

“At
my
mama’s house, at
my
mama’s house…” She mimicked the boys with a swagger in her shoulders. Giving them the show she knew they wanted, she plunked her hand on her hip and narrowed one eye. “That may all be
well and good, but let me tell you something, boys, this is
not
your mama’s house—”

“Nacho Mama’s house!” Hunter laughed. “I got her to say it.”

“Yes, you did, Hunter. You got me good.” She poured a thin thread of liquefied cheese onto the next serving of chips and wondered what had happened to her big plans of living the sophisticated and intellectually stimulating life of a lady of leisure?

Hannah looked out over the heads of the boys, and her gaze met Sam’s.
That’s
what had happened. Sam had happened.

And to a lesser extent Tessa who, even though she wasn’t as demanding as an eight-year-old
now
, thank the Lord…

As if Tessa had a direct line into Hannah’s thoughts, and had inherited the Shelnutt family knack for usually proving those thoughts wrong, the baby sleeping in the nursery down the hall let out a sudden, toe-curling wail.

“Nacho Mama! Nacho Mama!” The boys who had been served lifted their bowls over their heads and chanted as they snaked their way back to the plastic-protected living room.

Tessa wailed.

Hannah dipped up another serving and then another as fast as she could.

“Nacho Mama! Nacho Mama!” More boys joined the chorus.

Stilton stepped up in line.

Hannah picked up a bowl and flung a few chips into it.

“No, thank you.” Stilton shook his head, one eye squinted at her like he might examine a bug before he decided whether to squash it or set it free. “I’m lactose intolerant.”

Cheese boy, lactose intolerant? Hannah didn’t know whether to smile at the notion or marvel at the boy’s maturity. “Can I get you something else then, Stilton?”

“No, thank you.” After a moment of studying her, he leaned in, tilted his head and whispered, “Do you need some help, Mrs. Bartlett?”

She had a cranky baby down the hall, a mixing bowl of blistering hot cheese stuff that she dared not leave unattended in her kitchen, and a soccer team dancing the Nacho Mama mambo in her living room. And the kid wanted to know if she needed help?

Stilton’s mom would not need help. She’d handle the boys, the baby, the bedlam and probably bake a homemade Bundtcake to boot! Hannah, on the other hand…

She’d never admit this to another soul, but seeing as it was a sober-faced child who’d already had a sense of pity for Hannah and her family instilled in him, she broke down and confessed, “Actually, Stilton, I
do
need help. In fact, some people might take one look at this situation and say I need divine intervention.”

What she got…was a phone call.

T
he ringing phone rattled her down to her very last nerve.

She clenched her jaw. She shut her eyes. She stuck her hand out to avoid mowing down in her rush the perfect—with the possible exception of a little lactose intolerance—child of Loveland’s most perfect mom. “Excuse me, Stilton, but…”

But the boy had fled. He now stood huddled in the corner of the living room with his hands over his ears.

For one fleeting moment, Hannah thought about joining him.

R-r-r-r-ring!

The sound jangled her back to her harried reality.

“Please be Payt saying he’s done at work and is so close by, he can get here in seconds to pitch in,” she whispered in prayer even as she lunged for the phone. “Hello?”

“Hannah-Banana! It’s your favorite aunt.”

Phyllis Amaryllis Shelnutt Shaffer Wentz, her father’s twice-widowed only sister. If Hannah had had a dozen aunts, the one they always called “Phiz” (though no one could ever remember why) would still have been her favorite.

That didn’t mean she was always a welcome interruption.

“Hi, Aunt Phiz. You sort of caught me in the middle of something.” Hannah elected not to share the details. Compared to her aunt’s amazing adventures, a little cheesy chaos hardly merited mention.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Phiz hollered back, clearly having not heard her niece say almost that very thing.

“Yes! It’s not the best time to take a call.”

Unless, of course, the now-retired college professor, part-time archaeologist and full-time family meddler had called to say she was in the neighborhood. And that she would be glad to drop in and save the day—or whisk Hannah away from it all.

“Can you hear me, dear? You have to excuse the poor connection, as I’m halfway around the world—in China!”

“‘Peace. Be strong,’” Hannah muttered the verse from Daniel that her father had chosen as her personal axiom in childhood.

“What, dear?”

“Nothing Aunt Phiz. You just caught me at a bad time.” She said the last part louder, hoping against hope it would sink in with her aunt at last.

But the boys’ voices rose in the background and drowned her out even in her own ears.

Tessa’s cry had turned into a soggy-sounding cough.

The dog pressed her entire lean muscled body against the sliding glass window. She gave out a mournful high-pitched whine begging to be let inside, and Stilton—who probably thought this qualified as helping—obliged.

Every other boy in the living room leapt up, bowls of food held above their heads.

Over the uproar, Aunt Phiz shouted, “What’s that, dear? I didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”

Hannah considered using the receiver like a hammer and pounding it against her forehead; instead, she trapped it between her head and shoulder and got to work. First, she kicked the fridge door open with the toe of her shoe, then kept it from closing again with a well-timed swing of her hip. “I have Sam’s soccer team here, and Tessa seems to be getting a cold and I need to take her a juice bottle.”

“Then take me along with you. I assume you’re on a cordless?”

Hannah pushed aside juice boxes and milk jugs to retrieve the prepared bottle. “Yes, I’m on the cordless but…”

“Good. I’ll tag along and goo for the baby in Cantonese. The tour group is celebrating our departure for India tonight, and I don’t know when I’ll get near a phone again.”

Hannah sighed and braced the phone wedged against her shoulder in place with her “free” hand. “If there’s a celebration, maybe you should get back to it, Aunt Phiz.”

She could just picture the tall, robust woman leading a wildly energetic dragon dance—the locals laughing and chanting as they wound this way and that behind her. “Hey, that could work.”

“Of course it will work, just take the phone with you and—”

“Grab your nachos with both hands, boys, and get in line. We’re snake-dancing all the way to the baby’s room.”

Even as the boys hurried to get a spot in line and still keep their bowls above greyhound-head height, someone called, “We never do stuff like this at
my
mama’s house,”

“I told you before, this is not your mama’s house.”

“Nacho Mama’s house!” The boys laughed and wriggled behind her down the hallway.

Aunt Phiz gave a quick rundown of the time she expected to arrive in Cincinnati two weeks hence.

Hannah made it to the crib. She scooped her daughter up. Somehow she managed to cradle the phone against the child’s ear while getting the bottle into Tessa’s mouth
and
steering the soccer team back into the hallway with only a couple chip spills—which Squirrel happily lapped up.

Everyone was being fed.

Everyone was happy.

Hannah sighed. Maybe she was getting a handle on this motherhood thing after all.

“Oops!” The phone slid out from under Tessa’s warm pink cheek.

Aunt Phiz, her unfamiliar dialect sounding to Hannah like a cartoon watch spring breaking, kept right on babbling in Cantonese baby talk.

Hannah came to a full stop to catch the phone. Only after she did that did she realize the consequences.

Th-whap!

Thud.

Crunch.

“Ouch.”

Then a momentary silence before:

“Hey, the dog is licking the back of my head.”

“That’s because it’s got cheese on it.”

“Cheesehead! Cheesehead!”

“Boys, boys!” Hannah spun around to find melted cheese product stuck in hair, all over shirts and even on the dog. Crushed chips littered the floor. One kid had stepped in his dropped bowl and had it stuck to his shoe.

Unsure which disaster to tackle first, Hannah ordered, “Nobody move!”

Tessa heaved the bottle to the floor.

Squirrel cowered.

“Okay, change of plan.
Move
. Everybody into the kitchen!”

The boys started to do as she said, but about that time the dog, who was crouching at the back of the line, noticed the bounty of chips on the plastic floor covering. Just as the group did as Hannah had asked, sixty-two pounds of long, strong, determined greyhound decided to begin belly-walking between the boys’ feet.

The few bowls that had not fallen to the floor were goners, and so were the boys holding those bowls.

Down in a pile they all went like…like…like a load of broken chips poured from God’s greatest corn chip bag.

Hannah groaned.

Then the doorbell rang.

“Oh, great.” She checked the clock. Still too early for parental pickups.

At least
that
was on her side.

She could deal with the door, get the boys cleaned up, tend to Tessa and pull up the ruined plastic drop cloth before any of the other mothers saw what a big fat failure she was at handling even the most simple of mommy duties.

“Bye, Aunt Phiz, I’ve got to go,” Hannah hollered at the receiver lying on the floor.

Aunt Phiz, never missing a beat, went right on chattering in Chinese.

“Hang that up, Sam,” Hannah said as she hoisted Tessa on her hip and headed for the door.

Whatever they were selling or soliciting donations for, she would get rid of the caller, then get this household back under control. She had three years of college jour
nalism under her belt. She had lived with a nutty father in a small-town fishbowl. She had even recently survived discovering that the mother she had lived a lifetime hoping to find had died not long after the family broke up. Hannah had run a rural pediatric clinic. She had overcome disappointment and infertility, begun motherhood at an age when a lot of women were done with that sort of thing, and still managed to meet the standards of the Foster Parent program.

Hannah could handle anything.

She flung open the door. “I’m sorry but…”

The boys crowded forward around her, pressing cheese-smeared hands to the doorjamb and Hannah’s jeans.

Amend that. Hannah could handle anything except…

Stilton slid under her arm and beamed up at her. “When you said you needed divine in-inner…intention, I knew just what to do, Mrs. Bartlett.”

“Why…” Hannah’s shoulders slumped. Her heart sank. The corners of her mouth tightened into a smile as she strained a pleasant tone though clenched teeth, “Thank you, Stilton, but you shouldn’t have.
Really
.”

“Oh, no trouble,” her guest gushed. “That’s why we got Stilton a cell phone—so he could use it in case of emergency.”

Hannah forced a weak, empty laugh. “Emergency? Oh, this hardly qualifies as an—”

One of the boys shoved the phone toward Hannah.

“I don’t know what this guy’s problem is, Mrs. B.” A man’s voice, probably one of Aunt Phiz’s fellow travel
ers, blasted out through the receiver a Cantonese cootchie-coo.

The dog rolled over on her back, rubbing greasy orange cheese residue on two boys’ new soccer shoes at once.

And Tessa sneezed, spewing bright red juice directly into the face of none other than Lauren Faison—aka Stilton’s mom.

“Oh, who am I trying to kid?” Hannah motioned the world’s most perfect mom into the chaos of her home and said, “Come on in, and heaven help us all.”