Double Trouble
by MSC
ColeMeezer@aol.com
Dr. Kelly Brackett closed the door to the base station and reached for a much needed infusion of coffee. He was in luck, there was just enough left for one cup, but before he could manage to extricate the pot from the coffeemaker, he was paged.
Dr. Brackett, line 2. Dr. Brackett, line2.
Still clutching his empty Styrofoam cup in his left hand, his right reached instead for the house phone as he neatly side-stepped Joe Early’s arrival. Lifting the receiver, he pushed in the blinking button for line two and answered, “Dr. Brackett.”
“Kel,” it was his wife, without preamble she continued, “Could you bring something home for dinner.” Her voice sounded uncharacteristically thin, tight and exasperated.
“Dix, is everything okay?” He lifted his wrist to check the
time –
“No. Everything is not okay.” She declined to elaborate but her succinct reply spoke volumes.
Predictably, at least where his family was concerned, he over-reacted. “Are you all right? Are the kids all right?” He whirled away from Early to lean on the nurse’s desk, leaving his colleague poised with coffeepot extended in midair.
She sounded exasperated. “Let’s just say that your children have been busy today.”
My children. It’s a bad sign when they’re ‘my kids’, he thought. “What happened?” he asked. “What’d they do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” The tenuous thread of her patience with the father of her two hoodlums gave way. “Look, just bring dinner,” she instructed.
“What do you want?” Snick. Silence. She’d hung up on him. Kel removed the phone from his ear and stared at it. He felt vaguely uneasy.
“Everything okay Kel?” Joe asked. He hadn’t intended to eavesdrop but it was impossible not to overhear.
As he returned the headset to the cradle, Kel explained, “She hung up on me.”
“What happened? What’d you do?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know.” Perplexed, he turned to face Early. “She wouldn’t talk about it. All she said was that my children had been busy today.”
“That’s not a good sign,” Joe observed sagely. He took the opportunity to lean over and finally empty the coffee into Kel’s cup. Sounds like you’re gonna need a bracer, my friend.
“No,” Brackett agreed, “no it’s not.”
****************
He nudged the door open with his foot and cautiously poked his head into the laundry room. “Dix?” he queried. No answer. That’s strange.
He dropped his coat onto a large pile of freshly laundered towels stacked atop the churning dryer and made his way into the kitchen. Depositing the bags of take-out from the Red Fortune on the counter, he noticed that the house was eerily quiet. On the days when Dixie was home with Jake and Sophie, he was usually met at the door by a happy tandem of babbling toddlers and one lovely, and sometimes slightly frazzled, wife. Today, no one greeted his arrival.
He found Dixie in the living room, curled contentedly, or so it seemed, in a corner of the couch with a book, a half-finished glass of wine on the table beside her. “Hey,” he ventured.
Dixie deliberately finished her paragraph, picked up her bookmark from where it lay draped across the arm of the couch, inserted it between the pages, and closed her book before meeting his eyes. “Hey yourself.” She watched him without further greeting or comment.
“I brought dinner,” he gestured towards the kitchen. “I stopped at the Red Fortune.”
“Thanks.” She continued her silent appraisal.
“I got your favorites…” he trailed off lamely. He wished silently for the familiar uncertainty of a MVA, an overdose, a natural disaster, or a case of the flu. Any unknown medical challenge would be preferable to the silent treatment from Dixie. It never lasted long though, Dixie’s temperamental streak that more than matched his own.
She took a sip of wine but did not offer a response.
Brackett, never a patient man, could stand it no longer. He broke. “Dix…what happened? Where are the kids?”
She gave away nothing. “Napping.”
“Willingly?” He knew better.
“Not exactly,” she confirmed.
“Okay,” he dropped onto the ottoman, “you gotta tell me what happened. What’d the Dynamic Duo do this time?”
**************
“They were playing in the living room, watching Sesame Street, or so I thought,” Dixie explained. “I had the baby gates up across the living room and the kitchen doorway, and I was trying to get our bed and theirs stripped and changed. It couldn’t have been ten, fifteen minutes,” she shook her head in disbelief and took a sip of wine.
“What happened?”
“Well, Sophie came running into the nursery and said ‘Mommy, I’m wet, change me.’ It took me a few seconds to realize,” she ticked the items off on her fingers, “that she wasn’t talking about her diaper; she was completely soaked; and she was out.”
Kel panicked. “Did one of the gaits collapse? Is she okay?”
“Oh she’s fine. It was nothing that simple.”
“What?” Kel was now completely confused.
“They’d managed to unscrew the locking mechanism and take down the gait between the dining room and the kitchen.”
“What?!” Brackett sat back in stunned amazement. “But they’d have had to….how? How? And with what?”
“Butter knife,” his wife explained. “One or both opened the china cabinet, pulled out the good silver, picked a knife and used it to remove the screws.”
“But they…they’re not old enough for that kind of dexterity… are they? How’d they know what to do?” Brackett was flummoxed.
“Clearly they’re old enough. And it wouldn’t take much, the screws are large, you can almost turn them with your fingers. I don’t think it would take much force. Just patience…and persistence. Face it, they worked on this together. They’re hunting cooperatively, Kel,” Dixie observed.
“That’s a problem.”
“You’re a master of understatement,” his wife observed sarcastically. “The problem’s only beginning. Wait ‘til I tell you what they did next.”
“There’s more?”
“Oh yeah. Sophie was soaking wet remember,” she reminded him.
Kel shifted on the ottoman, his eyebrows furrowed together, the corner of his mouth twitching in his habitual response to uncomfortable situations. He reached out and patted Dixie’s knee as he stood. “I’ll be right back. This looks like it might take awhile so I’m gonna pop the food in the oven to keep it warm.” He pointed to her now empty wineglass. “Is there more of that?”
Uh huh, Dixie nodded.
“Maybe I’ll bring back a little liquid fortitude as well.”
He returned with the bottle of chardonnay and a second goblet for himself. After replenishing Dixie’s glass, he poured one for himself and, placing the bottle on the floor, Kel joined Dixie on the couch. Once settled, he turned to face her. “Okay, hit me with the rest of it.”
********************
“When I realized that she was soaking wet,” Dixie said, “my first thought was that somehow she’d gotten out into the back yard and into the pool and that Jake might be….” she shuddered slightly at the memory of how terrified she had been and then continued as Kel reached out and hugged her in commiseration, “…and I panicked. I grabbed Sophie and took off down the hall. I don’t think I’ve ever moved so slowly Kel, it felt like my legs were made of lead.”
“I’m sure you were flying,” he comforted her, wrapping his left arm around her reassuringly.
She sagged slowly into the welcome shelter of his embrace and took a sip of her wine before continuing. “The gate to the living room was still up, so I went through the den into the kitchen. I found the gate to the dining room down, and Sophie’s accomplice in his full glory.”
Kel found himself trying to mask a smile. Whatever Jake had managed to do, he was first and foremost unharmed and seemed to have generated a grudging respect from his mother for his ingenuity. “I’m going to assume he was okay and skip right to asking what Jake managed to get himself into?” he asked.
“Oh, you’re right, he was fine,” Dixie confirmed sardonically, “as a matter of fact he was having the time of his life.”
Kel tried to keep his voice even when he asked the obvious, “So, what was he doing?”
“Well, apparently your son, with help your from daughter, had managed to drag a kitchen chair over to the sink and had climbed up onto the counter.” Her sarcasm wasn’t lost on Kel.
“Dix! He could have fallen. He could have been hurt!” Wasn’t she worried that he could have fallen?
“Hurt!” she chuffed, “the child climbs like a goat. He didn’t stop there; he’d turned on the water and discovered the magical and wondrous properties of the sprayer attachment. He was spraying everything in sight…walls, ceiling, counters, Sophie, me ... got me full in face with the damned thing and laughed like a little hyena. Sophie seemed to find it hilarious too. She was running around the room doing her own version of ‘singing in the rain’.”
Slowly Kel removed his arm from around his wife’s shoulders and bent forward, propping his elbows on his knees. He clamped his lips firmly together; to let loose the laughter building inside his chest would get him into far more trouble than Jake and Sophie. The mental image of a wet, dripping and fuming Dixie was almost too much to repress. He swirled his wine around in the glass, taking a sip to buy himself some time to compose himself. “Uhmm….” he started.
That was all the impetus she needed. “Did you know that if you re-wet finger paint,” she observed, referring to the abstract masterpieces that apparently had once adorned the refrigerator, “that you can smear paint all over every available surface?” She sipped her wine and turned to face him. “Jake was drenched; so was Sophie and half-covered in paint, which I hadn’t noticed before, and there was paint on half the counters and water standing on the floor by the time I got the damned sprayer away from him. It took all the towels we had to dry us all off and mop up the mess.”
Her voice had risen sufficiently to attract the attention of the twins, who by now were clammering for attention from their nursery. Kel glanced briefly down the hallway in the direction of the growing ruckus. “You spent all afternoon on damage control, didn’t you?” he asked.
She nodded in affirmation.
“I’m sorry, Dix,” he said solicitously. “Finish your wine. I’ll get dinner ready and then go see if I can quiet down our little hose jockeys,” he offered.
She smiled at his analogy. “No,” she said, “I can handle getting dinner on the table.”
“Okay, then I’ll take care of the kids for the rest of the night.”
“And I’ll let you,” Dixie agreed. “I can’t wait to go back to the peace and quiet of the ER tomorrow.”
Kel grimaced in acknowledgement. Continuous shrieks of “Daddy!” had reached ear-splitting levels. As he turned towards the hallway, he said, “It won’t be too bad.”
“How to do figure that?” Dixie asked.
“They won’t need a bath,” he explained, then beat a hasty retreat down the hall and into the nursery. He’d probably pay dearly for that remark later, but he wasn’t going to loose this rare opening to get the last word with Dixie. Jake and Sophie weren’t the only opportunists in the family.
