Home Is Wherever You Are

by Rose von Barnsley

  “She doesn’t like people to know. Doctors and mechanics have it the worst, when people find out what they do. Everyone is always asking them questions, so she keeps it under wraps. She only works on our cars now, since she’s busy with the kids.”

  “Huh, I guess you learn something new every day. Do you think she’d look at it for me? I’d pay her, of course. I’m sure Addy would be thrilled to keep her truck.”

  “Sure, Darlene loves your truck. She’s talked about getting her hands under your hood for a while,” Kyle shrugged.

  “You make it sound so dirty,” I teased, and he punched my shoulder, laughing and shaking his head.

  He called Darlene at lunchtime, and she said she would go over to the house and look at it for me. When we pulled up after work, the kids were all jumping in the back of the truck, and Darlene and Addy were looking at the engine. Darlene had a smudge of black on her face, and Kyle let out a groan. “Man, my wife is so hot,” he moaned, pushing down on his pants.

  “Whoa there, buddy, not in front of the kids.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Sorry, it gets me every time. Thank heaven she’s ovulating, so I can bang her into next week.”

  I was a little shocked at his statement. Addy had mentioned they were thinking of having another kid, but this was the first I had heard about it from Kyle. “So you guys are trying for a baby?” I asked.

  “No trying needed, my girl is a fertile field, and I’m the plow. By this time next month, she’ll be puking her guts out and smiling about it. Women are so weird like that.”

  I started laughing and hopped out of the truck. The kids were screaming daddy, so Kyle and I walked over to them. His boys jumped on him, while my little monsters jumped on me.

  I heard Darlene yell, “Hit it!” and the truck roared to life. Addy looked over at me smiling. Little Abraham was on her lap trying to steer, bouncing around. Darlene slammed the hood down and smiled at us. “All fixed, she’s a beauty, Matthew.”

  “Thank you, how much do I owe you?” I asked.

  “Addy bought the new starter, and as for labor, you guys are babysitting this weekend.”

  The kids all screamed, “Sleepover!”

  Our house would be bursting with kids, even more than it was now. Darlene went to pack up her tools, and Kyle gave her a hand, lifting her massive toolbox. He put it in the back of his truck and kissed her a little deeper than appropriate for company, but that was just Kyle and Darlene.

  The next day was Friday, and when I got home from work, the house was loud and rowdy. The kids were playing tag, running around the house, and Addy was in the kitchen cooking dinner. Abraham was at her feet, pulling himself up to stand next to her, as he held on to her leg. “Ma!” he kept shouting at her, trying to get her attention.

  I walked over and picked him up. His whole face lit up when he saw me, and he squealed, “Da!”

  I leaned over and kissed my wife and smiled when I saw the large pot of spaghetti. “Looks yummy,” I said.

  Addy laughed, cupping her ear. “I can’t hear what you just said. The kids are being too loud.”

  I considered yelling at them to be quiet, but they were laughing and happy, so I pulled her tight into my arms, kissing her ear. “I said yummy.”

  Her eyes darkened a little, and she said something, but I couldn’t hear it. “What?” I asked laughing.

  She pulled me down to her lips, kissing me softly, and then she moved to my ear. “Me or the dinner?” she asked.

  At that, I just pulled her closer, squeezing her backside in my free hand. She giggled and kissed me again, but we were broken apart by Abraham patting my face and then pulling Addy’s hair, trying to get her off me. “Just you wait, buddy, when you start dating, I’ll be making your life a nightmare as payback.” I gave Addy’s backside another squeeze and then swatted it. She jumped and giggled, as the kids came running through the kitchen.

  “Take it outside!” Addy shouted, and I opened the back door, letting the kids run past me.

  She turned to the cabinet and started setting the table. I pulled out the milk and juice to go with dinner and helped her. Once it was ready, we sat down and ate by ourselves quietly, with little Abraham mangling handfuls of spaghetti as well. We could hear the kids laughing and playing in the backyard. “This isn’t so bad, is it?” she asked.

  I looked out the window, where the kids were chasing each other, and smiled. She was right. This wasn’t so bad. “Nah, it isn’t. How was your day?” I asked, and she just laughed.

  She told me how Genny was trying to tell jokes and they didn’t come out right, but she’d laughed at herself, and when she’d laughed, Abraham joined in. Addy was giggling as she told me about it, and she was so beautiful. “They’re so cute, Matthew. Some days I wish you could just stay home with me and see how sweet our babies are.”

  I leaned over to kiss her, and Abraham threw a handful of spaghetti at me and started giggling. I pinched the mess off my face and threw it back at him, causing him to laugh harder. It was impossible not to smile at him. Then Addy kissed the sauce off my chin. I turned and kissed her again, only to hear a chorus of, “Ew, kissing!” coming from behind me.

  The kids were all standing there watching. “Like you’ve never seen kissing,” I groused.

  “I’ve seen it, doesn’t mean I like it,” David said, and his little brother crossed his arms and nodded his head at me, like he had just told me so.

  I chuckled and took Abraham from his highchair, because he was done eating and was just making a mess.

  “I’ll get him washed up and ready for bed,” I told Addy, and she kissed me again, but chastely this time. I heard her round up the kids and listened to her joke about feeding them bloody worms for dinner. They all got excited. I realized then that my wife wasn’t just a good mother, but she was so sweetly gifted with children, it would be wrong to consider denying her more if that was what she wanted. We had managed so far, and God willing, we could continue to do it somehow.

  What I had thought would be a stressful time ended up being fun, as she fed the kids dinner and got them ready for bed. They all brought their blankets downstairs and fell asleep in front of the TV watching some movie David and George had brought over.

  I tucked little Abraham into bed, just as Addy came walking in with a smile on her face. I was about to ask her why she was smiling, when she pulled off her shirt and dropped her pants. Now I was smiling. I yanked her down on the bed and attacked her like I had wanted to do all day. She didn’t say anything, when I told her I didn’t need a condom as she reached for it. She just went back to kissing me, but this time it was more intense. She was amazing and beautiful. I was so lucky she was mine.

  It was a couple of weeks later, and I couldn’t believe I was disappointed, when Addy called and asked me to pick up feminine products for her. I ran into Kyle and found him a little further down the aisle looking at pregnancy tests. “Hey, Matthew,” he smiled at me, waving with a test in his hand.

  “You’re buying a test?” I asked.

  “Just a formality, she’s three days late. I told you she’d be puking.” He was smiling, and I didn’t understand why I felt so jealous suddenly.

  “Congratulations,” I said, giving him a smile, and he nodded, leaving me to find what was on my list. I tried to convince myself that I had plenty of kids. We had four! I should have been more than content. Kyle was only working on his third.

  When I found Addy at home, reading with Genny and Abraham in her lap, I couldn’t help but feel like we should have more. I didn’t tell her I was disappointed about her starting her period. I didn’t want her to stress about trying for another baby, since that seemed to impede the process. Besides, she wasn’t trying, I was. I knew enough about her cycle to figure out when she was ovulating. She had said she didn’t want to stop it from happening, so she would be okay with me trying, wouldn’t she?

  Chapter 41 - In the Works

  While I was secretly trying to impregnate m
y wife, I was also looking at ways to build up our savings. I wanted to be in a more comfortable place when it finally happened. I took on a few extra jobs, working even after I had class some evenings. I took jobs that were further out than I normally would have gone. Once Josh heard I was traveling to work, I got a call from him as well. He had a few houses in Houston and heard I was reasonably priced. He had me going there working almost daily. He paid immediately in cash and then asked me if I had ever thought about investing in houses and flipping them.

  I had never thought seriously about it and wasn’t sure it was worth the risk of losing what little money we did have.

  “Look, Matthew, I won’t lie to you. It’d be easy for someone to lose money in this business, but the fact is, you know what you’re doing and can do it all yourself. If you get a stripped or foreclosed house, fix it up and then sell it, it’d make you close to double if not triple what you paid. Heck, I made fifteen thousand dollars on the house you sold me two months later. Not bad for not lifting a finger, you know.”

  I stood silently, thinking over what he had said. I didn’t want to risk losing everything we had over a crapshoot. “Would you be willing to do it again?” I asked.

  “What?” he asked confused.

  “I can’t risk the money. I have a family, Josh. What if I bought a house, fixed it up, and then I sold it to you at a reduced price, so you could make a profit and not have to lift a finger?” I proposed.

  He rubbed his chin. “How much of a profit?”

  “It’d be the same as before, fifteen thousand dollars under the appraisal price. It’d be a guaranteed investment. You’d just have to wait for a buyer. In this economy, the houses I could afford to buy would probably sell fast, because everybody else is broke, too, and looking to go cheap.”

  Josh agreed and helped me pick a foreclosure house. It was eighteen thousand dollars and completely stripped of wiring. I drove down Friday and spent the weekend in Houston working on it. I got it all restrung and had an A/C guy coming on Monday. It passed the electrical inspection with flying colors on Saturday.

  I spent most of the night there cleaning and painting. I had bought several buckets of “oops” paint and dumped them all together, making a nice beige color Kelly would have been proud of. It was enough to paint the whole interior. The place didn’t look bad at all. I also found some flooring on clearance for nineteen cents a square foot that was a fancy wood laminate. I put it down throughout the living room, entryway and hallway. The tile in the kitchen and bathrooms was fine, thankfully. I rented a carpet cleaner to shampoo the three bedrooms. When I was done, the place looked amazing. If we didn’t need more room, I would have considered living in it. The A/C guy delivered and hooked up the new unit, as Josh was doing his walkthrough.

  “This looks great, Matthew, I knew you could do it.”

  An appraisal guy came a few minutes after, walking around and looking at the house. “This house appraises for eighty-five thousand dollars,” he said in a less-than-interested tone. He handed me the paper, along with a comparative on neighboring houses. They all ranged between seventy-five and ninety thousand dollars. I wasn’t going to fight him on the eight-five-thousand-dollar appraisal. At this point, Josh and I would both be doing well. I hoped he didn’t take long with the money, because I had used up all of our saving and then some. Thank heavens for store credit with zero interest for twelve months.

  Once the A/C guy and appraiser left, Josh took out his checkbook and a thick stack of papers. A lady came scurrying in with a book and stamp. “Lana, come notarize these papers, so Matthew can get back to his family,” Josh ordered, as I signed like mad. The sale price was seventy thousand dollars. Between the purchase of the house and other expenses, I had spent twenty-five thousand dollars of my own money, leaving me with a forty-five-thousand-dollar profit.

  I watched as Josh tapped a “for sale” sign into the front yard, and Lana took pictures of the interior. I grabbed my tools, duffle and sleeping bag and headed for my truck.

  “Hey, Matthew,” Josh called after me, “Would you be interested in doing this again?”

  “I’m not sure. Let me see how my wife faired alone with the kids for four days.”

  He chuckled. “Alright, you call me, I know of a few others I wouldn’t mind doing this with,” he offered.

  I nodded okay, but I would have to talk to my wife first. I hadn’t really told her what I had been up to. She just knew I had been working for Josh. I swung by the bank and deposited the money into the account. I called the number on the back of my new credit card and quickly made the five-thousand-dollar payment. I didn’t want that hanging over our heads. Finally, I headed home to my wife.

  I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept most of the weekend, just worked until I couldn’t work anymore, and then I slept for a short time, only to get up and work again. I had wanted to get the house all done that weekend, but it ended up taking me an extra day. I would have to apologize to my wife for that.

  When I finally pulled up to my house, it was really late, after eleven o’clock. The house was dark, but when I came in, I saw my wife with a sleeping Abraham on the couch. I went over and kissed her head, picking up my little boy from her and took him to his bed. He stirred and fussed as I laid him down, but I rubbed his back until he quieted again. I walked out to where my wife was sleeping on the couch and picked her up in my arms. She woke a little, but just snuggled into me, letting me carry her to our room. I tucked her in and then stripped down to climb in next to her. I had missed her so much. I snuggled into her side and fell fast asleep.

  It seemed like my head had just hit the pillow, when a fussy Abraham started to cry. I got up and picked him up, when I heard my wife groan. He clung to me so tightly, making me feel bad for leaving him. I walked out into the living room, where my wife had been last night, and turned on the lights. There were all sorts of teething remedies and a bottle of baby ibuprofen on the coffee table. I noticed little Abraham had his hand in his mouth.

  I checked the time to see if it was alright to give him more. It was almost five o’clock in the morning, and most of the medicine she had given him last night would have worn off a couple of hours ago. I carefully gave him another dose, including these tiny white pills he seemed to like a little too much as he gummed them. He dropped his head to my shoulder, like he was exhausted and relieved at the same time. I rubbed his back, sitting with him until he fell asleep. I finally put him to bed around six o’clock and knew my wife would be up at seven to get the kids off to school.

  I checked the fridge and found we were out of milk, so I made a quick run to the gas station and bought a gallon, along with a box of cereal. I set them on the table and grabbed some clothes for the kids out of the dryer and headed upstairs. I saw jam-covered faces and knew they would need to get up early for a bath. I woke up Adam first, and he was thrilled to see me, but he was not thrilled I was sending him to take a bath. I asked him to make it quick and then stopped him to ask if he knew if it was Addy or Darlene’s day to drive.

  “It’s mom’s, where is she?” he asked.

  “She’s sleeping,” I said quietly, hoping he would get the hint that I would like to keep her that way.

  He let out a sigh. “That’s good, that baby has been keeping everybody up,” he said stretching and went off to the bathroom.

  I walked over to Gabby’s bed, determined not to wake Genny. I rubbed her little back and kissed the top of her head. “It’s time to wake up,” I whispered. She groaned but stretched. When she opened her eyes, she smiled at me, hugging me tightly.

  “I missed you, Daddy.”

  “I missed you, too,” I whispered. “We need to be quiet, so we don’t wake Genny and Abraham. Come into the hall, I have clothes for you and Adam.”

  She followed me out into the hall, just as Adam came out in a bright yellow towel. His hair wasn’t wet, but his face was clean, so I wasn’t going to fight him on it. I passed him his clothes and told him to get dressed. I sent G
abby into the bathroom and told her to shower, get dressed and come eat breakfast.

  I went downstairs with Adam and found a couple of clean bowls. The kitchen was messier than it usually was. I wondered if Addy was doing alright. I loaded the dishwasher and turned to see Gabby hopping down the stairs with two backpacks.

  “Do you have any homework?” I asked.

  “We have a paper mom was supposed to sign, but we didn’t bug her about it,” Gabby said.

  “Yeah, she was yelling a lot, she’s not happy when you’re not home,” Adam spoke with wide eyes. Gabby was nodding in agreement.

  I let out a sigh, digging for a pen and signed the permission slips, letting the kids go on a field trip. I tucked them along with twenty dollars in an envelope and wrote a quick note, letting the teacher know it was to cover the ten-dollar cost for each kid. I stuck it in Gabby’s bag and herded them toward the door. “We pick up David, right?” I asked.

  They both nodded yes, and I hurried them out the door and into the van. I banged my knee on the steering wheel getting in. My wife was short. I readjusted her seat and headed to Kyle’s house. He was surprised to see me, but he didn’t say anything, when I mentioned Abraham was teething.

  “Dude, that’s rough. If you can afford to take the week off, you should, because you’ll need it. We lucked out being unemployed when George was teething. That was hell.”

  “Ooh, I’m telling mom you said a bad word,” David chided.

  “Oh, hush, you!” Kyle said, messing up his hair, causing him to pout and Kyle to laugh. “Good luck with the teething,” he waved.

  I pulled up to the school, letting all the kids out.

  “Wait! Our lunch!” Adam cried, stopping in his tracks. I dug around in my wallet and pulled out two fives.

  “You’re buying today,” I told them.

  Adam started doing a silly victory dance of some sort, and Gabby just kissed my cheek, thanking me. “Have a good day!” I called after them.

  When I got back to the house, I was met with a droopy-eyed wife. “You should go back to bed, that’s where I’m headed.”