Hunker Down with the McKallisters: A Cake Series Novella

by J. Bengtsson

  “Hey.” I gripped his arm. “It’s going to be fine.”

  He recovered straightaway, clearing his voice of any emotion. “If something happens to me, I need you to promise…”

  “Rocky, nothing’s going to happen.”

  “If something happens, Emma, promise me that my kids won’t grow up with Shelby. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’d want you and Finn to raise Nike and Posy. With you two, they’d have a chance. Please, promise me.”

  The look on Rocky’s face was one I’d never seen before – that desperation. He and Finn had both grown up in squalor, but unlike my husband, who’d been removed from the home as a teenager, Rocky had remained. Whatever hardships he’d suffered in Finn’s absence had never been revealed, but I had no doubt his life had been a tough one. I couldn’t turn my back on Rocky any more than I could on one of my own brothers.

  Meeting his eye, I made him a solemn vow.

  “I promise.”

  Kyle

  Quarantine – Day 7

  “I feel like one of those prostitutes in the window in Amsterdam,” I said as I settled into the chair in front of the large picture window.

  Jake dropped down beside me, slapping me on the knee. “You’d be so very lonely.”

  “Please. I’d have a line around the block.”

  “Oh,” Jake chuckled. “Okay.”

  “Screw you, dude, I’d make a kick-ass hustler.”

  “Not in your current condition, you wouldn’t.”

  “Speak for yourself, dickhead. I’m not the one wearing bald eagle slippers.”

  “They were a gift from my kids. What, am I not supposed to wear them?”

  “Yes, that’s right. You’re not supposed to wear them. It’s common courtesy.”

  Our argument was cut short when the kids began to gather around the window. Some were dressed in tights, while others just had sweatpants on, but all were barefoot.

  “Uh-oh,” Jake grinned. “I have a bad feeling about this one.”

  Every third day, at noon, the Lockdown Kids performed. The ensemble group consisted of all the grandchildren currently sheltering in place at the McKallister house. That included my two sons, Jake’s three kids, and the three Perry girls. The first Covid-19 performance had been a rock concert, which Jake and I both wholeheartedly supported. The second show was an unorganized synchronized swimming number, with the little non-swimmers performing their routines in a plastic wading pool.

  “Oh man,” I laughed. “I think this one’s a ballet.”

  “100% it is. Casey knows I’m not a fan. She’s just torturing me.”

  The music started, and sure enough, the kids began a riveting performance of Swan Lake. The only reason I knew that was because some of the kids were wearing homemade duck hats fashioned with felt and pipe cleaners. I noted Kenzie off to the side, her laugh unbridled as she watched the boys entertain. Life on that side of the window was still vibrant and fun. I wanted to be on that side.

  Over here in the red-light district, things were stale and uncertain. While Jake basically napped his quarantine away, I spent my days flipping from one news station to the next, filling my head with ever more troubling facts and graphs and curves. The world was going to shit while I was sheltering in place in a luxury pool house. Each day I spent in quarantine was another day of fear and doubt. Would life ever return to normal? Would my kids ever know a world without disease?

  Surprisingly, Jake didn’t seem affected by the news or by the virus that continued to devastate. I wondered if maybe he didn’t feel fear the way others did. He’d already survived the worst life had to offer, so it made sense that everything after paled in comparison.

  “Dad, are you paying attention?” my son Arlo called out in the middle of a pirouette. Arlo had stopped calling me daddy when he was three years old, the age when we both discovered his intelligence far surpassed my own.

  I nodded and smiled, watching with surprise as Arlo engaged in the dance with uncharacteristic aplomb. He usually hated movement. Just getting him outside to play could be a challenge. If Arlo was going to kick a ball around, he was analyzing the angles and calculating its distances. When I was his age, if it was round and it moved, I was kicking it into someone’s crotch.

  School was his sport and, in that, he excelled. Arlo was smart… almost too smart for his own good, and as a result, he spent a lot of time indoors and alone. My firstborn didn’t need to be a sports star; I just wanted him to connect, like he was doing now – in a ballet recital. It made me wonder if we’d been focusing him on the wrong activity. Maybe he’d be happier performing in the Nutcracker than cracking someone’s nuts. Whatever made him happy – that would be the direction I’d point him in. All I asked was for my boys to not feel the need to hide in the shadows – like I’d done for most of my life.

  “Daddy, look at me. Look at me, Daddy,” Axel hollered, a big toothy grin accompanying my youngest’s spastic movements as he flopped on the grass like an earthworm.

  Yep, that one was all mine.

  “I see you, bud.”

  Everyone saw Axel. He was life on a giant silver platter.

  “He totally doesn’t get the point of ballet,” Jake laughed.

  “No, he wasn’t blessed with grace,” I agreed, as I watched my mini-me perform.

  “This is your punishment for all the years when I’d ask you a question and you’d reply in interpretive dance.”

  “Yeah,” I chuckled. “That was obnoxious. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Sometimes it was the only laugh I’d get all week.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Certainly, it had never felt like a chore to entertain Jake, or to try to lure him out of his tortured head. “Well, I’m glad I could be of service.”

  “You were more than that, Kyle. I wouldn’t have made it through without you,” Jake said, the mood in the whorehouse dimming. “You were right to be worried about me. I was on the edge. All I needed was the smallest push and I would’ve been gone forever. But you were always there, always seeking out attention… like Axel. ‘Jake, look at me. Look at me, Jake.’ However annoying it was, you never let me look away, Kyle. You wouldn’t let me go.”

  His words sank straight into my soul. We rarely discussed the past. I think the last time might have been at the hospital years ago. As always, I yearned for more, but Jake had already moved on. He was now focused solely on his baby daughter dancing in her mama’s arms. Jake adored all his kids, but Lily was special – the little girl he’d always wanted. She’d torn down the last of his defenses and settled herself deep inside his heart.

  “Can I ask you something, Jake?”

  I could tell by the reluctant way he turned toward me that he wasn’t interested in further discussion, but I needed his wisdom right now.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Aren’t you scared? The whole world has gone to hell. How are we ever going to get back to what it was?”

  There was a long pause before he replied. “We can’t go back, Kyle. Life was never meant to be traveled in reverse.”

  Finn

  Lockdown – Day 9

  Was that… my toilet paper?

  I looked up at Grandma Gigi’s house, which was now covered in long streaks of two-ply gold. Not an inch of the exterior was untouched.

  Three hours. I’d left them alone for three hours.

  I caught one of the young hooligans by the arm as he raced by.

  “What have you done?” I accused.

  “We’re just playing,” the tweener replied. “What’s your problem?”

  I snatched an intact toilet paper roll from his hand and shook it in his face. “Where are the rest of them?”

  “Gone.”

  Gone? They couldn’t be gone. I caught my breath before hollering at the top of my lungs. “Shelby! Bucky! Anyone with kids! Get out here!”

  I held tight to the evidence, in one hand the boy with newly shorn locks squirming in my grip, and in the other, the last l
iving roll of toilet paper in the Perry household.

  When I’d first sat down with my kinfolk and told them of the state’s lockdown protocol, detailing how the virus jumped from one person to another and how they’d all been exposed, most acknowledged the situation. Some even offered to help me disinfect the entire property. But after returning from the great Lysol challenge, I found several of my cousins shaving their children’s hair off. Somehow, my halfwit relatives had equated the coronavirus to a lice outbreak.

  My first thought was to try and educate them by turning on the nightly news and giving them a dose of reality, but then it occurred to me that if lice was the worst health crisis they could imagine befalling them, then let them believe the little jumping parasites were the villains of this apocalypse. If it kept my family members six feet apart and focused on cleanliness, then I’d accomplished my goal… sort of.

  Shelby and a small gathering of adults oozed out of the front door at banana slug speed.

  “What are you screaming about?” my mother asked, slapping her hand to her waist.

  Wait… what was she wearing? It was like an 80’s Jane Fonda workout leotard, complete with knee-high leg warmers. I lost all train of thought.

  Shaking my head free of the image, I waved my arm in a half circle, covering the façade of the house. “Look.”

  “Yes, Indiana Jones, it’s a house,” Shelby mocked me, smirking at my cousin Mutt like I was this village's idiot.

  He spit a wad of chewing tobacco, his blackened teeth exposed in a righteous grin.

  “Yes, Shelby,” I said as patiently as my impatience would allow. “I know it’s a house. But did you happen to catch how the kids chose to decorate it? I mean, are you throwing a coronavirus party I wasn’t invited to?”

  “What are you babbling about, Indiana Jo…,” she stopped mid-sentence as her brain finally caught up to her eyes.

  “Oh, my god!” Shelby gasped, nearly falling to her stockinged knees. “What have they done? How are we…”

  “…going to wipe our asses?” I finished her sentence. “That’s a very good question.”

  Bucky stepped down off the porch to stare up in wonder. “Where did they get it? I haven’t seen toilet paper in a week.”

  I cringed at the mental picture of how my cousin was dealing with the lack of butt wipe material, but I had more pressing issues at hand. “I’m glad you asked, Bucky. See, I went to the store before the sun rose this morning to be the first one in line to buy the 36-roll ‘limited edition’ family pack. I also managed to buy eggs, which I can only assume are now splattered all over the picture windows at the back of the house.”

  “Indy, what are we going to do?” Shelby continued her over-dramatic bit, even hinting at hyperventilation. “This is a catastrophe.”

  Okay, well, famine in underdeveloped countries was a catastrophe; but I got her drift. It was going to be a long, hard spring without a little squeezable softness between our asscracks. I sighed. This shitshow needed a hero, and as always, it would have to be me – for no other reason than a lack of any other qualified contenders.

  “All right, I need all hands on deck – even the kids roaming the plains. Maura, go get some garbage bags. Collin, grab the fruit picker pole from the shed. Shelby…” I hesitated, trying to come up with the least taxing chore possible in hopes she might actually do it. “Hold my keys.”

  “Look, people,” I continued. “If we all work together, we can salvage some of what’s been lost. Let’s go!”

  I looked up from my inspiring pep talk to find – all my relatives still standing there.

  “Is there a problem?” I questioned.

  “Can we do it after the Ellen DeGeneres show is over?” Uncle Jimmy asked.

  “Is it a rerun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then no.”

  A collective groan erupted.

  “Uh,” Mutt cut in. “I ain’t got no kids, so I should be exempt.”

  I blinked at him. “That statement is entirely false, Mutt. What about the one in Utah? Or the one down the street?”

  “Here, Indy. I meant here – at Perryland.”

  “Ugh. I can’t help people who can’t help themselves. If I don’t have every human over the age of five out here in three minutes’ time, I’m going back to the McKallister mansion, where bidets render toilet paper useless and I don’t have to deal with shitheads like you.”

  For the first time in forever, my family actually listened.

  Scott

  Lockdown – Day 10

  “Hey, Mom? Dad? I’m home.”

  “Quinn?” Michelle jumped from her chair as he entered the kitchen, backing away slowly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Um,” Quinn’s eyes shifted between the two of us. “I’m not gonna lie. I was hoping for more enthusiasm.”

  “No, of course I’m happy to see you,” she replied, taking another step back.

  “Really? Because you’re acting like I’m wrapped in explosives.”

  “It’s just… well…” Michelle turned to me. “Help me out, Scott.”

  “What she’s trying to say, son, is that you’re dirty.”

  “I showered this morning,” he protested.

  “Not that kind of dirty. You’re from the outside.”

  Michelle tagged back in. “Remember when I told you that you either had to come home back in March or not at all?”

  “You were being serious?”

  “Of course she was. In case you haven’t heard, kid, there’s a virus out there, killing old, fat guys like me.”

  “Come on, Dad, you’re not that old,” Quinn grinned.

  “Shut up.”

  “So, where am I supposed to go?” my youngest son asked. “Do you think the county dump will take me?”

  “Doubtful,” I chuckled.

  “Scott, you’re not helping. We need solutions.”

  “I mean, I suppose we could toss him in with Jake and Kyle.”

  “We can’t do that!” Michelle said, flashing me her Angry Bird eyebrows. “What if Quinn’s not infected?”

  “Hello, people. I’m right here,” Quinn waved. “And just FYI, this is the worst greeting ever.”

  “I’m sorry, honey," she said. "Your old room is being used by the grandkids. But what if we clean out the craft room for you and put the blow-up bed in there? I’ll feed you meals through the door. Two weeks of solitary confinement, and then you’ll be good to go.”

  My youngest son looked from his mom to me, waiting for someone to tell him he was being punked. His choices were either prison or zombie apocalypse. I wouldn’t much like those options either, but we were living in different times now… with different rules. And, honestly, I was with Michelle on this one. Quinn was a damn rock star. There was just no telling what that boy might drag in.

  “Forget this shit,” he said, breaking the tense moment. “I’m going over to Keith and Sam’s house. No way would they turn me away. Keith’s the dirtiest human I know.”

  Michelle

  Lockdown – Day 10

  The minute Quinn left, I felt the weight of my decision. How could I turn my back on my own child? “Do you think we were too hard on him?”

  “Absolutely not,” Scott replied. “We gave him the option of being imprisoned in his own home, and he turned it down. What more could we do?”

  “I’m being serious, Scott.”

  “So am I. Do you realize that we are down to twelve rolls of toilet paper… in the entire house? I ran inventory this morning, Michelle; it’s not looking good. As much as I’d like to, we just can’t afford to support one more asshole.”

  In our marriage, we’d been opposites from the start. We’d always made it work, but quarantining with the man was testing my patience. I had to keep telling myself that it was a stressful time, and this too would pass. We’d made it through way worse than this; times that would have killed lesser marriages.

  “We wouldn’t go through so many rolls of toilet paper if
people would start using the bidets Finn put on every toilet in the house last week," I said. "They work amazing.”

  “Yes, well, unlike yours, my ass doesn’t require power washing.”

  I rolled my eyes. Patience. Give me patience. “And unlike you, I won’t be wiping mine like a savage come Friday.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve got spies out scouring the shelves. We’ll find some before then. Anyway, stop feeling bad about Quinn. He’s survived this long in the open air; he’ll be fine. I mean, did you see that kid’s muscles? He’s like a germ-fighting super hero.”

  “Muscles won’t protect against this virus, Scott.”

  “No, but we can’t either. He made his choice weeks ago when we asked him to come home and he refused.”

  “Right – but he was going through that whole virus denial stage. We should’ve known he’d come home once reality set in. We should’ve had his room ready for him.”

  “Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Michelle, our priority now is ourselves. Who’s going to suffer if Quinn drags in the Black Plague?”

  “Us,” I replied.

  “That’s right. More me, probably… but you too.”

  “Sure, honey.” I laughed. He was such a man. I could be four days deep into the stomach flu when he came down with a sniffle and the world would officially end. “Of course, the virus will punish you the most.”

  “Thank you. That’s all I’m saying. Do you feel better now?”

  “I do,” I said. Scott always did have a way of calming my anxiety. “I love you.”

  “I love you too. And just remember, Michelle – now is the time for us to be the grownups and to set a good example.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I always am,” he said, before raising his voice to attract the attention of our grandchildren in the other room. “Now, who wants to play some poker?”

  Quinn