“I don’t know what you fantasized about then, but I know what it is now—reliving some teenage beauty queen fantasy.”
“The pageant? You’ve got a problem with my being in that pageant?” Mazie yanked down her bra, which was up around her collarbone. A minute ago she’d been feeling sexy and beautiful, but now she was acutely aware of all her shortcomings: not big enough; not small enough; not hot enough.
“First you say pageants are stupid and sexist,” Ben said, buttoning his shirt wrong. “Then suddenly you’re so gung ho into it you forget about helping with the documentary.”
“Oh, right, your precious documentary! You care more about Fawn Fanchon than you do about me.”
Okay, it was a dumb thing to say, Mazie thought, but she was on a dumb roll here.
“Maybe I should hit my head again,” Ben snapped. “Maybe then what you just said would make sense. Since you started with that pageant thing you’ve lost fifty points off your IQ.”
“Really? I’m not the one who just zipped his shirttail into his fly.”
Mazie yanked her own shirt on, not caring that it was inside out. “I suppose you think I’m too mentally challenged to figure out what’s going on here?”
“Oh? What’s that?” Ben ripped his shirt out of his zipper.
“You want to go chasing off to the mine disaster—the dashing young hero photojournalist—but you wanted a quickie with me first. It’s L.A. all over again.”
“Oh, right—throw that at me.” Ben’s voice rose. “I’m never going to hear the end of that, am I? I came back to you, didn’t I?”
“Lucky me. You checked out the big pond and found out you’d rather be a big fish in a small pond.”
“That’s completely—I take back the fifty-points thing. Make it a hundred points!” Ben bashed out the door, ignored the rungs on the tree trunk, and vaulted off the platform, landing lightly on his feet below. “Another thing,” he flung over his shoulder as he stalked off. “Your tree house is off-kilter. You should have used a plumb bob.”
What the hell was a plumb bob? Mazie had no idea, but if she’d had one in her hands at the moment she would have chucked it at Ben Labeck’s big, fat, swollen head.
Chapter Twenty-three
Rain.
Great.
On top of a sleepless night.
And today was Emily’s C-section.
And there was no summer school on Fridays.
And Ben’s bed hadn’t been slept in and he might not come back.
What else could go wrong? Don’t ask, Mazie thought, or it would happen.
She padded downstairs to the living room and turned on the television. The Shullsburg cave-in was the top story on the local ABC channel. The two kids had been pulled out of the collapsed pit around four that morning, filthy but unharmed. Mazie could see Ben’s handiwork in the film work—the distinctive angles, the close-ups, the expert way the shots were framed; he was a master craftsman when it came to photography.
She didn’t want to think about Ben because she’d thought about him all last night, beating herself up over the nasty things she’d said and the way she’d lost her temper.
Scully came in from doing the chores as the boys were sitting down to their plates of syrup topped with waffles. He looked pale and tense, too nervous about Emily’s impending surgery to eat, although he managed a cup of coffee. He showered and changed and came back downstairs again just as Emily’s brother Burt arrived to pick him up. Scully hadn’t trusted himself to drive to the hospital this morning.
Mazie hugged him as he headed out the door. “Tell Emily I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for her.”
“Yeah.” Scully hugged her back, and she was surprised to feel him shaking. Gran had already gone to the hospital and now Mazie felt sort of stranded, left with the breakfast dishes and the twins and no one for backup. It was raining too hard for the boys to go outside; they spent the morning playing noisy indoor games that involved a lot of yelling and thundering up and down the stairs.
Where was Ben? Was he so angry he’d gone to a motel? Or back to Milwaukee?
Mazie threw the breakfast things in the dishwasher, ran the vacuum, and set up the ironing board. She needed to iron the white blouse she planned to wear for her talent number later today—a piano solo she hadn’t had time to practice for.
She plugged in the iron. Maybe she ought to just forget the pageant. Maybe Ben was right and she was just entering it to indulge herself, relive her youthful moment of glory. Except it hadn’t been glorious at all. People didn’t realize how much work went into pageants, how much pressure there was to be perfectly dressed and groomed all the time, to behave in a ladylike but perky and upbeat manner, until you just wanted to rip your clothes off and run around chugging beer and cursing.
Distantly, a cat let out a squall. It sounded as though it had come from inside the house, but cats weren’t allowed inside; they stayed in the barn. Setting down the iron, Mazie walked through the kitchen, ears cocked. The sound came again, louder this time, the yowl of an angry cat.
“Bombs away!” Sam bellowed from the basement.
This was not good.
She flung open the basement door and pelted down the steps. Sam was hunched at the base of the laundry chute that ran between the second-floor bathroom and the basement. Something plummeted down the chute, mewling and scrabbling at the chute’s tin sides. A tiger-striped tomcat exploded out of the chute and into a mound of dirty laundry. Before the cat could gather his wits, Sam moved with lightning speed, mummying it in a thick towel.
“What are you doing?” Mazie shrieked.
“Seeing what happens when you drop a cat down the laundry chute.”
“Stop it—that’s cruelty to animals!”
“No it’s not!” Joey yelled from the top of the chute. “Sweetie Pie likes it!”
She wrestled Sweetie Pie away from Sam. The big tomcat lashed out, his claws raking across Mazie’s wrist. She lost her grip and the cat leaped to the floor and streaked away.
“Damn it!” She lifted her bleeding wrist to her mouth.
“Aunt Mazie swore!” the boys gleefully chanted.
“Shut up!”
“I’m telling!” Sam yelled. “You’re a bad example. You told us to shut up and you said the d-word. You ought to get a time-out.”
“Oh, don’t tempt me!”
The cat had gone to ground under the water heater, spitting and hissing, his ears back, his fur bristling, his mouth open to expose razor-sharp fangs, the demon cat from feline Hades. What if he accidentally jostled the heating element? Did the heater have a pilot light? And if it did, was it more likely to:
A. Go out, thus causing gas to slowly leak out, build up, and finally explode in a giant fireball, or
B. Set the poor creature’s fur on fire, causing him to race madly around the basement, setting fire to everything in his path, thus burning down the house?
“Here, kitty, kitty,” Mazie coaxed, trying for a calm, cat-friendly voice, levering herself onto the dirty, damp floor to eyeball the cat, whose own eyes were set in a fierce yellow glare. “It’s okay, Sweetie Pie—you can come out.”
He swiped out with a powerful paw, raking her cheek, nearly taking out an eye.
“Fine,” Mazie yelled, her cheek smarting like mad. The cut had gone deep, and blood was seeping out. If Sweetie Pie had recently killed a rat—and he looked as though he killed a dozen rats before breakfast just to keep his claws trim—rodent germs were even now multiplying in her bloodstream, probably mutating into the hantavirus. “You’re on your own, buster,” she snarled at the cat. “Don’t expect me to stick around with the fire extinguisher.”
“Tuna!” Sam said. “He’ll come out if we get him a can of tuna.”
“No!” Mazie said. “No tuna!”
But Sam was already racing up the basement steps. He reached the top of the stairs at the exact moment that Muffin, sniffing out cat, was dashing downstairs. Sam tripped over Muffin and fe
ll, banging his chin against the top step.
Muffin shot across the basement floor, using his inborn cat-locating radar to home in on the badly named Sweetie Pie. He frantically circled the water heater, trying to get at the cat while evading Mazie’s grasp, exchanging bloodcurdling curses with the cat. Sweetie Pie’s fur was so spiked out Mazie was afraid he’d lift the water heater off the ground.
She was torn between the need to check on Sam and the need to snatch Muffin away before Sweetie Pie turned him into shih-tzu McNuggets.
“Sam?” Mazie called up the stairs. “Are you hurt?”
“Nah. I just popped a tooth and split open my chin.”
Heaving himself to his feet, Sam ran up to the kitchen. In that instant Sweetie Pie wriggled out from beneath the heater. He feinted a blow at Muffin, flashed across the floor, jumped onto the washing machine, leaped to a cracked-open window, and squeezed through it to freedom.
Mazie left Muffin in the basement, where he prowled about hoping to discover more cats, and galloped upstairs to tend to Sam. In the kitchen, the twins were using a beer punch to open a can of StarKist. Joey tried wrenching the top of the can off while the job was half-finished and the jagged edge sliced into his thumb. Blood welled from the cut. He stuck the thumb in his mouth, sucked on it, then resumed pulling the lid off.
Mazie took the can away from Joey. The boys looked up at her, one bleeding from the mouth, the other from the thumb, both of them dribbling blood all over the kitchen.
“Wash,” she hissed, trying hard not to shriek.
They scrubbed and dried, using an entire forest’s worth of paper towels. Mazie took ice cubes from the freezer, crammed them into a plastic bag, and ordered Sam to ice his swollen lip. His chin had suffered only a small gash and probably didn’t need stitches. But one of his lower molars was hanging from his mouth by a stringy stalk of pulp. Before she could stop him, Sam twisted the tooth free.
Her stomach lurched. She thrust the bag of ice at him. A kid who could wrench out his own teeth didn’t need much coddling, but Mazie herself was feeling in need of strong spirits. She eyed the cupboards. Scully, who knew his sons well, kept the liquor under lock and key, but there might be some cooking sherry up there.
“I smell something burning,” Joey said.
She hurried to the living room, where the iron had fallen over and was scorching a wedge-shaped hole in her blouse. She snatched up the iron. Scraps of curled fabric stuck to it. The burn marks and hole were on the right breast, just beneath the armpit. Maybe if she kept her right arm clamped to her side, and played one-handed, the hole wouldn’t show.
“Mama says you should always unplug the iron before you go in another room,” Joey sanctimoniously instructed her.
Mazie gave him her death glare, unplugged the iron, and stomped back into the kitchen, wishing life had an instant rewind button and you could stop it where you wanted.
“I want tuna sandwiches for lunch,” Sam said.
Mazie picked up the blood-drizzled can of tuna. “Oh, sure, why the heck not? Joey, you don’t have hepatitis, do you?”
“Huh?”
The phone rang. It was a landline phone dating from the seventies, and actually had a rotary dial. Mazie yanked it off the wall, beating Joey to it by a nanosecond. “Hello?”
Scully’s voice, high-pitched and excited. “Mazie? They just delivered the baby.”
“Oh! Oh, that’s terrific! Congratulations, Scully.”
“Yeah. It’s—I can’t—it hasn’t sunk in yet.”
“Is Emily—”
“Mom and baby both doing great. Seven pounds one ounce. Black hair.” His voice trembled and something that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle came over the wires. “I held the baby for a few seconds before they took it away. You forget how tiny they are.”
“Can we come?”
“I guess that would be okay. Boys being good for you?”
“Ummm …”
Before she could answer, Scully hung up.
“Hey, guys,” Mazie said, smiling. “Your mom just had the baby.”
“Is it a boy?” asked Joey, who’d swaddled his thumb in so many 4th of July–motif Band-Aids it resembled a patriotic Popsicle.
“I forgot to ask,” Mazie admitted. “But we’ll find out when we get there.”
“We’re going to go see Mom?” Sam asked.
“In the hospital?” Joey asked.
She didn’t like the way the boys perked up at the word hospital. Hospitals contained all kinds of gadgets the twins would find intriguing, from the automatic doors to X-ray equipment.
“Listen, you two.” Mazie jabbed a finger into each skinny chest. “You are going to behave when we get there. You are not going to bring your spud gun. You are going to sit quietly in your mother’s room. No racing in wheelchairs. No yanking on people’s IV lines. And the CAT-scan machine does not actually scan cats.”
The twins looked at each other. Wicked glints appeared in their eyes.
Wrong thing to say. Mazie knew it the minute it was out of her mouth.
Chapter Twenty-four
Annie Laurie Maguire was lying sound asleep in her father’s arms, wearing a tiny pink cap over her acres of black hair, her eyes tightly shut, her little mouth slightly working as though she were dreaming of sucking milk. It was a cliché, Mazie knew, but the baby’s mouth really did look like a rose, and it made her go all squishy inside.
Emily patted Mazie’s hand as though sensing her thoughts. Mazie had always liked Emily, who was much better than Scully deserved. She was very pretty, with dark, wavy hair and bright hazel eyes she’d passed along to Joey. Right now her face was still swollen with hormones and her hair was matted to her scalp, but she was exuding happiness in waves nearly visible to the human eye.
“Well, what do you guys think of your sister?” Emily asked the boys, who were standing so close to her bed they were practically in it, Sam absentmindedly stroking his mother’s arm, Joey with a strand of her hair wrapped around his finger.
Joey peered more closely at the baby. “Is it always going to be so ugly?”
“How come it’s so purple?” Sam asked. “It looks like a big prune!”
“It looks like the alien in that one movie,” Joey commented, “the one that explodes out of the giant centipede’s gut.”
Emily just laughed. “You’ll love your sister when she gets a little older.”
Both boys appeared to have doubts about this.
There was a rap on the door, then Ben Labeck poked his head around the corner.
“Should I come back later?”
“Hell no,” Scully called. “Come on in and meet my baby girl.”
Ben sidled in, a Congratulations balloon bobbing behind him. He carried two Shopko bags and a giant pink and blue flower arrangement in a vase.
“Oh, they’re gorgeous!” exclaimed Emily when she saw the flowers.
“The lady at the florist shop asked me if the baby was a boy or girl and I didn’t know, so she put in both colors, just to be on the safe side.”
“Emily,” Mazie said, “this is Ben Labeck. Ben, Emily Maguire.”
“I’d shake hands,” Emily said, “except they’re full of twins.”
Emily was going to be too weak to lift so much as a plate for a while, according to her doctor, so Mazie took charge of the flowers, removing the cellophane and setting them on a dresser. The bouquet was centered with tiny white bootees, arranged so they looked like knitted flowers. Mazie’s eyes suddenly filled up. What was it about baby bootees that set off her tear ducts? Was it the tininess of the things? She blinked away the tears, hoping nobody had noticed.
“What’s in those bags?” Sam asked, pointing.
“Something for the guys who are going to have the job of protecting the baby,” Ben said.
“Who?” Joey asked.
Ben raised his eyebrows at them.
The boys looked at each other, communicating in silent twin language. “I guess we could protect her
,” Sam said. “We’re pretty strong.”
The packages turned out to contain Lego space stations. Prodded by their parents, Joey and Sam thanked Ben, then dashed out of the room to find a place to assemble the stations.
“You’re a doll to think of the boys,” Emily told Ben.
“Thought they might be feeling a little left out.”
Emily turned to Mazie. “Do not let this guy get away,” she whispered.
“Want to hold Annie?” Scully asked Ben.
“Uh … I don’t know. Do I have to put on a mask or something?”
“They’ve relaxed the rules these days,” Emily said. “Go ahead.”
Scully handed the baby to Labeck. Annie Laurie woke at that moment, yawned, and opened her eyes.
“That’s Uncle Ben, little girl,” Scully said, in a high-pitched baby-talk voice that made Mazie laugh out loud. It sounded like: “Dass Unca Ben, widdle giwl.”
Ben held the baby very carefully, his hands looking ridiculously large wrapped around her tiny body. If he resented being called Uncle Ben by a family he was not married into, he didn’t protest. He seemed to enjoy holding the tiny bundle, making little cooing noises to her and gently bouncing her, smiling at her as she stared nearsightedly up at him. She flexed her feet and her socks came off. Ben kissed the bottoms of her tiny pink soles, then kissed her toes. “Does this widdle girl have teeny, weeny piggies? Yes, she does!”
Mazie and Emily grinned at each other, and Mazie was sure the only reason Emily wasn’t indulging in a full-fledged belly laugh was because of her stitches.
“You can get one of those of your own, you know,” Scully said, watching Ben pace around the room with the baby.
Mazie had to clasp the base of the flower arrangement so her hand wouldn’t treacherously shoot up while she yelled, “I volunteer!” The idea of having Ben Labeck’s baby was very appealing. If only there was some way to guarantee it would be an Annie and not a Sam or Joey.
Labeck walked over to Mazie with Annie Laurie. Mazie touched the baby’s tiny palm with a forefinger and found it grasped with a surprisingly strong grip.
“You’re crying,” Labeck whispered. “Are you all right?”
Tangled Thing Called Love: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 16
