Babies in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  “Sim!” Mandy demanded more forcefully now that she had her sister’s support.

  “I don’t know what sim is,” Kira informed the tiny child, unsure if either twin comprehended what she was trying to get through to them any more than she understood what they were telling her.

  “Sim!” Mel shouted.

  That prompted Cutty to say into the receiver, “Hang on a minute.” Then, with his hand over the mouthpiece, he said to Kira, “Sim is swim. They want to swim in the blow-up pool in the backyard.”

  “Oh,” Kira said as light dawned. “Should I let them?”

  “It’s up to you. You’ll have to rinse out the pool, fill it from the hose, bring out a bucket of hot water to heat it and sit with them the whole time.”

  None of which involved making any headway on the chores Kira was hoping to get to.

  Cutty must have seen her indecision because he said, “You can tell them no if you don’t want to do it.”

  Then he went back to his phone conversation and left it up to her.

  But by then Mandy had joined Mel in chanting, “Sim! Sim!” and Kira knew she’d be in for a raging tantrum in stereo if she told them they couldn’t swim. So she caved.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll swim. For just a little while, though, because there are so many other things I need to get done today,” she said to hush the girls.

  “You can put them in the pool in their diapers,” Cutty informed her, taking another break from his call as she ushered the twins into the backyard.

  Filling the pool with the hose hadn’t sounded like a problem, but with Mel and Mandy in tow it was hardly uncomplicated. They didn’t have any conception of waiting until Kira had it ready for them. Or them ready for it. Instead, as she was turning on the hose, they got into the small vinyl wading pool, getting their clothes soiled with the dirt that had dried on the bottom from disuse.

  “No, we have to rinse it out and fill it before you can get in,” Kira told them, setting the hose down on the lawn and going to lift them out.

  “Sim!” Mel protested.

  “We need water in it to swim,” Kira said, putting Mel on the grass and then turning to get Mandy out.

  But while she was retrieving Mandy, Mel picked up the hose and aimed it at the pool, dousing Kira and Mandy both, and making Mandy cry.

  “Oh, this is not good,” Kira muttered to herself, before attempting to comfort Mandy and get the hose from Mel at the same time.

  Once she had the hose she put it down again but kept her foot firmly on it as she set Mandy on the lawn beside her sister.

  “Can you take off your clothes while I put the water in the pool?” she asked, hoping to distract them, knowing they could undress themselves if they wanted to because they often did it at moments when they weren’t supposed to.

  But of course they both said, “No.”

  “Okay, then just sit there while I fill the pool.”

  Another no was the answer to that, but Kira ignored it, snatched up the hose and took it to the pool.

  She managed to rinse it and dump out the dingy water but as she finally began to fill it the girls returned.

  “Sim!” Mel said.

  By then Kira knew better than to expect any patience from them, so she put the hose between her knees to hold it still aimed at the pool and, with her hands free, she went to work taking off the twins’ shirts and shorts.

  It was not a graceful operation but luckily the pool was so small it didn’t take much to put a few inches of water into it, and the girls had on only shorts and T-shirts over their diapers.

  With both things accomplished, she took the hose with her to turn it off and by the time she’d done that, the babies had climbed into the water.

  “Coad!” Mandy complained, getting right back out.

  “I know it’s cold. I’m going to get some water from inside to heat it up.”

  But she couldn’t leave Mel in the water while she did that, so she again lifted the baby out of the pool, making her scream bloody murder because she didn’t want to get out.

  “Go find the ball. You can take it into the pool with you,” Kira said, hoping to distract Mel.

  But it was Mandy who found the ball—and threw it into the water from a safe distance away—while Mel merely tried to get back in herself.

  So, keeping an eagle eye on Mandy but leaving her in the yard, Kira took Mel into the house with her.

  She was glad to see that Cutty was no longer on the telephone. If he had been he certainly wouldn’t have been able to hear his conversation over Mel’s crying and demanding to sim again. Instead he’d already filled a bucket with hot water.

  “Thanks,” Kira said, pretending not to notice that he was amused by the spectacle of her swimming-pool comedy of errors.

  She took the screaming infant and the bucket back outside but she needed two hands to pour the warmer water into the pool. Which meant she had to put Mel down.

  But the minute she did, Mel climbed in again.

  Kira was afraid she might burn the baby, so she took her out.

  Mel’s feet no sooner hit the ground than she climbed in.

  Kira took her out.

  Mel climbed in.

  So Kira took her out, took her to the farthest end of the yard, and then ran as fast as she could to pour the water in before Mel got back, too.

  Kira could hear Cutty laughing from inside the house so she knew he was watching, but she was just glad she’d managed to get all the hot water in and do a quick test of the temperature before Mel climbed into that pool again.

  Then Kira turned to Mandy who was stomping her bare feet into the puddle left when Kira had rinsed the pool initially.

  “The water is warm now, Mandy. Do you want to swim?”

  “No.”

  Of course not. And no amount of coaxing could get the other baby anywhere near the water her sister was happily romping in now.

  Kira was slowly learning to pick her battles and forcing Mandy to swim didn’t seem like one she should wage. Besides, after all that, she was ready for a breather herself. So rather than saying any more, she took a lawn chair to the edge of the wading pool where she could sit and watch Mel and Mandy at once, and sat down.

  “Can I put my feet in?” she asked Mel.

  “Sim?” Mel responded in invitation.

  “No, thank you. I’m too big to swim. But I’ll put my feet in,” she said, taking off her own sandals and rolling up her jeans so she could do just that.

  “Toes,” Mel said, pointing to Kira’s.

  “Toes,” Kira confirmed.

  That drew Mandy’s interest and she came to the pool’s edge, too, bending over to get a look at Kira’s feet, as well.

  Kira wiggled her toes for them and that made them laugh.

  Then Mandy left, dragged one of the two infant-size lawn chairs to Kira’s side and tried to do what Kira was doing—sit in the chair and dangle her feet over the edge of the pool.

  Her judge of distance was off, though, and she was too far away. So Kira helped out by moving Mandy and her chair close enough for Mandy’s pudgy feet to reach.

  She promptly wiggled her toes, too, and it must have looked like more fun than Mel was having because she climbed out of the pool, clumsily maneuvered her own pint-size chair to Kira’s other side and wasn’t happy until she was doing exactly what Mandy and Kira were doing.

  And there they sat, three girls soaking their feet on a hot summer’s day, wiggling their toes, making trails through the water, kicking up a light splash just for the heck of it.

  And that was when it struck Kira that somewhere along the way she’d turned a corner with her nieces.

  That not only had they accepted her, they might even like her.

  And nothing she could think of pleased her more.

  “If you do that over here I can help,” Cutty informed Kira when she came down the stairs carrying a basket of clean laundry to fold after getting the twins to sleep that night.

  “I wo
n’t pass up that offer,” she said, struggling not to let anything fall from the mountain that peaked well above the top of the basket.

  Cutty was in his usual position on the couch with his foot propped on top of pillows on the coffee table so Kira put the basket in front of the sofa and joined him on the other side of it.

  Oddly enough, sharing the simple chore seemed like a nice way to end the day. A day Kira had enjoyed even more after the realization that she’d made headway in the twins’ affections.

  “Can I say I told you so now?” Cutty asked as they worked.

  “About what?”

  “The girls. Didn’t I tell you they’d warm up to you if you just gave them a little time?”

  “You did.”

  “And now they’re passing up their dear old dad like a dirty shirt,” he pretended to complain.

  “You could have read their bedtime story if you wanted to,” Kira pointed out, believing he was referring to the fact that the twins had decreed that “Kiwa” do the honors tonight.

  “No, they made their choice and it wasn’t me.”

  “Mel even wanted to give me a good-night kiss,” Kira bragged. “Then, not to be outdone, I got one out of Mandy, too.”

  “You’re on the A-list now.”

  Kira just smiled, keeping to herself how good that made her feel. And at the same time trying not to take too much notice of Cutty.

  He had on casual Sunday clothes—a pair of jeans and a simple navy-blue crew-neck T-shirt—but every time he reached for something to fold his carved biceps slid out from under the short sleeve and Kira’s gaze kept getting stuck on how sexy that looked.

  “You’re very patient with the girls,” he said then.

  “Why does that seem to surprise you?”

  “Well, for one, they’re a handful.”

  “And for two?”

  He didn’t seem eager to answer that because there was a moment’s pause before he said, “I guess it comes from the image I have of the way you and Marla were raised.”

  “The image you have? Didn’t Marla talk about the way we were raised?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t. I made certain assumptions based on my experience with your father, but she said I was wrong.”

  “What assumptions did you make?” Kira asked.

  “To be blunt? That he was domineering. Demanding. Dictatorial. Controlling in the extreme. Really, that he was just plain mean and that he ran his household like boot camp. And even though Marla swore he was never violent, patience was definitely not what I figured anyone learned from him.”

  “No, he wasn’t violent—that part was true. But Marla denied the rest?” It was Kira’s turn to sound surprised.

  “She said her father was a model parent. That at times he could be a little stern but that didn’t make him any less great. That I’d only seen him one night when he’d been upset, and that he’d had good reason to be angry.”

  “Oh.”

  They’d finished folding the laundry and they piled it back in the basket. A lot of the things were baby clothes, and Kira couldn’t go into the nursery to put them away while the girls were sleeping, so she took the basket into the foyer and left it at the foot of the stairs, wondering the whole time at her sister’s description of their father.

  Then she rejoined Cutty on the couch, sitting slightly sideways so she could face him.

  “Are you sure Marla was talking about our father?” Kira asked then, making a little joke. “Because the father I had was a lot more like your description than what I would consider a model parent.”

  “It was important to Marla to have a good face on things,” Cutty said, sounding a little sad. But it was short-lived. “So tell me what he was really like.”

  Kira had the sense that Cutty’s curiosity came from more than merely a desire to know about her childhood. But even so she didn’t see why that curiosity couldn’t be satisfied. In fact she didn’t understand why Marla hadn’t satisfied it.

  “Boot camp—that pretty much hits the nail on the head,” Kira confirmed what Cutty had said moments earlier. “One of my earliest memories of Tom Wentworth is of this big man towering over me and yelling because I hadn’t made my bed the minute I got out of it—and made it complete with the sheet folded just so over the top edge of the blanket, the pillow centered and the spread exactly the same distance from the floor all the way around.”

  “And you were how old when your mother married him?”

  “Three. I don’t know how soon it was afterward that I was in trouble for not making the bed, but I don’t think it was too terribly long a time. I do know that there were always high expectations of me and some of the things he made us do seemed unnecessary.”

  “For instance?”

  “Well, for instance, besides the specifications for how the bed had to be made, at night our clothes either had to go into the hamper or be folded in a pile at the foot of the mattress, and our shoes had to be side-by-side under the bed—far enough under to be out of the way, not so far that the heels couldn’t be seen. And if the shoes weren’t where they were supposed to be or weren’t absolutely side-by-side, he would wake us up with a scream that would scare us to death and make us do it the way he wanted it.”

  “So you were afraid of him even if he didn’t hit you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Kira said emphatically but matter-of-factly and without feeling sorry for herself.

  “I know I’d never seen anyone as petrified as Marla was about telling her father that she was pregnant,” Cutty put in.

  “And then you met him and understood.”

  “But there was no hitting?” Cutty reiterated as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “No, he never hit us. Although there were a few times when he’d flick our ears—which hurt a lot. But that was as far as any physical consequences went. It was more that there were average punishments that he’d take a step—or ten steps—further.”

  “Like?”

  “Like we didn’t just have dessert taken away, we wouldn’t get a meal at all. Toys wouldn’t just be off-limits for a while, he’d pack everything up and give it to charity, and we wouldn’t have anything to play with until the next Christmas or birthday. Extra chores didn’t mean we had to sweep out the garage, it meant that we had to completely take the garage apart, scrub it down as if it were an operating room and put it back together. Extremes—he always did everything in the extreme. Including his reaction if we did step out of line or didn’t perform to his standards. He could be very scary. And loud. If I disappointed him or made him mad I dreaded his reaction as much as I dreaded his punishments.”

  “And your mother let this go on?”

  “He was as hard on my mother as he was on Marla and me. He saw everything and everyone as a reflection of him, and that reflection had to be flawless. It was important that people marveled at how exceptional everything he had contact with was.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure.”

  “A lot,” Kira confirmed.

  “And he was the same with your mother?”

  “Dinner at six o’clock every night. If she served it at five after he was likely to throw it against a wall. She couldn’t be seen without makeup. The house had to be spotless and everything had to be in exactly the order it had been before we moved in—the way his first wife had decorated it. Once he didn’t speak to my mother for six months because she’d dusted the living room and moved a lamp to a spot she thought needed more light.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I wish I were. The lamp was where Marla’s mother had put it and that meant it couldn’t be moved.”

  “Was the place a shrine to his first wife?”

  “To him it was more that his first wife had set the standard my mother had to live by. Just the way Marla was the standard I was supposed to live by…well, in terms of getting straight As and minding my manners and being as good at everything as she was. At least as good as she’d been up to the point where she got
pregnant.”

  Cutty shook his head. “I still can’t believe your mother put up with it all—for herself or for you.”

  Kira shrugged. “He wasn’t awful all the time. He could be nice. I think she genuinely loved him, even though I admit, I found him a hard man to love myself. But my mother always said that even though he ran a tight ship he was still a good man, that he provided for us and only wanted the best for us. Plus, she never thought she had a whole lot of options. She’d gotten married right out of high school, she didn’t have a degree or any work experience, and when my birth father deserted us and disappeared so he didn’t have to pay child support when I was a year old, she’d really been left in trouble. To her it was better to put up with Tom Wentworth’s idiosyncrasies—that’s what she called them—than to be on her own to raise and support me the way she’d been for the two years between her divorce and marrying again.”

  Cutty’s eyebrows came together in a frown. “So did Wentworth ease up on you at least after Marla did the biggest no-no of all and got pregnant at seventeen?”

  “Ease up?” Kira repeated with a laugh. “Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I sort of got punished for it.”

  “You were punished because Marla got pregnant and eloped?”

  “Not directly. But if you thought he was strict with Marla as a teenager, it was nothing compared to what he was with me.”

  “Did he lock you in a closet or make you wear a chastity belt?”

  Kira laughed again. “It wasn’t quite as bad as being locked in a closet or wearing medieval armor. But I wasn’t allowed any social life. He made my mother take me to school and pick me up at the end of the day, and beyond that I couldn’t go anywhere where either he or my mother wasn’t supervising, and never either with a boy or if boys were being included.”

  “No boys—under any circumstances?”

  “None. If a boy so much as called me about a school project I was in for it.”

  “Girlfriends only?”

  “Right. And I didn’t end up with many of those because the older I got, the more my friends wanted to do things without one of my parents having to go along and to be with boys, and since I couldn’t—”