A Fine Mess

by Kristy K. James

  “Yes. I‘ll see you upstairs. Thank you, Ian.”

  “No problem.”

  And it wasn’t. Not really. Now if she’d asked him to change a diaper or give the little monster a bath, that would be a problem.

  When the microwave dinged, he removed the bottle and headed upstairs. Twenty seconds was just to take the chill off, from what he gathered. And it had.

  Annie was singing softly, rocking Sam on the edge of her bed. With no light except that from the hallway, the bedroom was shadowed so it almost felt like he was looking at silhouettes.

  “...Yes, Jesus loves you. Yes, Jesus loves you. The bible tells me so.”

  He remembered Maddie telling him about her part in the Christmas program. No, he had no idea what she sang like as a little girl. As a woman cuddling a baby, though, she sounded like an angel. So much so that he got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Annie?” She glanced over at him.

  “He’s almost asleep. But I think he’s waiting for the bottle before he gives in and conks out for the night.”

  He walked quietly across the floor and handed it to her. Sam grabbed it greedily and began to drink as Ian squatted down before them.

  “Do you think he’ll sleep okay?” he whispered, reaching out to gently stroke the soft, chubby baby cheek.

  “I hope so. I’d sure hate to haul him out to the car for the night.”

  “You’d drive him around?”

  “No, I’d lock him in the car and let him out in the morning.”

  “Annie! Oh. You’re kidding. Right?”

  “Yes, I’m kidding. I wouldn’t hesitate to drive him around for awhile, though, if the need arises.”

  “Wake me up if it does. I don’t want the two of you out alone in the middle of the night, okay?”

  “We’d be fine, Ian.”

  “Would you just humor me? Please? Wake me up if you need me.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “Thank you. Do you think you’ll go back downstairs tonight?”

  “Probably not. I’d be nervous about leaving him up here alone and not hearing him if he needed me.”

  “Okay. I’ll lock up and turn the lights off then. Good night, Annie.”

  “Nite, Ian.”

  ~~~~

  Annie closed her bible and set it carefully on her night stand and stared at nothing as she contemplated what she’d just read.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t read the verse several times throughout her life. She had, in fact, read through the entire bible numerous times. Except none of the verses regarding marriage had ever jumped out at her like they had been doing lately. Especially tonight.

  ‘And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband: But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife.”

  Straight out of first Corinthians chapter seven, verses ten and eleven.

  Like other verses, this was crystal clear. If you got married, you stayed married. Annie was pretty sure that the Lord did not recognize the agreement she and Ian had made as a valid reason for divorce when the time came.

  “I guess all I can do is pray for your will, Father. If you want me to stay with him, I’m willing. I like and respect him and I think I could make him happy. But You will have to work in his heart, Lord. I can’t make him love me, or want to stay with me.

  “Lord, I also ask that you bless and keep us. Heal my mom. Give me opportunities to be a laborer in Your harvest. In Jesus Name I pray. Amen.”

  ~~~~

  Becca had warned her that Sam was an early riser. In Annie’s opinion, five-thirty on a Saturday morning was obscenely early, but she hurried to the portable crib at Sam’s first whimper and lifted him out.

  No wonder he cried. He was soaked. And now, so was she.

  “Thanks, Sam,” she said softly, kissing his blond curls as she carried him into her bathroom." It's too early to wake Ian so I can have a shower. But I guess if baby wipes work to clean you, they’ll have to be good enough for me until he wakes up, huh?”

  In no time she had the baby, and herself changed, and had padded downstairs to the kitchen.

  “Here you go, buddy.”

  She sat him safely in the high chair and gave him a handful of round oat cereal to play with, and maybe eat, before she started scrambling a couple of eggs for him. Becca said it was his favorite breakfast, along with a piece of plain toast. It didn’t sound particularly appetizing to Annie since she wasn’t supposed to season the eggs. And no butter on the toast- That just wasn’t right.

  Still, he wasn’t her baby, and the decision wasn’t hers to make. Maybe if it was, she wouldn’t change it anyway. Because, quite truthfully, what she knew about babies and toddlers would probably fit on the head of a pin.

  Sure she’d done her share of volunteering in the nursery at church. But there was a world of difference between playing with babies for an hour and a half and raising one!

  Her instincts would be to feed Sam rather than spooning the now cooled eggs onto the high chair tray so he could feed himself. Yeah, feeding. He might be wielding a rubber coated spoon, but his fists seemed to be the main eating utensils.

  “You have no manners,” she said, pulling up a wooden kitchen chair and yawning. “You wake me up before the crack of dawn, and there you sit stuffing your little mouth with eggs.”

  Sam flashed her a toothy grin. Well kind of a toothy grin. There were only four on the top and two on the bottom.

  “You think you’re cute do you?” She reached out and tickled his neck and was rewarded with a giggle. “Well you are. But you’re also a slob. Do you see all the egg on the floor, young man?” Yuck!”

  “Yuck,” Sam repeated amicably, shoving most of one hand in his mouth. The other wouldn’t fit and so he proceeded to smear the eggs over his face and through his hair.

  ~~~~

  Ian woke slowly. It felt like someone was watching him. Thinking it must be the remnant of a dream he couldn’t quite recall, stretched and yawned and rolled over on his side before opening his eyes.

  To find a big black nose almost touching his.

  “Jack!” The exclamation startled both him and the dog, Jack backing away a few feet and Ian sitting bolt upright in bed. “How did you get in here?”

  He was sure he closed the door securely before going to bed the night before, but obviously he hadn’t.

  “Sam run you out, did he?” Ian yawned again before reluctantly climbing out of bed and dressing quickly in jeans and navy and yellow U of M sweatshirt. The late October mornings were getting pretty chilly now.

  A glance at the alarm clock on his way out showed it to be six-forty-five. A good forty-five minutes earlier than he preferred to get up on weekends, but once he woke up, he was awake for the day.

  “You have too much energy for this early in the morning, buster,” he heard Annie saying cheerfully from the living room. It was followed by a big yawn and he grinned, just before yawning again himself. “No, you can’t play with that. Give me that! No, you’re not having that either.”

  Thinking he should probably go help out, he stepped into the doorway, where he watched his wife rescuing a couple of candlesticks that had previously been decorating the top of their coffee table. She must have spotted him from the corner of her eye because she smiled up at him from where she was kneeling on the floor.

  “Did we wake you?”

  “No. Actually Jack did. I must have not closed my door good last night because he was looking me right in the eyes a few minutes ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Ian,” she apologized, rescuing a cut glass candy bowl that had been sitting on a lace doily between the candlesticks. “Wow, he’s fast! I don’t notice a whole lot at five-thirty in the morning, but I did see that he was still sleeping in my room when we came downstairs.”

  “Five-thirty? That’s when Sam woke you up?”

  “Yup. But that
’s okay. After cleaning about half of his scrambled eggs up off the floor, and giving him a bath to get the rest of them out of his hair, we’ve been having fun. Haven’t we, Sam?” She tickled his belly and he laughed. A delighted laugh that had Ian grinning from ear to ear.

  “Sounds like it. Did you fill Jack’s feeding dishes yet?”

  “No. I didn’t even think about it.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “Thanks.”

  He turned to head for the kitchen when he heard Annie exclaim,

  “Hey, you’re not feeding the dog!”

  A quick glance back showed Sam crawling for all he was worth in an effort to follow him.

  “Guess he has to check out everything, doesn’t he?”

  “Everything being the key word there,” she sighed, jumping to her feet and scooping the boy up. “If you want to check it out, I’ll take you. I don’t trust you as far as I can see you!”

  ~~~~

  “Doggy!” Sam said, bouncing in her arms as they watched Jack wolf down his breakfast. “Pay doggie!”

  “You can play with Jack in a little while,” Annie said, laughing. “He’s not very patient,” she told Ian, who was leaning against the counter watching Sam’s reaction to everything.

  “I hope Jack is patient. I think he’s going to need to be to survive this weekend!”

  “Oh. Before I forget, I wanted to warn you. You probably did close your bedroom door last night. But if you didn’t lock it, it wouldn’t matter. Jack knows how to turn doorknobs with his nose.”

  “Jack can do what?” Ian asked, as though sure he’d heard wrong.

  “He can turn doorknobs with his nose.”

  She watched as he mulled that information over for a moment and then a look of utter disgust crossed his face.

  “Jack had his nose on my doorknob?” he demanded, clearly appalled at the thought.

  “I’m afraid he did.”

  Ian’s lips thinned as he continued to consider the possibility. And then he turned suddenly and started rummaging around under the sink, coming up shortly with a can of disinfectant spray. Then, ripping a couple of paper towels off the holder on the counter he said,

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Annie buried her face against the baby’s neck and kept her laughter quiet so that Ian wouldn’t hear.

  ~~~~

  “That was Dad,” Annie said, hanging the phone up. “I need to run over to their house to pick something up and take it to them at the clinic.”

  “The clinic? What’s wrong?” Ian asked, lowering the spoon he held into his bowl of Annie‘s homemade chicken noodle soup.

  “Nothing. Mom goes to the clinic every Saturday for her chemo treatment. It’s just routine stuff, only they forgot something today. Dad doesn’t like to leave her alone so he called me.”

  “What in the world do they need to take for that?” he wanted to know, trying to ignore the fact that his mother-in-law was getting the virtual poison that was making her waste away to nothing.

  “Just a-sample,” Annie said evasively.

  “A sample of what?”

  “Ian, you don’t want to know,” she said pointedly.

  “Why don’t I want to know?” he insisted, watching as she blushed. And then he knew. “Oh. Never mind. Do you want me to drive you?”

  “No. Go ahead and finish your lunch. Doesn’t the football game start shortly anyway?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t mind missing the first quarter.”

  “I’ll be fine.” She looked at Sam, sitting in his high chair eating finely chopped chicken and soft vegetables. “Do you want to come for a ride, you little squirt?”

  “Da-da.”

  “I think the answer to that question should be, 'of course, Aunt Annie,'” she teased, ruffling his curls. “Hurry up and eat, Sam.”

  “Why don’t you just leave him with me?” Ian surprised himself by making the offer

  “I’ll be gone about an hour,” she told him, shaking her head. “Trust me, you don’t want to be chasing him that long.”

  “It can’t be that hard,” he said patiently. Annie laughed. “Just go. We’ll be fine. I promise.”

  “Ian-”

  “Go. If you take Sam with you, you’ll have to get him out of the seat at your folk's house, then again at the clinic. You’ll save time leaving him here with me. And I promise. I won’t let him wander off or eat the curtains.” She laughed again.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Positive. Now beat it. We’ll see you in about an hour.”

  Chapter 9

  Considerably less than an hour later, more like about twenty minutes, Ian was eating his words. Chasing after a baby was a lot harder than it looked. The kid wanted to cram everything that wasn’t nailed down in his mouth.

  He also discovered that Sam could crawl a whole lot faster than he could toddle and thought he’d found the answer to all of his problems.

  Taking the candlesticks, bowl and doily off the coffee table, he put blocks and an assortment of other toys across its top and stood him there, beside where he sat on the sofa.

  Now he could enjoy the game in relative peace. A quick glance at the kid every now and again showed him playing happily.

  “Oh come on!” Ian muttered, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. One of the Michigan players had missed a pass and the crowd at the stadium groaned along with him.

  A couple of tense minutes later, though, they recovered the ball for a touch down and he shot to his feet and cheered. Then glanced down at Sam to make sure he hadn’t startled him.

  Only Sam wasn’t there. He quickly looked around to find that the boy wasn’t in the living room at all, and so he took off at a jog to find him. How far could he have gotten?

  “Oh no,” he breathed, when he finally caught up to him. “Annie is going to kill me.”

  For Sam was sitting on the kitchen floor, happily eating what was left of Jack’s dog food. Both of his fists were filled to overflowing, as were his bulging cheeks. The insane thought crossed his mind that he looked cute, kind of like a chipmunk, before he fell to his knees shouting,

  “No, Sam!”

  As he began emptying his hands of the ill-gotten booty, Sam’s big blue eyes filled with tears and his mouth opened in an ear splitting yell, followed immediately by even louder sobs. At least it enabled Ian to stick a finger in his mouth to remove what hadn’t already fallen out.

  Or been swallowed.

  He swallowed hard at that thought and wondered if dog food could hurt a baby. Quickly picking the screaming boy up, he carried him to the pantry and, with one hand, tried to wrestle the mostly full, twenty pound bag of kibble up to the counter where he could read any warnings.

  About halfway there he heard a loud rip, followed by thousands of chunks of dry food pellets hitting the floor and rolling everywhere.

  In frustration he threw the bag down and raced to the counter, the food crunching beneath his feet with every step, and whipped out the phone book out of one of the drawers.

  Why was it that a child screaming in his ear seemed to affect his ability to remember where the letter ’H’ might be found, he wondered, as he frantically thumbed through the yellow pages?

  It was impossible to hear the many choices the automated voice was offering him over the din Sam was making, so Ian tried pressing the zero. With great relief he heard a real person identify herself as an operator and he demanded to be connected to the emergency room.

  “Emergency Room,” another voice said after a brief wait.

  “I need to speak to a doctor,” Ian told her.

  “I’m sorry but our doctors don’t take telephone calls. If you have an emergency, you need to come in to the-”

  “Look, lady! I think the baby has been poisoned! I need to speak with a doctor,” he shouted, further frightening Sam, whose cries increased in volume. Personally Ian thought he’d reached his zenith a couple of minutes ago, but he was wrong.

  “Just a m
oment, sir. I’ll see if we have a nurse available,” came the terse response.

  Juggling a tantrum-throwing baby and a telephone required greater skill than Ian possessed. He wanted to throw something when the phone slipped from his grasp. Or was ripped from his grasp when the little monster flung an arm out and caught the coiled cord.

  “I dropped the phone, hang on,” he yelled, just in case someone answered as he fumbled around for the receiver.

  But no one was there, just the cheery classical tune that was beginning to annoy him. These people worked in an emergency room. He’d think they’d treat emergencies with a little more concern!

  “Hello? This is the nurse,” a calm voice finally came over the line. “Is this the gentleman with the possible infant poisoning?”

  “Yes it is. Sam got into-”

  “Sir, I’m afraid you’ll need to call poison control to find out if you need to bring the baby in. If you’ll just write down this number-”

  “I don’t have a pen! You’re a nurse! You should know if dog food is poison to babies!”

  “Dog food?”

  “Yes, dog food! He got away from me and was eating the dog's food. My wife isn’t here and I don’t know what to do!”

  That couldn’t be laughter he was hearing. He knew it couldn’t be. But it was.

  “You first time fathers crack me up!” the nurse told him, trying to contain her mirth. In his opinion, she wasn’t succeeding. “While dog food wouldn’t be my first choice as a snack food for anyone, much less a baby, it certainly won’t hurt him. So you can rest easy. Your baby will be fine. However, if you‘d like to avoid this kind of scare in the future, I would suggest hiding your dog‘s feeding dishes when they‘re not in use. By the dog anyway.” With that she wished him good day, laughed all the harder and hung up.

  Ian was annoyed. Of course he was relieved that Sam would be okay, but he was still left with the after effects of the disaster. A screaming baby, and a mess that spread from wall-to-wall. Jack, he noted, stood in the doorway, tail between his legs and looking like he’d prefer to be anywhere else.