Mom Over Miami - By Annie Jones Page 0,14

megawatt smile on Hannah. “We should have seen it coming, really. How could this lovely lady not have come to us to meet this exciting challenge?”

Hannah jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the cans. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a challenge.”

“Well, what else could you call it—redecorating the baby and toddler rooms?”

“Re…re…” Hannah swallowed and forced herself to say it aloud. “Redecorating? You two? My nursery rooms?”

“Don’t think of them as your nursery rooms anymore, Hannah.”

“No?”

“Think of them as our canvas.” Jacqui flung her arms out.

Out.

What a lovely, compelling, unattainable word. It was all Hannah wanted right now—to get out of here so she could try to figure out what she’d just gotten herself into.

Think, Hannah, think.

“I, uh, I can’t talk about this just now. Payt’s at home fixing lunch for Sam and Tessa and me. Well…not for Tessa, but…we really can’t stay.”

Hannah swept through the room and into the nursery like a miniature tornado. Snagging Sam and directing him with a well-placed hand on his back, she gathered the diaper bag and her drowsy daughter up in one swoop, then turned to make her goodbyes.

She’d started the day with a single goal. To do the job she’d volunteered to do and to do it perfectly. And she had.

Except for the spill.

And the paint cans left in the hallway.

And the fact that she had just unleashed the DIY sisters on what she had thought would be her own quietly controlled territory.

Other than that, however, the day couldn’t possible have been more perfect.

“Hannah Bartlett, why didn’t you tell us?”

She jerked her head up to see Jacqui and Cydney poring over an open page of her hometown newspaper.

Oh, dear. What had Daddy gotten up to now? Somehow she’d thought that by living in another state she might escape the embarrassment of her father’s lively antics.

Tessa squirmed against her shoulder.

Hannah adjusted the baby for comfort, and though she didn’t want to, asked, “Tell you what?”

“About your writing.”

“My…?” She edged forward.

“It’s adorable and clever,” Jacqui pronounced, like the arbiter of all things both precious and precocious. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“About what?”

“This!” Cydney shoved the open paper in her direction and smacked it with the back of her hand. “Your newspaper column about modern motherhood. Where did you ever come up with that title?”

“I…” She forced her eyes to focus on a strip of newsprint wedged between an update on who would be sending prized produce and livestock to the state fair next week and the list of new bus routes for the coming school year.

There it was. One of the worst photos ever taken of her in all its grainy newsprint glory just above the opening line Greetings From Nacho Mama’s House.

Hannah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So she just gave Sam a little nudge, snapped up the paper and her mail and headed for the door. “Excuse me, ladies, but we have to go home now.”

“Are we going home to get lunch?” Sam asked.

“Yes, dear. We’re going home to have a calm, pleasant, life-affirming lunch with Daddy. And as soon as we finish with that, I am going to kill your aunt Sadie.”

5

Subject: What have YOU done?

To: ItsmeSadie

Journalism 101—always get the who, what, where, when and why. Since I am now—through no fault or initiative of my own—a newspaper journalist of sorts, let me ask you:

WHO do you think you are, publishing my private thoughts and stories about my life, written for personal amusement only, in the Wileyville Guardian News?

WHAT kind of thoughtless, pushy person does that to her own sister?

WHERE did you get the idea that I wouldn’t mind seeing myself turned into a cartoonish buffoon in front of everyone in my own hometown?

WHEN did you plan to tell me that you’d done this?

WHY did you let them run a picture of me, eight months pregnant with my face puffed up like a water balloon, stuck right beside the headline County’s Biggest Sow State Fair Bound?

I am never speaking to you again.

Call me.

“I’m a joke.” Hannah slid against the wall to sit on the floor of her vacant front room.

“No.” Payt settled down beside her.

“A laughingstock,” she muttered.

“No. No.” Payt wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. “People aren’t laughing at you—they’re laughing with you.”

Hannah shot her well-meaning hubby a look that would boil stone. “Do you think saying that has ever made anyone feel better?”

“No, but it sure eases the guilt for the people doing the laughing.” A smile lit his