Mom Over Miami - By Annie Jones Page 0,5
and Tessa seems to be getting a cold and I need to take her a juice bottle.”
“Then take me along with you. I assume you’re on a cordless?”
Hannah pushed aside juice boxes and milk jugs to retrieve the prepared bottle. “Yes, I’m on the cordless but…”
“Good. I’ll tag along and goo for the baby in Cantonese. The tour group is celebrating our departure for India tonight, and I don’t know when I’ll get near a phone again.”
Hannah sighed and braced the phone wedged against her shoulder in place with her “free” hand. “If there’s a celebration, maybe you should get back to it, Aunt Phiz.”
She could just picture the tall, robust woman leading a wildly energetic dragon dance—the locals laughing and chanting as they wound this way and that behind her. “Hey, that could work.”
“Of course it will work, just take the phone with you and—”
“Grab your nachos with both hands, boys, and get in line. We’re snake-dancing all the way to the baby’s room.”
Even as the boys hurried to get a spot in line and still keep their bowls above greyhound-head height, someone called, “We never do stuff like this at my mama’s house,”
“I told you before, this is not your mama’s house.”
“Nacho Mama’s house!” The boys laughed and wriggled behind her down the hallway.
Aunt Phiz gave a quick rundown of the time she expected to arrive in Cincinnati two weeks hence.
Hannah made it to the crib. She scooped her daughter up. Somehow she managed to cradle the phone against the child’s ear while getting the bottle into Tessa’s mouth and steering the soccer team back into the hallway with only a couple chip spills—which Squirrel happily lapped up.
Everyone was being fed.
Everyone was happy.
Hannah sighed. Maybe she was getting a handle on this motherhood thing after all.
“Oops!” The phone slid out from under Tessa’s warm pink cheek.
Aunt Phiz, her unfamiliar dialect sounding to Hannah like a cartoon watch spring breaking, kept right on babbling in Cantonese baby talk.
Hannah came to a full stop to catch the phone. Only after she did that did she realize the consequences.
Th-whap!
Thud.
Crunch.
“Ouch.”
Then a momentary silence before:
“Hey, the dog is licking the back of my head.”
“That’s because it’s got cheese on it.”
“Cheesehead! Cheesehead!”
“Boys, boys!” Hannah spun around to find melted cheese product stuck in hair, all over shirts and even on the dog. Crushed chips littered the floor. One kid had stepped in his dropped bowl and had it stuck to his shoe.
Unsure which disaster to tackle first, Hannah ordered, “Nobody move!”
Tessa heaved the bottle to the floor.
Squirrel cowered.
“Okay, change of plan. Move. Everybody into the kitchen!”
The boys started to do as she said, but about that time the dog, who was crouching at the back of the line, noticed the bounty of chips on the plastic floor covering. Just as the group did as Hannah had asked, sixty-two pounds of long, strong, determined greyhound decided to begin belly-walking between the boys’ feet.
The few bowls that had not fallen to the floor were goners, and so were the boys holding those bowls.
Down in a pile they all went like…like…like a load of broken chips poured from God’s greatest corn chip bag.
Hannah groaned.
Then the doorbell rang.
“Oh, great.” She checked the clock. Still too early for parental pickups.
At least that was on her side.
She could deal with the door, get the boys cleaned up, tend to Tessa and pull up the ruined plastic drop cloth before any of the other mothers saw what a big fat failure she was at handling even the most simple of mommy duties.
“Bye, Aunt Phiz, I’ve got to go,” Hannah hollered at the receiver lying on the floor.
Aunt Phiz, never missing a beat, went right on chattering in Chinese.
“Hang that up, Sam,” Hannah said as she hoisted Tessa on her hip and headed for the door.
Whatever they were selling or soliciting donations for, she would get rid of the caller, then get this household back under control. She had three years of college journalism under her belt. She had lived with a nutty father in a small-town fishbowl. She had even recently survived discovering that the mother she had lived a lifetime hoping to find had died not long after the family broke up. Hannah had run a rural pediatric clinic. She had overcome disappointment and infertility, begun motherhood at an age when a lot of women were done with that sort of thing, and still managed to meet the standards of the Foster Parent program.
Hannah could handle anything.
She flung open the