"I'm fine, Sissy.
Want a cookie?" WHEN I OPENED THE OFFICE DOOR, WHICH WAS A FADING orangish pink and needed to be repainted, the blaring music was overwhelmed by "Mercy" and "Look, dog!" And what seemed like a hundred small bodies piled on us.
Sissy put her small fists on her hips, and said in a picture- perfect imitation of her brother, "Barbarians." And then she took a bite of the cookie I'd given her.
"Cookie!" shrieked someone.
"Sissy has a cookie!" Silence fell, and they all looked at me like a lion might look at a gazelle in the savanna.
"You see what happens?" asked Gabriel's mother, not even glancing up from scrubbing the counter.
Sylvia was about ten years older than I, and she wore those years well.
She was a small woman, delicate and beautiful.
They say Napoleon was small, too.
"You spoil them," she told me in a dismissive tone.
"So it is your problem to deal with.
You must pay the price." I pulled the two bags of cookies from where I'd hidden them in my jacket.
"Here," I gasped, holding them out over the horde's reaching hands toward their mother.
"Take them quick before the monsters get them.
Protect them with your life." Sylvia took the bags and tried to hide her smile as I wrestled with little pink-clad bodies that squealed and squeaked.
Okay, there weren't a hundred of them; Gabriel had five little sisters.
But they made enough noise for ten times that many.
Tia, whose name was short for Martina, the oldest girl, frowned at us all.
Sam, sitting beside her, had been abandoned for the possibility of a cookie.
He seemed amused, more amused when he caught my wary glance.
"Hey, we're doing all the work," Rosalinda, the second-oldest said.
"You chicas start scrubbing right this moment.
You know you won't get cookies until Mam? says." "Sissy got one," Maia said.
"And that is all anyone will get until it is clean," proclaimed Tia piously.
"You're no fun," Sofia, the middle girl, told her.
"No fun," agreed Maia with her bottom lip sticking out.
But she couldn't have been too upset because she bounced away from me to crawl back onto Sam, her fingers clutching his collar.
"My puppy needs a cookie." Sylvia frowned at Sam, then at me.
"You have a dog?" "Not exactly," I told her.
"I'm watching him for a friend." For Samuel.