Chapter 2
2
N ick
My skin smells like peanut butter. I swear I just pulled a glob of red buttercream frosting out of my hair, and that stinging sensation at the back of my tongue refuses to let up. That’s the last time I agree to a sour gummy worm challenge, no matter how many times I’m called a chicken for wanting to back out after the second round. The kids are savage. The sour candy challenge of today is not like the Pop Rocks challenge of the nineties, back when we poured package after package into our mouths to see how many of those popping suckers it took to crack a tooth.
Five. It took five for a hairline chip so minor that a dentist considered my mom’s desire to repair it “for vanity purposes only,” all while looking at me with his raised eyebrow of judgment. But I’m sorry, a dare is a dare, even if minor tooth chips hurt like the dickens. I never tried it again. If thirty-year-old me is a chicken, little-boy me was a reluctant hero who knew when to quit. But I swear to the gods of artificial sweetener, today’s sour candy could melt a human tongue in three consecutive bites, especially the ultra-sour kind.
Kids these days with their lethal candy.
Me these days? I’m barely into my third decade and already sounding like my great-grandfather.
“Okay, who’s going to help me clean this mess up?” I say to the two rug rats currently destroying my kitchen. On cue, they both scramble out of the room, leaving shrieks of “not me’s!” in their wake, their bare feet slap slap slapping on the hardwood floor like wet towels being repeatedly snapped on a thigh. What can I say? My sister Susan needed a babysitter, and since I wasn’t doing anything tonight anyway, I said yes to watching the kids. I had no plans other than watching the Rams play, that is. And let the record show that the football game is well into the fourth quarter, and I’ve barely seen any of it since the kickoff.
“Fine, you little terrorists, the kitchen can wait,” I mutter under my breath while surveying the room. It’s a disaster, but other than replacing the top on the peanut butter jar, I don’t feel like tackling it right now, either. But speaking of tackling…
“Who wants to finish watching the game with me? I’ll pop some popcorn and grab some sodas, and we’ll settle onto the sofa with blankets and?—”
“We want to watch The Grinch !” comes the high-pitched whine of my seven-year-old niece, Rowan. “Mom hasn’t let us watch it yet.”
Eleven-year-old Sam just nods along because he’s not much of a talker. He’s a brainiac whose favorite pastime is dismantling old desktops and radios and putting them back together. A far cry from my favorite eleven-year-old pastime of digging tunnels in the dirt with the neighbor kid up the street while simultaneously wondering why girls had gone from being repulsive to sort of interesting in the span of one summer.
The tiny spark of hope I’d felt seconds ago at the prospect of football dies on a girlish, whiny “pleeeesse.”
“ The Grinch ?” I say, dangerously close to joining her in a game of Who Can Whine the Hardest. “We watched Christmas movies last weekend.” Yes, I’m fully aware that I’m babysitting for the second Saturday night this month, and that’s just for my niece and nephew. On Tuesday afternoon, the lady down the street had a nail appointment she simply couldn’t miss. At least her eight-year-old son liked to play catch in the front yard. Score one for a kid who likes baseball, even if my arm got a little frostbit and is still sore from throwing the ball for two hours straight.
“Yes, The Grinch !” Rowan screeches. “ The Grinch, The Grinch, The Grinch !”
The Grinch , it is. The kid is persuasive.
“Fine Row. But I’ll only agree to watch it if you sit quietly and resist the urge to ask questions. I answer them every year, no matter what movie we watch. So many questions I can already anticipate them now.” Why does The Grinch have a dog? How did his heart grow three sizes when his chest didn’t get any bigger at all? Why do all the Who people have such big noses, and does water get inside them when it rains? If water got inside my nose, I would sneeze. Her stream of comments is endless and only stops when I remind her to watch. Kids are cute and all, but there’s only so much movie trivia a guy can manage when all he wants to do is watch football and take a nap, in that order.
“I won’t say a word, I promise.” It’s a lie, but I relent because she’s so darn cute. Most people say she looks like me, so no wonder.
“Okay, but after The Grinch, we get to watch Die Hard ,” my nephew says. “It’s a better Christmas movie anyway.”
On this we agree, although at this point, I’m sick of both. Football is a better Christmas show than either movie, but no one currently in this house sees things from my perspective.
“ Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie, plus I’m not allowed to watch it,” Rowan says.
It’s a fair point. We watched it when the kids were here last week, and there’s nothing like a seven-year-old girl in pigtails greeting her mother with, “Hey, Mom, how the hell are you?” to get a younger brother like me in the doghouse. My sister nearly burned my corneas with her death glares, and I felt every bit of our eight-year age gap. No more Die Hard for my niece, at least not on my watch.
“You heard what your mom said last week,” I remind her. “Your lessons in cussing have thoroughly stopped with me.”
“What about earlier when you hit your leg on the chair and yelled out the word?—”
“Okay, no need for reminders,” I say in a rush to stop my nephew. The last thing I need is for Rowan to repeat that word to my sister. It would move me straight out of the doghouse and into a coffin buried six feet under. “Ready to watch the movie?” I settle in between the kids, prop my feet on the coffee table, and hit Play on the remote.
We make it thirty-seven seconds.
“But how can all this happen inside a snowflake when Whoville is so big?”
Like I said, my niece is cute, but she’s a liar.
I open the front door to the sight of three boxes sitting on my front porch that absolutely don’t belong to me. One is the size of a small car.
“Shopping for Christmas already?” Susan says as she steps around the stack and walks into the house. She kicks a Lego out of her path, hops over a blanket fort poking out of the guest room, and nearly trips headlong into a pile of brown Amazon boxes piled at the edge of the dining room that makes any denial about early shopping futile. Sue me. I like Christmas, and I have started shopping already. Bought my niece a Baby Alive complete with diapers, and the secretary at the realty company I sometimes work for a subscription to the Fruit of the Month Club—both of which were delivered to me already opened. I need to complain to the postal company because who the hell keeps opening my boxes ?
Maybe that’s where my niece gets her bad mouth.
Anyway, yes, I have started shopping. But the boxes taking up half my porch are yet another delivery that doesn’t belong to me. Our delivery driver needs to be fired.
“That box probably belongs to Loretta,” I tell Susan. “I’m always getting her mail.” Oddly, my neighbor is still ordering things, considering she left on an overseas adventure for three months and didn’t tell me what to do with her mail. She left early last week—informed me that her granddaughter would be housesitting for the entirety of her vacation, though I haven’t laid eyes on the aforementioned granddaughter yet. A bit antisocial, it seems. Either that, or she’s a recluse, which already makes her strange in my eyes. What kind of person moves in next door and doesn’t emerge in the ten days since?
Whatever. Someone keeps snatching the packages off the porch before I can do anything about them, so it’s honestly not my problem. Not the granddaughter or the mail.
I close the front door and promptly step on the Lego, my bare left foot screaming in pain. If you brought a Lego to a knife fight, those suckers would undoubtedly win.
“I swear to fu?—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Susan says with a less-than-patient bark.
“I was going to say, ‘fun kid games,’” I say with an eye roll, then I swallow the curse right along with the lie, hop on one foot, and wonder how fast I can throw the whole blasted pile of weaponized plastic blocks away.
“Rowan, time to pick up the toys,” Susan says in a singsongy voice that honestly should only be used on newborns and puppies. Not on seven-year-old girls who like to giggle at the sight of a wounded uncle.
“Stop laughing,” I groan, not amused. Which only starts my nephew giggling, too. I suppose I do look ridiculous and force myself under control. I quit hopping, but my arch hurts like a slashed tire after a drunk ex-girlfriend hacks it with a pocket knife. Why is it always the car’s fault? Why is it my foot’s fault? Why did I buy Legos?
“You’re funny, Uncle Nick,” Rowan says, and what can I say? The kid knows how to give a compliment.
I wink through the pain. “Glad to entertain. Now listen to your mother and pick up your toys, or you’re not coming over next weekend.” We both know I’m lying; it’s the same line I deliver every Saturday night when Susan picks them up. She’s a single mom who is only now emerging from the shock of her husband walking out on her and the kids two years prior, so the standing Saturday night babysitting gig we’ve got going makes her feel human. It’s something I’m not likely ever to quit. I’m single and unfortunately unattached—save for all the ways I tend to over-extend myself. It’s the least I can do.
Plus, in ways I still don’t allow myself to think about, Susan and I have one thing in common that siblings never should. Grief. It comes for you when you least expect it.
“You sure next Tuesday afternoon is okay, too?” Susan asks, a little crease forming between her eyebrows. “It’ll only be for an hour, but if watching them becomes too much for you to?—”
“You’re going to the dentist. Watching them is perfect.” And I mean it, even if describing my two miniature sidekicks as “perfect” is a stretch. Terrors. Gremlins. Overbearing and relentless. But I love them. And I welcome the distraction. Without something to keep me busy, I might just fall apart, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to take. For eleven months now, using my niece and nephew to distract me from the harsh reality of my own sad life has worked nicely. No need to stop now; maybe not ever.
Time for a subject change.
“But I am dog-sitting the Taylor’s poodles this week while they’re off seeing their new grandbaby, so the kids might need to walk over there with me. And my neighbor had a tree fall in his front yard this morning that’s blocking the driveway, and I told him I would be there Tuesday to clear it. Just in case I’m not here when you show up, you’ll know where I am.”
“Nick.” Susan levels a knowing look at me, but I shrug it off.
“I’m fine,” I say in a way that shuts down further discussion. And I am. Fine, I mean. I have no other choice.
She purses her lips. “You’re not fine, and you should?—”
“I’m fine,” I say again, voice raised enough that Sam and Rowan both look at me. Discussion over. I force a tight smile.
She sighs. “If you say so…”
“I do say so.”
After a tense moment, Susan gets the message, pastes on a smile, and turns toward her children. “Alright, kids, time to go home. You both need showers, and we need to get out of Uncle Nick’s hair for the night.”
I hate it when she puts it that way, even if her words might reflect the way I feel. I love the kids, but I’m no saint. Besides, the ballgame’s probably over, and I wouldn’t mind catching the SportsCenter highlights. After a few moments of hurried activity that includes cleaning the toy room, shrugging into coats that neither kid wants to wear, and giving two rounds of hugs because Rowan never wants to leave, they do. I open the door and walk them to their car, then buckle both kids into their seats and wave as they back down the driveway.
It isn’t until I’m walking back up the steps that I notice the boxes are gone.
It’s like somehow, in the last half hour, a sneaky little Christmas elf quietly whisked them away.