Falling for a Father of Four. Arlene James
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needed elsewhere.
“Uh-oh.” She turned and hurried away in that direction.
“Son,” Orren called anxiously, still pawing through the laundry. “Everything okay in there?”
Mattie stuck her head around the short partition wall and said, “A hot waffle iron is melting a hole in the floor vinyl.”
“Well, unplug it!”
“I did!”
“Blast!” Orren groaned and staggered as Jean Marie bumped into him, feeling her way along sleepily from behind a curtain of hair.
“I want doughnuts,” she said, yawning.
“Not this morning, Red,” Orren answered, giving up the search for socks. “See if you can get Sweetums to come to you.”
“Let Chaz,” Jean Marie grumbled, stumbling toward the kitchen. Yancy screamed from the back bedroom just then, offended at waking up alone, and Candy Sue promptly threw up on his shoulder.
“Aw, baby!” Orren jumped away from the mound of clean laundry and held Candy out at arm’s length. She immediately started to wail. Lord help him! “It’s okay, Sweetums. Chaz, bring the antacid! Candy Sue’s nervous stomach is acting up again.”
He placed Candy Sue in the chair and spread a towel over her in case she threw up again, then ripped his shirt off and threw it on the floor, muttering, “Only clean shirt I had!” He felt like sitting right down and bawling, but that’d make three of them, and he didn’t think he could stand it.
Mattie appeared, Chaz on one side, Jean Marie on the other. She was holding the bottle of antacid and a spoon. “Set the water glass down on the end table, Chaz,” she directed smoothly, “then take Jean Marie and go quiet Yancy.”
Chaz obediently complied. Jean Marie stuck her chin out and opened her mouth. Mattie bent down to her face level, parted the hair curtain with a fingertip and said, “Unless you don’t want me to cook breakfast.” Jean Marie whirled and stomped after her brother. Mattie straightened and thrust the bottle and spoon at Orren. “You dose the baby,” she said, “I’ll take care of the shirt. Where’s the iron and ironing board?”
He took the medicine, watching as she bent and picked up the soiled shirt, and said, “I don’t know. My bedroom, I think.”
“I’ll find it,” she said airily, carrying the shirt away from her.
Orren gratefully sat down next to the baby, spread the towel over the two of them and began the chancy process of coaxing the medication down her. Ten minutes and three attempts later, he judged that he’d gotten enough of the stuff in her to calm her stomach and began rocking her into a better mood. Shortly thereafter she dropped off in his arms. He stood, towel and all, to carry her to his own room, where she might be able to sleep undisturbed by the other children. He was surprised—and oddly disturbed—to find Matilda Kincaid bent over his bed, straightening out his sheets. She certainly looked adult from the back. She glanced over her shoulder, something very like censure on her face, but then her expression softened and she stood, turning, to smile down at the frothy-haired angel in his arms. He smiled, too, proud of the little beauty cuddled so trustingly against him.
“She’ll never be able to stay asleep in the kids’ room,” he whispered. “She sleeps most often in here.”
Mattie nodded and moved away to retrieve the clean and pressed shirt from the ironing board as he tucked the little one into his bed. She stepped out into the hallway; a second or two later, he joined her, pulling closed the bedroom door. She shook out the uniform shirt and held it up for him, her eyes roaming over his bare chest. Orren resisted the urge to turn his back, and instead dipped one hand into a sleeve hole. She carried the shirt around him and slipped the other sleeve over his arm, settling the shirt over his shoulders.
“I tried to iron it dry, but it’s still damp,” she said quietly. “At least it didn’t stain.”
Nodding, he began pushing the buttons through the buttonholes. “That’s all right. Thanks.”
“No problem,” Mattie said, presenting him a pair of matched socks from her belt. “They had dropped down between the bed and the wall.”
He clutched them gratefully. “You are a lifesaver!”
“Just part of the service.”
“Listen, I’m sorry to run off so quick. I meant to show you around, explain things, but I really don’t have the time this morning.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said cryptically. “I think I can find plenty to keep us busy today.”
He was already moving into the living area, only half listening, when he remembered the grocery shopping. He immediately turned back, whipping his wallet from his hip pocket. Emptying it of the last seventy bucks to his name, he thrust it at her apologetically, saying, “Uh, there really isn’t anything much here to eat. If you could do the shopping, I’d appreciate it, but this is all I have until the end of the week. We’ll, um, discuss a budget later.”
“What about your lunch?” she began, but he waved that off, snatched up the thermos and swung out the door. A glance at his watch told him that he just might make it—barely. These days, he reminded himself grimly, barely was the best he could hope for.
Mattie shook her head at the boards nailed over the door, the bare gypsum walls and the electrical wires hanging loose. While Candy Sue slept and the other girls watched an educational program on public television, she’d looked over the house in the helpful company of Chaz. It hadn’t taken long to get a full picture of Orren Ellis’s house, his unfinished house. Chaz had told her proudly that his daddy had built the house with his own two hands, and she could understand his pride, but the place was woefully inadequate. For one thing, the kids had been squeezed into a single small room, while this third unfinished bedroom and its badly needed second bath had accumulated debris and gathered dust. Actually, the whole house was a dustbin, not to mention a jumble of chaos. Ah, well, she’d wanted a challenge.
After a scant breakfast of buttered griddle cakes sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, which the kids wolfed down gleefully, Mattie had found a piece of paper and a pencil and made a list of the family’s favorite foods. It wasn’t a very extensive list, but it was enough from which to conceive a frugal menu for several days. She then went through the refrigerator and pantry, listing the available supplies and mechanically rearranging the shelves. Everything needed a thorough cleaning, but that would have to wait a bit. First she had a shopping list to make out, carefully estimating the cost of each item and tabulating the whole to be certain that the cost remained safely within the amount allotted.
That proved a simple task compared to getting the children properly dressed for their outing. Their clothing, both clean and dirty, was scattered over the whole house, but eventually she put together outfits for each of them and, by standing over them with an implacable expression, a bar of soap and a tube of toothpaste, saw them dressed and made presentable. It took some time to persuade Jean Marie to brush her hair, but by promising that each of them could choose a favorite food item from the grocery store, she managed even that.
The shopping excursion was a nightmare, with Jean Marie and Yancy playing hide-and-seek in the aisles, Candy Sue begging for everything she laid eyes on, and Chaz desperately badgering, pleading and threatening his sisters while trying all the while to coax Mattie into buying the same items his father always bought. To make matters worse, Candy Sue suddenly developed a pressing need to visit the rest room, while Jean Marie flatly refused to go along. What should have taken an hour at most took more than twice that time, but finally Mattie had the groceries stowed in the trunk, the kids belted in and the little red car on the road to the Ellis house.
By making a game of putting the groceries away, Mattie managed to complete that chore relatively quickly. Then she ferreted out a ragged notebook, sharpened her pencil and set about making her plans. The first order of business, she told an anxious Chaz, was the kitchen, to which he replied,