Single with Children. Arlene James
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with dismay and exhaustion. How many times could one little boy wake up in the space of a single night?
“God, Robbie, don’t you ever sleep?”
“Ryan,” corrected a petulant voice.
“Oh.” The boys were alike enough to confuse, if one didn’t look too closely, but Wendy claimed that their mother had never gotten them mixed up, and Adam could not quite squelch a spurt of guilt that he had, however seldom, done so. Sighing, he rolled onto his back and laid an arm across his eyes. “What is it now?”
“Ah hun-wy,” said Ryan, his slight speech impediment exaggerated by the three fingers he had thrust into his mouth. Adam’s aunt Lindsay, the family pediatrician, had told him that there was no reason for concern, but he worried anyway—when he had the energy, which he didn’t at the moment.
“Ryan,” Adam groaned, “it’s the middle of the night.”
“Na-a-aw. Id maw-ning!”
Surely not. It couldn’t possibly be morning. He hadn’t slept two full hours yet. Oh, God, don’t let it be morning, he thought, carefully lifting his arm and slitting open his eyes. Oh, God, it was morning. Adam made a whimpering sound in the back of his throat and resigned himself to the inevitable, even as he rolled onto his side and craned his neck to read the time on the digital alarm clock beside the bed. Seven-forty. The alarm would screech in five more minutes. Five minutes was not worth fighting for.
“All right,” he said, sitting up and yawning. “What’s for breakfast?”
Ryan shrugged and popped his fingers out of his mouth. “I don’t know.”
Adam swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the T-shirt he’d left lying on the floor the night before. “Well, go see what Nanny’s making, and come tell—”
“Nanny’s gone,” Ryan reminded him.
Adam closed his eyes. Gone, gone, witchy’s gone. Godiva had left them the night before, and Cook didn’t come in until just before lunch. Heaven help them. Well, surely there was something he could dish up…cold cereal, perhaps, doughnuts… He’d have given a thousand bucks to put on his fatigues and jog down to the mess hall just once more. But things were bound to look better after he’d gotten down a cup of coffee. Coffee. He groaned again, realizing that there wouldn’t be any coffee, not this morning. The civilian world was hell.
Ryan scrambled off the bed and attached himself to Adam’s leg, tugging with all the might in his little limbs. Adam laughed at the senselessness of it and got awkwardly to his feet, reaching for the bathrobe that hung over the bedpost. He threw it on and belted it over the fleece pants he’d worn to bed and the T-shirt he’d just donned. His shoes were around here somewhere, if he could just see around the bunched body of his son.
“Okay, okay, Ryan,” he said, patting the boy’s back. “I’m on my way.”
Ryan let go and ran to the door, where he paused and called back. “Better huwwy.” He shook his finger at Adam in a perfect parody of his older sister. “Wendy say if you don’t come, she gonna make breakfast herself.”
Adam’s eyes widened in alarm. Forgetting his shoes, he pelted toward the kitchen, bawling, “Wen-dy!”
He burst through the louvered swinging doors in time to see his daughter standing on a chair that she had pulled up to the counter and dumping flour into a glass bowl from a sack. The flour hit with a whump and rose in clouds around the bowl, which wobbled ominously near the edge of the counter. Adam threw himself across the cooktop island and snatched Wendy off the chair, just as the bowl shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Flour and glass sprayed the narrow aisle between the counter and the island. Wendy immediately burst into loud wails. Adam pulled her up onto the island, expecting to see blood running down her legs. He sagged with relief when all he saw was flour dusting her legs. At that moment, the boys pushed through the door, Robbie first, then Ryan, his hand in his mouth.
“Out!” Adam barked. Neither of them moved a muscle. “There’s glass all over the floor! Get out of here!”
Eyes wide, they backed through the swinging door, but then Robbie pushed them open again and stuck his head inside. “Wendy, you hurt?”
Wendy’s wails had subsided to sobs now, but she made no effort to answer. Adam answered for her, still miffed—pained, if he was to be honest—that his children always seemed to need a reason to obey him. “She’s not hurt, she’s just scared,” he said gruffly, pulling her to him and beginning to inch his way across the floor toward the door, on the lookout for the telltale sparkle of glass splinters.
Once safely on the carpet of the dining room, he set Wendy on her feet, went down on one knee and grasped her by her solid little shoulders. “What on earth did you think you were doing?” He hadn’t meant to shout, and he hadn’t meant to shake her, but the thought of glass embedding itself in her plump child’s body both horrified and angered him. She went off into screeching wails again, her face scrunched up and her braids shuddering, but Adam noted that her eyes were dry. He guessed she was more embarrassed than frightened. Truth to tell, he was somewhat shaken himself. He let her go and wiped a hand across his brow. “All right,” he muttered. “It’s all right, but don’t you ever do anything like that again. Do you hear me?” She nodded her head, sniffing phonily. Adam ignored the sham and schooled his tone to patience. “What were you doing anyway?”
“Making pancakes,” she said challengingly, sticking out that lower lip.
“Pancakes!” Robbie echoed, jumping up and down. “Yeah, yeah, pancakes!”
Ryan immediately picked up the chant, clapping his hands together.
Adam winced. They would settle on something as difficult as pancakes for breakfast. Even if he could find a recipe, he couldn’t begin to put together an edible batch of pancakes. Who was he kidding? He’d be lucky to get the milk in the bowl with the cereal—if he could find any. He wasn’t about to go looking in his bare feet, not now. He made a sudden decision. He was good at decisions. In fact, deciding was what he often did best, and this decision let him off the hook in several ways. For one thing, they’d actually get to eat, and for another, he wouldn’t have to face cleaning up the mess in the kitchen on an empty stomach. He pushed up to his full height. “All right, let’s get you dressed. We’re going out for pancakes.”
That elicited paroxysms of delight. Robbie danced around, whooping in circles, knees knocked together, lower legs flying out at odd angles. Ryan took a look at his brother’s improbable dance and settled for stomping up and down and hoo-hooing like a train. Wendy merely looked up at her father in that solemn way of hers, nodded sharply and spun away to drag her noisy brothers from the room. Adam smiled to himself. He might actually have scored some points with this one.
An hour later, Adam asked himself how a good idea could have gone so bad as he grabbed for the syrup pitcher yet again. He snatched it out of the way just as Robbie fell, chest forward, into his plate, his arms stretching out to knock salt and pepper shakers into ashtrays and ashtrays into toast baskets. Wendy snickered, one hand over her mouth, the other waving a fork bearing a speared piece of dripping pancake. Robbie giggled, looking down at the sticky mess on his shirt, and Ryan immediately went up on his knees, preparing to duplicate his brother’s antics. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Adam jumped up, trying to balance the syrup pitcher with one hand and grab Ryan’s shoulder with the other. His hip hit the table, and coffee sloshed out of the cup, over the rim of the saucer and onto his khakis. “Damn!”
The children descended into loud laughter. Adam felt the syrup pitcher lifted out of his hand. An instant later, it was replaced by a damp white towel. “Allow me,” said a soft voice. Adam caught a flash of pale blue uniform and brown hairnet as he bent to wipe at the stain on his thigh. He looked up in time to see a slender young woman tugging Wendy’s leg down into place and sliding her chair farther under the table, situating the hand with the fork over her plate. She smiled down at the girl, then moved on around the table, putting Ryan back into his booster seat and pushing his