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  The child squealed.

  “Kumquat? Or Canary?” Hannah leaned closer.

  Tessa stuck both arms out straight, waved them about for a moment, then poked one balled-up card into her mouth.

  “We have a winner!” Hannah pulled the card away from Tessa.

  The baby protested with a kick and a screech.

  “Now she’s mad, too.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  Hannah kissed the baby’s head, inhaling the sweet scent of her fine curls.

  Tessa quieted—a little.

  “She’ll get over it, and so will Jacqui. Tessa didn’t have any business hanging on to that paint card. Just like Jacqui doesn’t have any business hanging a paint color over my head.”

  “Was Mrs. Lafferty mad enough to pour paint on your head?

  “Maybe, but you know what?”

  He shook his head.

  “I am not going to let her do it. I wouldn’t let her actually do it and I refuse to let her do it metaphorically.”

  “Metawhatically?”

  “Vocabulary lessons later, son. Right now I have a job to do.” Hannah tweaked Sam’s nose. “Your mommy is not a wimp. She’s an intelligent, capable person who can speak her own mind.”

  “What does that mean?” Sam blinked up at her.

  “It means we’re done here today. Let’s go enjoy the last days of summer.” She nudged her son to get him going.

  He hurried on ahead.

  Hannah took one last look at the slobbery sample she’d slipped from Tessa’s grasp, then wedged the corner of the card under the plastic light switch cover.

  She flipped off the light in the toddler room, calling over her shoulder as she ushered her family out the door, “Canary!”

  9

  Subject: Nacho Mama’s House column

  To: [email protected]

  Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat ta-dum. Ta-dum.

  That’s right. If my life were to have a theme song right now it would have to be the one they play to accompany plate spinners, jugglers and acrobats.

  Plates-a-spinning big-time around here—figuratively and literally. But I am getting better at juggling Payt’s, Sam’s, Tessa’s and my own schedules. And like some out-of-control acrobat, I have my share of tumbles. Of course, I still think I’d look ghastly in tights!

  The cooking lessons forge on. And by that I mean the results look like I produced them in a forge not a kitchen. Pork roast isn’t supposed to have the color and consistency of pig iron, is it?

  Aunt Phiz’s palate is proving more exotic than our small-town tastes around here. I didn’t do a bad job with the eggplant Parmesan but Payt wouldn’t have any part of it. Not until I likened it to fried green tomatoes—then he couldn’t get enough.

  Oh, and while I’m on the subject—breading! Why didn’t anyone tell me about this minor miracle years ago? Flour, egg, bread crumbs.

  The great equalizers.

  Unfortunately breading does not work its magic on soccer kids’ snacks. Have tried to get away from the nachos in favor of more healthy choices. Yesterday Aunt Phiz whipped up a batch of oatmeal cookies. I spent the rest of the afternoon making faces on them with raisins for eyes, apple slices for mouths and shredded carrots for hair.

  They ate the cookies.

  I think they fed the apple slices to the dog.

  The shredded carrots are ground into my carpet.

  The raisins?

  Found some between the couch cushions.

  Some dropped down into the vase on the bookshelf.

  And two stuffed inside the ears of Payt’s bust of Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

  It’s hard to stay mad at the boys, though. They are really good kids, even if they are rotten soccer players. Sadly they haven’t won another game yet. Am I a bad mother because I’m secretly a little bit relieved because this means I don’t have to attempt another cake?

  No cooking for me tonight, though. Aunt Phiz is watching the children and I am going on a real, live bona fide date—with my husband! He left a message on the phone for me to meet him at his office after hours so we could catch up together. Trés roman-tique, n’est-ce pas?

  At last, one evening in my life I won’t end up writing jokes about!

  NOTE TO SELF: FINISH COLUMN BEFORE SENDING

  “You asked me here to do what?” Hannah stood in the vacant waiting room looking at the top of her husband’s lowered head through the opened frosted sliding-glass window.

  He scrubbed his clean, blunt fingers through his shortly cropped hair, never lifting his gaze to her. “Start by emptying out the trash cans, then tackle the break room.”

  “Trash?” She tugged at the pearl necklace Payt had given to her when she’d given birth to Tessa. She’d only worn it one other time. Funny, she hadn’t noticed it feeling so constricting then. “Tackle?”

  “Dump the small wastebaskets into the big one on wheels by the back door. In the break room, tidy up. Clear away. Do whatever needs doing to the floors, that kind of thing.” He tucked a pen with a drug company’s name on it in the front pocket of his lab coat. “Oh, and bin liners in the supply closet.”

  “Bin liners in the supply closet to you, too,” she muttered, shifting her weight.

  Her feet already ached in her brand-new high-heeled sandals, the kind of shoes she’d worn all the time before becoming a mom. Their soles scuffed the floor as she moved toward the receptionist’s desk. “Payt? Isn’t there something more you want to say to me?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah.” Payt rummaged through the book where the staff recorded phone messages. “Turn out the lights when you leave a room. Don’t want Dr. Briggs to show back up and find us wasting electricity.”

  “Dr. Briggs? Tell me you did not drag me down here to try to impress the phantom Dr. Briggs.” He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

  “I’m on a ninety-day trial period. Clock’s ticking.”

  He had!

  And all for Dr. Raymond Briggs. The boss. Senior partner. The surrogate father figure in Payt’s work life. Had to please the man. Had to do whatever it took just for the hope of an “atta boy” and a place at the proverbial grown-ups’ table.

  Where, if her husband didn’t start thinking about the consequences of his choices, Payt might end up sitting alone. Not that Hannah had any room to criticize. Aside from taking on the column and choosing Canary for the toddler room, what had she done to break free of her own childhood patterns? How had she ever tried to rise above her own longing for approval?

  Not much, she thought, standing in the office all dolled up for a date and not daring to demand her husband at least discuss the situation with her.

  That had to end.

  This was Payt, after all.

  If she couldn’t assert herself even a little without risk here, she might as well give it up for good.

  “In the first place, if you are here working after hours and asking your wife to work here, too, after hours—even though technically a person not getting a paycheck doesn’t have ‘hours’—then whatever electricity you use can hardly be called wasted.” Hannah took a few steps toward the closed-in reception area.

  “I know. You’re right, but Dr. Briggs—”

  “Is not coming back here tonight.” She’d met the man who had taken Payt on as a junior partner a whopping total of two times. Even so, Hannah grasped the improbability of the fiftysomething, single-again-and-had-the-foreign-sports-car-to-prove-it man returning after hours for a “lights-out” check. “At this very moment Dr. Briggs is probably filling himself to the gills at the Maisonette or wherever it is men of his ilk stuff themselves.”

  Payt’s dark brows slanted in over the most innocently perplexed eyes in the world. “What’s your point?”

  “At least tell me that while you’re putting in overtime here, Dr. Briggs has taken on call for the night.”

  Payt shook his head, almost smiling as he said, “I was going to be working anyway
.”

  Hannah groaned and started to rub her eyes. Her fingertips touched her mascara-coated lashes. The first time she’d worn more than a smidge of makeup in months. She didn’t want to smear it all over the place. So she cupped her hands over her cheeks and dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “I’m not saying to turn the lights off while you’re in the room, Hannah. Just have the courtesy to hit the switch on your way out when you’re done.”

  “If I were going to hit anything on my way out, Bartlett, it wouldn’t be the switch.” She folded her arms and waited.

  “Thanks, sweetie. I’ll be in my office catching up on paperwork.” He slid the glass partition closed between them.

  “Catching up. This is what you meant by catching up?” All she saw was a blur where her husband had stood moments ago.

  He had cut her off. In every way possible. Visually. Verbally. Audibly. Emotionally.

  As she stood there with her mouth open and heart exposed, her initial responses of denial, determination and even the first wash of anger evaporated. And shame flooded in to take their place.

  “I shouldn’t. I don’t deserve a new outfit,” she had told Aunt Phiz, who had encouraged her to pull out all the stops. “This money should go for something the kids need. Besides, someone who hasn’t lost all the weight from her baby shouldn’t indulge in clothes. What if it makes me too comfy in my new shape?”

  “It will make Payt happy to see you looking so pretty,” her aunt had countered.

  And Hannah had bought it. The line of reasoning and the pretty dress.

  Pride had made her do it, and she knew better. What did she have to be proud of?

  As for making Payt happy? Obviously she could have accomplished that in coveralls and a hair net, or a sweat suit or…any outfit that said she had come to get some work done. Hannah took a deep breath.

  Hmm. No “doctory” smell of rubbing alcohol, the astringent odor that had made her pulse race as a child. Not even the odd clash of freshly baked goodies brought in by clients and sterile biohazard-approved disinfectant spray that permeated the clinic in Wileyville. This place smelled…empty.

  And she didn’t like it.

  She kicked off her sandals and set them carefully by the door. She had run the gamut of emotions. What else remained but acceptance?

  Or action.

  Why not? She’d stood up to Jacqui Lafferty. And Jacqui Lafferty was a lot more intimidating than Payton Bartlett, boy-faced pediatrician.

  “Payt, honey.” She pushed through the door and made a beeline for the tiny back office that Payt had inherited from the other two young pediatricians Dr. Briggs had driven off over the past five years. “What are you doing here?”

  He stood right beside the door collecting pieces of paper from a plastic “in” box. “You wouldn’t believe how many forms I have to deal with in a day.”

  Don’t start with me about not knowing what your spouse deals with in a day. You are the absolute king of that.

  Early in her marriage she had learned not to let every sharp or sarcastic thought she had pop out of her mouth. She’d learned that from watching—and listening—to her sister Sadie, who never seemed to let a smart-mouthed remark go unuttered.

  That wasn’t the way to win friends or mend marriages, Hannah thought. So she entwined her fingers in front of her. She pulled back her shoulders. She drew in the warm, lingering scent of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’d made Sam as part of the chaos of getting out of the house, and the perfume she’d spritzed on her neck just before coming into the silent waiting room. And she said, “I appreciate how hard you work, Payt. But—”

  “Some of these cases, Hannah—” he raised his gaze but did not meet hers “—they’d break your heart.”

  “Oh.” How could she have acted like no one else figured in this scenario? Payt had patients. Sick little children depended on him to ease their suffering.

  “And if I don’t check all the right boxes and fill out the right forms, the hassles with insurance can shoot these poor parents’ stress levels through the roof.”

  “Never thought of that.” And she’d been ready to read him the riot act for not paying enough attention to her.

  Her. With the two beautiful healthy children, the bighearted husband and the meddling aunt come from halfway around the world to help with them all.

  For someone who liked to think she never thought of herself, she sure did think a lot of herself.

  “Give me forty minutes, and if you’re not done, I’ll pitch in and we’ll knock off the cleaning,” he muttered.

  Cleaning. She hated to seem ungrateful, especially on the heels of such a humbling moment but…“You know, when you called today you never said a word about cleaning. I, uh, I actually thought you invited me to dinner.”

  “Dinner! What a great idea. Let’s grab some burgers or a pizza on the way home.” He bounced a kiss off her cheek and turned away to begin leafing through a stack of files on his huge, dark cherry desk.

  “Payt!”

  He worked a single page loose from the brass brackets in the file in his hand. “What?”

  She held her arms out to her sides and shook her head.

  With the paper wedged between his thumb and first knuckle, he swept his fingers back through his hair, leaving it as disheveled as his expression looked dumbfounded. “What?”

  She let out a soft sigh and tried not to laugh at her adorable but clueless man. “Not what, honey. Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why have me come to your office to empty trash and clean the break room? Don’t you have a service for that?”

  “I asked Dr. Briggs the same thing, and turns out he, um, that is, we…don’t.” He waved the paper hard enough to make it crackle. “Gotta run make a copy of this.”

  And he slipped away.

  Hit and run. Deliver the bad news, then disappear. The man hated confrontation. Always had. So on those rare occasions when he couldn’t charm his way out of dealing with unpleasantness, he avoided it.

  Unfortunately for her hubby, this tactic wasn’t going to work. Not anymore. She now had experience with eight-year-olds.

  “Payt?” she singsonged ever so sweetly, padding barefoot behind him down the hall.

  “Yes?” He parroted her tone.

  “Even if you don’t have a cleaning service, you do have a staff.”

  “Hmm?” He slid the paper into the copier.

  “You know, the people who make the mess in the first place. Shouldn’t they clean up after themselves?”

  He punched the copy button, and the machine whirred to life.

  “Shouldn’t they be doing the cleaning, instead of me? It’s not that I mind a little hard work but…you do have a staff for that kind of thing. Right?”

  He pulled out the copy and examined it a little too long before grabbing the original and brushing past her, saying, “We have a staff, Hannah, but they aren’t here right now, and now is when the work needs to be done.”

  She clenched her teeth. Her cheeks burned. Not in anger but because she felt like such a dope.

  Obviously he didn’t want to tell her why he’d asked her in to do someone else’s work. Or maybe he just didn’t understand why she wanted him to tell her. Either way, it made her feel…disconnected. Dismissed. Just plain dissed.

  He didn’t mean it that way. She knew he didn’t mean it.

  But…

  “Payt, honey, can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  His eyes searched her face.

  For a second she thought he might just tell her to mind her own business. No, strike that. He’d tell her to mind him and his business and stop presuming she deserved an explanation.

  He’d never done anything like that before.

  She had no reason to believe that he ever would.

  But in her anxious heart, in the depths of her imagination, in the fears and self-doubt that bubbled just below the surface of her practiced persona, she suddenly sus
pected he wanted to.

  Then he heaved out a world-weary breath, shook his head and, wearing a sheepish grin, he leaned against the door frame. “I’m so embarrassed, Hannah. How could I have been such a fool?”

  “Fool? You?” Him? Not her? The very suggestion set her pulse skipping. “Payt, what are you talking about?”

  “Politics.”

  “Local or federal?”

  “Office.”

  “Oh.” She winced. She’d worked a lot of years in offices to pay the rent and put food on the table while Payt pursued his studies. “Office politics—the trickiest kind of all.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” He crooked his finger. “Walk with me.”

  She put her hand on his back and kept pace with him step for step.

  “Raymond’s office.” He moved swiftly past the closed door with the brass plaque proclaiming Dr. Briggs.

  She wished she could have poked her head inside and learned a little more about this man who had her husband hopping whenever he said, “Jump.” But Payt had moved on already.

  “Dottie.” He pointed into an office that made his look like a broom closet. “Office manager and bookkeeper. Been with Dr. Briggs through three pediatric partners, two wives and at least one total office meltdown.”

  “Oooh.” Hannah peered in, noting the photos of grown children and presumably grandchildren gracing the bookcase. Then her eyes fell on a painting that as an old Kentucky girl she recognized as a prized thoroughbred. She smiled. “What do you call her? The warhorse?”

  “She’s earned the title.” Payt laughed and strode on, swinging his arm out to point into the next room. “Kaye. Nurse Practitioner. If Dottie is our warhorse, then Kaye is the big dog.”

  Hannah sized up the cheery room lined with painted children’s chairs, an overstuffed sofa and a zillion stuffed animals filling every nook and cranny. “Just guessing, but looks like the big dog’s bark might be worse than her bite.”

  “Guess again.” He raised his eyebrows, then snaked his arm around Hannah’s shoulders to motivate her to get moving again.

  “What’s this?”

  “Break room.” He pointed with the papers in his hand. “Also serves as Meg’s quasi-office on the days she’s here.”