Plain-Jane Princess

“From my father,” she said simply, tightening her hands a little more around his neck, breathing in his scent a little more than she had any right to. “Where’d you get those children?”

They’d nearly reached the porch by now; the scrapes and bruises groused a little when he shifted her weight to carry her up the few steps, giving the lilac a wide berth. “I’m their guardian,” he said, his soft words conveying the weight of all that word implied. “Think you can make it into the house on your own?”

“What? Oh, yes, I’m sure I can.”

He gently let her down, bracing one hand on the screen door handle a moment before opening it. “Ted MacIntyre, their father, was my best friend all through school.” He shook his head, his breath escaping in a slow sigh as he looked out over her head for a moment, then back to her. “Sometimes, you just do what you gotta do, you know—?”

The door pushed open, knocking Steven out of the way. The littlest one stood there—still in her nightgown, Sophie now noticed—holding out a small, colorful box. “I found ’em, Unca Teev. My bandy-aids. For the lady.”

Touched more than she could say, Sophie reached out and took the box from the child. “Oh, my goodness—” She clutched the box to her midsection, smiling for the little girl. “Are these your very special bandy-aids that nobody else can use?” The baby nodded. Sophie hesitated, then touched the silken hair. “Thank you, love. Thank you very, very much.”

The little girl gave her a shy smile, then ran back inside the house. “What’s her name?” Sophie asked, then looked up to find Steven’s gaze riveted to hers, his expression unreadable, but intense all the same.

A second passed before he answered. “Rosie. Well, Rosita, actually. The children’s mother was Honduran,” he added with a hint of a smile as he finally led her inside, the screen door slamming shut behind them. From the depths of the house, she heard what sounded like a small battle. Seemingly oblivious, Steven led her through a very cluttered, minimally furnished living room to a hallway off to one side. “I’ve got a first-aid kit in the bathroom down here,” he said, only to halt when he realized Sophie wasn’t exactly zipping along behind him. “Sorry—”

“No, no.” She made herself smile, only to flinch when the wall shook underneath her hand. “It’s all right, really. Do you need to—?” She carefully nodded in the direction of the fracas.

“I’ve probably got another thirty, forty seconds before things get seriously out of hand,” he said. But still, she caught the tension hardening his features, as he showed her into the bathroom, turned on the light, then stepped inside only long enough to pull a first-aid kit out of a cupboard over the toilet. She managed not to gasp when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over the sink; between her still not having the hang of how to use the hair gel and the events of the morning, she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. And did she have a comb on her person? She did not.

“If you can just get started,” Steven began, apology swimming in his eyes.

Sophie laughed over her wince as she first lowered the toilet lid, then herself down onto it. “I doubt whether there’s anything here that requires triage. Go ahead.” She shooed him out with one hand, already surveying the contents of the well-stocked kit. With five kids, she didn’t wonder. “I’ll be fine….”

When she glanced up again, he was gone.

Twenty minutes later, he’d somehow gotten the right sandwiches, drinks and fruit—Bree only ate Gala apples, Courtney golden delicious, Dylan bananas—into the right bags, all shoes located and on the correct feet, all permission slips signed and trip money dispensed, and all the kids out the door in time to catch the school bus. With a weary sigh, George flopped down on the worn linoleum at Steve’s feet.

“Yeah, that was a rough few minutes, wasn’t it, boy?”

George managed, barely, to thump his tail in agreement.

And the murk cleared from Steve’s brain long enough for him to remember he had an accident victim in his bathroom. He strode down the hall, knocked on the closed door. “How you doing in there? Need any help?”

“Not at all,” came the chipper reply. “Only three more wounds to go. But I’m afraid I’ve put a severe dent in your iodine supply.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He thought a moment, then said, “I’ve got a couple of calls to make, then I can drive you back into town on my way into work. That okay?”

“Yes, that would be lovely.”

He wandered back out toward the living room, hand on back of neck.

Yes, that would be lovely?

Nope. Something was way off, here. The clothes and makeup did not jibe with that accent. Or her manner. Even in black bicycle shorts and a tank top, even made up like Elvira’s sister—and what was with that hair?—she was classier than any woman he’d ever known.

And maybe when he had a spare couple of minutes—ten, twenty years from now—he’d try to figure it out. Now, however, he had about a million phone calls to make, and so was extremely grateful that Rosie, still in her nightgown, he realized, had plopped herself down in the middle of the debris-strewn living room floor, giggling at Mr. Noodle’s antics on Sesame Street.

Sighing, he glanced around the room. The house was a lot like the dog: sorta this, sorta that. Somebody’d decided to add a few rooms to the original two-story structure, probably ten years before Steve’s birth. The result was not what one would call aesthetically pleasing. Or particularly well built. Floors slanted, door didn’t always shut tight, that kind of thing. But he could afford the payments, it was out in the country, and it had six bedrooms.

The house was furnished, if you could call it that, with whatever anyone had seen fit to foist off on him. On them, now. All donations were welcome, as long as they didn’t smell like someone’s basement or weren’t too pukey a color. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like places that were all fixed up and nice-looking, as much as he simply didn’t have the energy to be bothered. If someone wanted to give him their cast-off sofa, and it was still in reasonable condition, well, that saved him from having to go to some furniture store and pick one out, didn’t it?

Not to mention having to buy one. Ted and Gloria had both had life insurance policies, but those had gone into a trust fund for the kids’ education. And Steve had quickly discovered just how fast five kids could eat up the cash. Still, between his working for his father and his steadily increasing income from his photography, they did okay.

Ignoring yet another twist to the old gut, Steve walked back to the kitchen and called his folks, both to ask his mother to baby-sit and to tell his father he’d be late. Then, leaning with his back against his tornado-stricken kitchen counter so he wouldn’t have to look at it, he picked up the phone to call—yet again—the employment agency. He’d just gotten through to the director when he saw Lisa make her way slowly down the hall, her legs and arms pockmarked with assorted bandages and Pokemon “bandy-aids,” but otherwise moving fairly well for someone who’d just done a forward vault off a moving bicycle.

He lifted a hand in acknowledgment, then pointed to the phone. With a little smile, she nodded, then lurched off toward the living room. In sensible little white sneakers, he noticed.

Just as he noticed that the bicycle shorts left little to the imagination—

“Mrs. Anderson! Hi!” He tore his gaze away from things he had no right to be gazing at and concentrated on the subject at hand. “It’s Steve Koleski…”

The conversation went straight down from there. Five minutes and a great many sighs later, all he had was a half-assed apology for Mrs. Hadley’s behavior and the possibility of a wonderful woman (an adjective Mrs. Anderson used with great frequency and with scant regard to reality) in her mid-fifties whose employer’s youngest child was graduating from high school and thus would be seeking a new position in about two weeks. Other than that, though, Mrs. Anderson was sorry to say, she had no one. No, she insisted, no one.

Steve hung up and groaned loudly enough to make George lift his head. Two weeks? How the hell was he supposed to work full-time and manage five kids on his own for two weeks? Granted, the older kids still had a month of school, so at least they were otherwise occupied most of the day, but he couldn’t impose on his mother to sit for Rosie that long. Not that she minded, but Rosie wasn’t his parents’ responsibility. She, and her siblings, were his. A responsibility he’d willingly accepted when he’d told Ted and Gloria he’d be thrilled to be the children’s godfather, even though, like most people, he never dreamed—

“Excuse me?”

Lisa’s perky accent jarred him out of his musings. She stood at the kitchen doorway, holding Rosie’s hand, a pair of creases nestled between her heavy brows. “Are you all right?”

Between the gentle, obviously genuine concern in Lisa’s voice and the way she and Rosie had clearly bonded in such a short period of time, it was everything Steve could do to keep himself together. But he did. He had to. “More or less,” he said with a shrug. “It’s just been a doozy of a morning, that’s all.”

Lisa quirked her bright red mouth. “And having a cycling casualty to tend didn’t help matters any, I’m sure.”

“That wasn’t your fault,” he said softly, and the quirk twitched into a smile.

“No, I don’t suppose it was. Well, except for being foolish enough to not think anyone else might be on the road, at least. Anyway,” she said on an exhaled breath, “if you tell me where sweetie’s clothes are, I can get her dressed for you.”

Steve was around the counter in three strides, shaking his head. “Forget it. You…sit somewhere. I’ll get her dressed—”

A tiny glower met his attempt to pick Rosie up. “No.”

Now down to his last milligram of patience, Steve squatted in front of her, matching her glower for glower. “Lisa’s not feeling very well, honey,” he tried, except, naturally, Lisa pulled the rug right out from under him by announcing in that prim little way she had that she was feeling just fine, thank you, and if he’d simply tell her where the child’s clothes were, they could get on with it.

“See?” Rosie said, and Steve gave up.

“Fine, fine.” He got to his feet. “She and the twins share a room, upstairs. Her clothes are in the small, white dresser under the window. Her shoes, however, could be in Alaska for all I know—”

“No, silly!” the child said, yanking her sandals up to her shoulders. “They’re right here!” Then she strutted out of the room, shaking her head.

They both followed the baby out into the hall, standing at the foot of the stairs and watching her ascent for a moment before Steve heard himself say, “Their parents were killed in a fire, last August.” He felt Lisa’s gaze zip to his face, heard the soft “oh” of surprise and sympathy fall from her lips. “I got this call, two-something in the morning. Mac, in hysterics, calling from the hospital.”

For the rest of his life, he’d remember that night. That call. The devastating feeling of utter helplessness that swept through him when he tore into the ER to find a scared, filthy, thirteen-year-old boy trying to keep it together for the sake of his younger brothers and sisters, a kid refusing to let the social worker the police had quickly gotten on the case take them away, insisting his Uncle Steve would be there, his Uncle Steve would take care of them….

“Steven?”

He glanced over, nodded. Continued. “They’d just bought this old house, over in another township. We knew the wiring was bad…” He paused, collected himself. “I was supposed to go up there the next weekend, start working on it. The fire started in the wall between the kitchen and Dylan’s bedroom, in the middle of the night. Ted and Mac—he’s the oldest boy—woke up first, got the twins and the baby out, then realized Gloria had apparently gone in to Dylan sometime during the night and fallen asleep on his bed. Ted tried to get to them, but a wall collapsed, trapping him.”

He stopped, tried unsuccessfully to quell the nausea that swamped him everytime he had to explain. “He never had a chance. But before the fire department got there, Mac…Mac went back in. He managed to get Dylan out through a window, but his mother…” He shook his head. “That ratty old quilt Rosie drags around? That’s about all that was left, only because she took it with her when Ted grabbed her from her crib.”