Temporary Dad

“This place doesn’t look very clean,” he said.

“It’s not like we’re going to roll your niece and nephews across the pavement.”

“Yeah, well, all the same,” he said over Pia’s especially heartfelt cry. “Maybe we should just—”

Annie unfastened her seat belt and hopped out of the van.

Jed looked at the sun-bleached concrete parking area and the shabby picnic tables and shook his head.

An empty two-liter pop bottle rolled like tumble-weed until it stopped against the carved wooden sign urging folks to Put Litter In Its Place.

Annie slid open the van’s side door. “Listen to you all,” she crooned to the bawling trio. “My goodness. The way you’re carrying on you’d think some TV exec canceled Sesame Street.”

She unbuckled Pia and scooped her from her seat. After patting the rump of her pink shorts, Annie said, “What’s up, sweetie? Your diaper’s dry.” While talking to Pia, she rubbed Ronnie’s belly. “Seeing how they tossed their bottles, I’m guessing they’re not hungry, which leaves general crankiness as the cause of all this angst. Come on,” she said, awkwardly taking Richard from his seat, too. “You grab Ronnie and we’ll take them for a quick walk.”

“A walk?” Jed had stepped out of the van and was standing behind Annie. “We were supposed to be halfway to Colorado by now. This is going to completely blow the schedule.”

“What schedule?” Two babies and a fat diaper bag in her arms, she backed out of the van. “Think you could help me down from here? I don’t want to trip.”

Suddenly, Jed didn’t just have lost time to worry about, but Annie’s soft curves landing against his chest. He caught her around her waist, guiding her safely to the ground, getting himself in trouble with the trace of her floral perfume.

“No, no.” He shook off his momentary rush of awareness to remember his argument. “Why are you leaving the van? It’ll just take that much longer to load back up.”

Already halfway across the lot, aiming for the nearest picnic table, she called over her shoulder, “Could you please grab Ronnie? Now that we’re stopped, I’d like to do an official diaper check.”

Muttering under his breath, Jed did Annie’s bidding, cringing when he reached the table only to find her spreading the babies’ good changing pad across the graffiti-and-filth-covered concrete slab.

“What’s the matter?” she asked mid-change on Richard, her right hand efficiently holding the gurgling baby’s feet while she wiped him with her left.

Pia sprawled on a blanket Annie had spread beneath a frazzled red bud. The little faker was grinning up a storm while gumming the baby-friendly rubber salamander he’d bought for her at the zoo.

“What’s the matter?” he echoed, hands on his hips. “These kids are bamboozling us.”

Annie shot him an entirely too chipper smile. “Jed, they’re just over three months old. There’s no way they could systematically set out to mess with your schedule.”

“Yeah, well, what else explains this?” He held out Ronnie, who was also alternately giggling and cooing.

Annie looked up only to hastily look back down.

She returned her attention to sealing the tapes on Richard’s diaper, then resnapping the legs of his short-sleeved cotton jumper.