Temporary Dad

She eyed it for a second, then said, “Um, sure.”

OVER AN HOUR LATER, Annie had fed and diapered the infant trio. Jed had confirmed her earlier assumption of their being triplets. The five-month-old girl was named Pia, and the boys, Richard and Ronnie. Jed explained earlier that morning, he’d lost the ribbon bracelets his sister kept on the boys to help tell them apart, so now he wasn’t sure who was who.

“Man,” he said, arching back his head with a yawn. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you. When Patti finally shows up, she’s going to catch heat the likes of which she hasn’t felt since I caught her smoking in church.”

“Bit of a wild child, was she?” Annie asked, as she fastened the last snap on Pia’s pink jammies. She found a tiny pink Velcro bow stuck to the terry cloth, pulled it off, and attached it to the baby girl’s thin tufts of hair.

He laughed. “That’s an understatement. The happiest day of my life was when she said her I Dos to Howie. Finally, I thought, she’s someone else’s responsibility.”

“You been looking after her for a while?”

“Yeah. Our folks died my freshman year of college. Patti was okay as a kid, but once she hit her teens, she was nothing but trouble. She started pulling all this rebellion crap. Smoking. Drinking. Exclusively dating guys whose gene pools were only half-full. Most times, I knew she must have still been upset about Mom and Dad. But then there were other times I swear she did every bit of it just to piss me—” He winced. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Annie said, hugging the sleeping beauty to her chest.

“So lately,” he said, “she’s been kind of depressed. Howie—her husband, my savior—got laid off from his job here in Pecan, so he took a new one that has him traveling out east a lot. The company won’t pay for the whole family to relocate, so until he can find something closer to home, this is what he’s doing to pay the bills. Patti hasn’t handled it all that well. Before this happened with Howie, she’d been a bit shaky on the whole motherhood thing—not that she hasn’t done a great job. It’s just that she gets pretty frazzled.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Annie said, starting to share Jed’s concern for his sister, this precious infant’s mother. She stroked Pia’s downy-soft hair and breathed in her innocence and lotion.

“Anyway, that’s why I offered to watch these guys for her. I figured she could use a little break, but her being gone overnight…” He shook his head. “I never agreed to that. I’ve checked her house, called her neighbors and friends. Mrs. Clancy on the end of her block saw her tear out of her driveway yesterday about twelve-thirty in my truck. Since I can only fit one baby seat in my truck, she probably thought it best to leave me with the Baby Mobile. No one’s seen her since.” He raked his fingers through his hair.

The muted sound of a running vacuum came from next door.

“When she was younger,” he said, “she ran away a few times. I’m scared she’s choosing that way out again. But it could be something else. Something bad…”

The vacuum went off.

Annie leaned forward, her stomach queasy. “Have you called the police or tried getting in touch with Howie?”

He shrugged, then pushed himself up from the sofa and began to pace. “I’ve got a couple friends down at the police station, so I’ve been calling them like every hour. They’ve entered my plates and Patti’s vitals into the national missing persons base. Anyway, the cavalry’s been called, but they keep telling me the same thing. Wait. She’ll come home. There’s been no sign of trouble. Odds are, with Patti’s history of running, the stress of the babies probably got to be too much for her and she just took off.”

“And her husband? Did you ever get hold of him?”

“Nope. His cell keeps forwarding to voice messaging—same as his office phone. Apparently, not a single real live person answers the phone at that high-tech fortress where he works. I’d go to see him, but he’s out in Virginia somewhere.”

“Sorry,” Annie said. “Wish there was something I could do.”

“You’ve already helped,” he said. He shot a glance at his nephews. “Sometimes when these guys—and girl—start on a crying jag, I get panicky. Maybe my sister felt the same and split.”

Annie’s eyes widened. “She just left her babies?”

“I don’t want to think that of her, but what other explanation is there? I mean, if there was an emergency or something, wouldn’t she have called?”

“I’d think so, but what if she can’t?”

“Oh, come on.” He stopped pacing and thumped the heel of his hand against a pasta-colored wall. A snow-capped mountain landscape rattled in its chrome frame. “In this day and age, I’ll bet you can’t give me one good reason why a person couldn’t call.”

Annie wanted to blurt dozens of comforting reasons, but how could she when Jed was right?

Chapter Two

Patricia Hale-Norwood glared at the ICU nurse manning the desk phone. “Please. I’ll call collect. I just need to let my brother know where I am. I left in a hurry, and he’d taken my triplets to the Tulsa Zoo, and so I couldn’t—”

“I’m sorry,” said the steely-eyed, middle-aged dragon disguised as a nurse. “Hospital policy. This phone is for emergency use only.”

“This is an emergency.” Heart pounding at double the rate of the beeping monitor in Room 110, Patricia clenched her fists. From the call that’d interrupted her bubble bath telling her Howie had been in an accident and was barely alive, to the hasty trek down the front porch stairs that had badly sprained her right ankle, then the endless flight and rental car drive that led her to this North Carolina hospital where her husband now drifted in and out of consciousness, this whole trip had been a horror show that just kept getting worse.

The nurse sighed. “I’m sorry, but unless you’re in need of a blood transfusion or have an organ you’d like to donate, I can’t let you use this phone. There are pay phones and courtesy phones located throughout the hospital for your convenience.”

“Look.” Patricia slapped her palms on the counter. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but over in that fancy new wing y’all are building, some yo-yo sliced the phone cables with a backhoe. So now there isn’t a single phone on this whole freakin’ square mile that works—except for yours—which, I’ve heard through the hospital grapevine, has its own separate emergency line.”

“Please, Mrs. Norwood, lower your voice. We have critically ill patients here.”

“You’re damned right!” Patricia said shrilly. “My husband happens to be one of them. He’s hanging on by a thread, and you’re acting like he’s here for a bikini wax. Now, we’ve been through this already. My cell batteries are dead. My charger is back home two thousand miles away. My ankle’s swollen to the size of a football, making it kind of excruciating for me to get around. Please let me use this phone.”

The nurse cast Patricia a sticky-sweet smile. “Perhaps a family member of one of our other patients has a cell they’d allow you to use in the special cellular phone area on the sixth floor?”

JED SLAMMED his cordless phone on the kitchen counter.

What was the matter with those guys down at the police station? They were supposed to be his friends.

Hell, Jed had been the one who’d thrown Ferris his police academy graduation party. And now the guy was claiming there wasn’t a thing more he could do to find Patti?

He glanced at his niece and nephews, thankfully all still sleeping.

What would he have done without the help of his new neighbor? What was he going to do when all three babies woke at the same time, demanding bottles and burping and diaper changing?

Jed had earned many medals for bravery as a fireman. Yet those snoozing pink and blue bundles made him feel like a coward.

The phone rang and he lunged for it before the next ring. “Patti?”

“She’s still not back?” said Craig, one of his firehouse buddies.

“Nope.”

“What’re you gonna do? We need you down here, man. There’s a brushfire on a field by the country club, and we just got back from a house-fire call over on Hinton.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“Nah, but their kitchen’s toast.”

“Bummer.” Jed had been on hundreds of scenes like this. Witnessed lots of why me’s and crying. Crying. Occupational hazard.

Annie said the same about her job. How she hated hearing babies cry. Jed hated hearing anyone cry. It was great that he saved lives, but the emotional toll taken by fires was every bit as horrible as the physical destruction.

Fire didn’t just ruin lives and houses, it also stole memories.

Snapshots of Florida vacations.