The Girl who Waited

In which our Hero is looking forward to unfamily-ar times, but the family isn’t all that bad

It’s been an anti-social summer and as family has increasingly crowded me, I’ve been increasingly surly. To try to balance avoidance with courtesy with our extended-stay guests, rather than hiding in my own room, I was in a different room where if I was caught I was surely just looking out the window. It was the last day of their visit, and a nice enough day. In the background, someone was bathing, a child was playing, my mother was clattering in the kitchen with my nephew’s wife and&emdash;

(thud)

(crying)

I come out of the room I’m in directly diagonal to the guest room their using. The door is open. A baby is on the floor. Who I’d seen just moments before with her father on the bed. And her father ain’t there now.

The 6-year-old is calling for mom so at least that much was happening, but I scooped up the kid and checked for damage. Mercifully, the room has relatively thick carpet pile, so soft, bendy baby landed on soft carpet. Nothing broken, no flinches or issues with motion. Just outrage as far as I could tell.

I soothed her as I took her to mom, and to my great surprise, she stopped crying before I’d gotten very far, instead snuffling against my shoulder. So I can’t really explain this part, but basically, odds are that she’s okay, and if she sees mom, she’ll just burst into tears again. So I tried to distract her but she started cry again, and I delivered her to her people.

All I said was, “She fell off the bed.” I couldn’t say more. I just don’t have words for how stupid it was. Eventually my nephew came to find out what had happened, and his wife told him, with a “what were you thinking” look. And he explained. “I only left her for a moment. [6-year-old] was keeping an eye on her.”

My mom is a well-intentioned tyrant who is not shy about opinions, but I could see her just as devoid of words as me. It’s not something you can scold about. They all feel horrible already. I’m not about to make him feel better, because he did a dumb thing and deserves a little glaring.

I can’t remember when I’ve been so much at a loss for words.

My Moonbeam called, which was a very unusual thing of itself. But she called me crying hard, and all she said was that she was having a horrible day and just needed to hear my voice for a bit. Most of what I do to take care of my people is fake it and hope. In this case, I decided that it wasn’t the time to draw her out into talking so I talked instead, about detailed and intricately boring parts of a design document for an API to authenticate accounts receivable customers to a presentment system because it may be less fun than getting stuck with a needle, but it does give me cause to make noise. And after a while, she settled a bit and asked me if she was a bad person.

So she’s calling brokenhearted about something she wasn’t in a hurry to tell me about, seeking comfort and wondering about herself as a person. At the start of the call, I had checked to make sure she wasn’t out somewhere in need of rescue, so I knew she hadn’t been arrested or attacked. Add the question and clearly she’s an active participant in whatever it is. The range of possible issues, given the source, goes from pocketing post-its to murder. The probable issues are a little less crazy, but are still broad. (I will admit that there was a very brief flash of the thought: Please don’t let it be a boy. Or a girl.) But I made a case for why I didn’t think she was a bad person. Supported by a number of the things I know about her.

She thought about it, told me she loved me, and decided to go to bed.

Of course she called just as stray family in town pulled in to our house. Suddenly there were three little boys loose in the house. I could hear the thunder of their play as I spoke to Moonbeam, and I suppose I was being a little rude, but, priorities, you know?

But after she excused herself, I went down to say hello and the boys… well… didn’t exactly glom on to me so much as kind of achieve a probabilistic wavefront somewhere around me. I took them down to my home theatre and suddenly I was dealing with three different boys being excited about three different things at the same time. I mean, they were polite about it in so far as they didn’t really interrupt each other, but there were no pauses for me to really get into the conversation.

“I know how to use this keyboard, but it’s very small”

“Let’s play wii!”

“Can we watch Batman?”

“Wait, this isn’t a Wii remote. Is it an XBOX?”

“Do you play guitar?”

“Why do you have a gun?” [Nerf. Answer: For taking care of kids who don’t listen to me!]

“[youngest] is scared of Batman”

“I put in a game”

“Where’s the wiimote thing?”

“I used to use this keyboard before, but I don’t remember how to use it”

“I think this is broken, it’s not turning on”

We got the Wii up and running, but I had to change the batteries which lead to another stream of questions.

“Why do you have to change the batteries?”

“I know how to open the cover!”

“I think this one is broken?”

“I found the batteries!”

“Can we watch Batman?”

“What do you mean these are dead batteries?”

“I’m just going to follow you now.”

“I think this cover is stuck.”

“Why do you have dead batteries?”

“Does this keyboard work on the Wii?”

They were actually really good kids, but the onslaught of questions had me breathless then and now in retelling it. But I got the Wii going and they were off to the races. Well, except for another batch of questions about why I don’t have three controllers and why if there’s only me do I have two controllers and what’s a yard.

Because two were playing WiiGolf and the third was making fun of them, I set up a miniature putting range so the third could try “real life” but he wasn’t impressed. And they played and made fun of each other, and the baby boy would say “I’m just going to lose, okay?” in self-defense as he played his brothers who were a little more aware of what they were controlling.

Once I got them settled, it was kind of fun to just sit and watch them go. And after they’d all gone, my mother let out a big puff of air. “Whooo! Those boys! Thank god you came downstairs, they were everywhere!”

The boys were in town for a wedding for our cousin’s wedding. He was marrying his high-school sweetheart after 10 years of a relationship.

The wedding was a whole lot more fun than I ever expected, but a moment that startled me came at the end. I was taking my leave of the groom and he gave me a huge hug and then thanked me for sponsoring him for his confirmation, a catholic ritual that marks adulthood.

I was shocked he even remembered that I’d stood with him, to be honest. We don’t cross paths all that much anymore, and there’s affection, but I’m my normal quiet and withdrawn self so it’s not like he knows me all that well. And besides that, I’d wrestled hard with the fact that this was a religious rite and I’m not all that religious a person, and even where I am, I’m not all that orthodox a person, and is that the right role model for a boy? I was persuaded to stand for him anyway, but my response was based out of that uncertainty, and I told him that he was welcome, but that what he’d made of it was all him.

And I got scolded. I got scolded because he felt that I had played a role, and because he claims not to be all that communicative and he wanted me to know.

So I thanked him. And pondered.

The littlest of the three boys was designated the Ring Bearer (a title of some increased importance now that more of the world is aware of Tolkien). And a diamond-commercial-grade adorable little girl was the flower girl, and they did their jobs magnificently at being cute. But then we noticed they weren’t running around, and we were starting to decide to search when we noticed them, in a glassed-in side area. Waiting.

We collected them and gathered them on their way. And Bony’s baby sister turned to me and said, “He’s so cute! That little suit.”

I was just starting to agree when she looked at me again, and added with a smile, “And a bow tie. Cause Bow Ties are Cool!”

You either already know why I laughed or else it doesn’t matter.