Household Gods

Nicole Gunther-Perrin rolled over to turn off the alarm clock and found herself nose to nose with two Roman gods. She nodded a familiar good-morning to Liber and his consort Libera, whose votive plaque had stood on the nightstand since her honeymoon in Vienna. Maybe they nodded back. Maybe she was still half asleep.

As she dragged herself up to wake the children and get them ready for daycare, her mouth twisted. Liber and Libera were still with her. Frank Perrin, however…

“Bastard, “ she said. Liber and Libera didn’t look surprised. They’d heard it every morning since her ex-husband took half the assets, left the kids, and headed off for bluer horizons. She doubted he thought about her except when the child support came due (and not often enough then), or when she called him with a problem. She couldn’t help thinking of him a dozen times a day – and every time she looked at Justin. Her son – their son, if you wanted to get technical – looked just like him. Same rough dark hair, down to the uncombable cowlick; same dark eyes you could drown in; same shy little smile that made you feel you’d coaxed it out of hiding.

Justin smiled it as she gently shook him awake. “Mommy!” he said. He was only two and a half. He hadn’t learned to wound her yet.

“Come on, Tiger,” she said in her best rise-and-shine, mommy-in-the-morning voice. “We’ve got another day ahead of us.” She reached inside his Pull-Ups. “You’re dry! What a good boy! Go on and go potty while I get your sister up.”

He climbed onto the rail and jumped out of bed. He landed with a splat, of course, but it didn’t hurt him. It made him laugh. He toddled off sturdily toward the bathroom. Watching him go, Nicole shook her head. Kimberley never jumped out of bed. Testosterone poisoning, Nicole thought, and almost smiled.

Kimberley not only didn’t jump out of bed, she didn’t want to get out of bed at all. She clutched her stuffed bobcat and refused to open her eyes. She was like that about every other morning; given her druthers, she would have slept till noon. She didn’t have her druthers, not on a Tuesday. “You’ve got to get up, sweetie,” Nicole said with determined patience.

Eyes still resolutely closed, Kimberley shook her head. Her light brown hair, almost the same color as Nicole’s, streamed over her face like seaweed.

Nicole wheeled out the heavy guns: “Your brother is already up. You’re a big four-year-old. You can do what he does, can’t you?” If she’d used such shameless tactics in court, counsel for the other side would have screamed his head off, and the judge would have sustained him.

But she wasn’t in court, and there was no law that said she had to be completely fair with a small and relentlessly sleepy child. She did what she had to do, and did it with a minimum of remorse.

It worked. Kimberley opened her eyes. They were hazel, halfway between Frank’s brown and Nicole’s green. Still clutching her beloved Scratchy, Kimberley headed for the bathroom. Nicole nodded to herself and sighed. Her daughter wasn’t likely to say anything much for the next little while, but once she got moving, she moved pretty well.

Nicole got moving, too, toward the kitchen. Her brain was running ahead of her, kicked up into full daytime gear. She’d get the kids’ breakfasts ready, get dressed herself while they ate, listen to the news on the radio while she was doing that so she could find out what traffic was like (traffic in Indianapolis had not prepared her for L.A., not even slightly), and then…

And then, for the first time that day, her plans started to unravel. Normally silent Kimberley let out a shrill screech: “Ewwww!” Then came the inevitable, “Mommmmy!” Ritual satisfied, Kimberley deigned to explain what was actually wrong: “Justin tinkled all over the bathroom floor and I stepped in it. Eww! Eww! Eww!” More ewws might have followed that last one, but, if so, only dogs could hear them.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Nicole burst out; and under her breath, succinctly and satisfyingly if not precisely accurately, “Shit.”

The bathroom was in the usual morning shambles, with additions. She tried to stay calm. “Justin,” she said in the tone of perfect reason recommended by all the best child psychologists and riot-control experts, “if you go potty the way big boys do, you have to remember to stand on the stepstool so the tinkle goes in the potty like it’s supposed to.”

Children raised in psychologists’ laboratories, or rioting mobs, might have stopped to listen. Her own offspring were oblivious. “Mommy!” Kimberley kept screaming. “Wash my feet!” Justin was laughing so hard he looked ready to fall down, though not, she noticed, into the puddle that had sent Kimberley into such hysterics. He thought his big sister in conniptions was the funniest thing in the world – which meant he’d probably pee all over the floor again sometime soon, to make Kimberley pitch another fit.