Kids Is A 4-Letter Word Read Free Page B

watched in amazement as a huge soap bubble formed in the O of his mouth, then popped out and floated away. Billy laughed and more bubbles floated out.
    Jamie stopped singing long enough to join in Billy’s laughter. “He took a bite out of the soap,” he informed Jo, pointing to a missing chunk.
    “Oh my God!” Jo yelled, reaching in the tub to grab Billy by the shoulders. She hardly noticed her hair and shoulders were being splattered. “Shouldn’t we call poison control or something?”
    “He’ll be all right,” Claire declared. “He’s done it before,that’s why we have to hide the soap. He’ll have the poops for a couple of days, that’s all.”
    Billy giggled again and blew bubbles into Jo’s face. She leaned back on her heels and clutched her hand to her heart in an effort to slow her pulse. “Let’s get to work,” she instructed Claire.
    “Yeooowwww!” Jamie screamed when Jo reached in and raked the brush across his back.
    “Stand still,” she ordered. “It’s soft and it won’t kill you.” She ruthlessly scrubbed every stain from the boy’s body in between his protests. With some aggressive cleaning, Claire managed to remove most of the paint from a protesting Billy. Jo glanced at her watch again. Forty-five minutes left, and the drive would take fifteen.
    Claire had found two towels and the boys were soon rubbed dry, their skin now glowing pink.
    “Get dressed,” Jo commanded Jamie.
    “We’re out of diapers for Billy,” Claire reminded Jo.
    Jo expelled a noisy sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, summoning patience. “Find a white hand towel.”
    Once Claire had provided the towel, it took Jo several minutes to persuade a wriggling Billy to lie still while she found a way to pin it around him. After several false starts and a couple of bloody stabs into her own fingers, she finally fashioned a passable diaper and fastened the sides with two lapel pins from her ruined dress. “Shouldn’t you be potty-trained by now?” she mumbled to the bejeweled toddler.
    “He’s difficult,” Claire repeated.
    “I’m ready,” Jamie announced.
    Dressed in a green sweat suit, à la Peter, he stood proudly, arms akimbo, a black towel tied around his neck and trailing down his back.
    “What’s with the towel?” Jo whispered to Claire.
    “It’s his shadow,” she whispered back. “Don’t you know anything about Peter Pan?”
    Jo took a cleansing breath. She instructed Claire to findclothes for Billy, then herded everyone downstairs. Hurriedly, she added a few sentences to Claire’s note to John, then locked the front door with a key Claire produced on a chain around her neck.
    As Jo unlocked her sports sedan, however, Claire balked. “Where’s the car seat?”
    Jo blinked. “Car seat?”
    “For Billy, he has to sit in a car seat.”
    Jo chewed her bottom lip. “Really?”
    Jamie frowned, disgusted. “Aren’t you a mommy?”
    Foolishly feeling as if she’d just received the ultimate insult, Jo cocked an eyebrow and leveled her gaze on him. “As a matter of fact, no, I’m not a mommy.”
    “We have an extra car seat in the house,” Claire offered quietly, pushing her glasses up.
    The trip back inside for the car seat was followed by another for Billy’s bedraggled blankie, then one more to retrieve another book for Claire. Somehow in all the commotion, the girl had managed to finish reading the first one.
    By the time she strapped everyone in, Jo had eleven minutes left to make the fifteen-minute drive. As soon as she turned over the engine, her car phone rang.
    Jo picked up the handset as she pulled out of the driveway. “Hello?”
    “Josephine, where the green blazes are you?”
    Jo smiled at her aunt’s familiar habit of misspeak. “Hattie, I’m on my way. Have the Pattersons arrived?”
    “With shoes on.”
    “You mean, ‘with bells on’?”
    “No bells, dear, just shoes.”
    Jo shook her head and muttered a prayer for strength.