Fourteen

The encounter with Burke left me no time to interview potential hooligan parents before my kids got home, so I decided to do that first thing tomorrow. The kids came barreling in just about the time Burke showed up with some wood, panes of glass he’d cut to size, putty, and other equipment. He borrowed a ladder from my garage and set to work.

Leah burst in the door and dropped her book bag on the floor. “Who’s the man on the ladder?” she demanded.

“He’s fixing the window. Go feed your lizard.” She rolled her eyes and flung herself on the couch, her latest in a series of defiant gestures.

Ethan was a few steps behind her. He stomped noisily into the house and dropped his book bag on the floor. “Can I go on the Internet and look for dogs?” he asked.

“Do your homework.”

He shrugged, got his books out of the bag, hung the bag up on the banister, and got to work on his homework, sitting on the floor next to the couch and working on the coffee table (in this case, the homework table). He had to avoid sitting on his sister, who was writhing on the couch now, since just flinging herself onto it had not produced the desired response.

“Leah, feed the lizard and do your homework.”

“Ahhhhhhhh!” The sound that emanated from her throat can’t be accurately translated into letters and punctuation. It was the kind of thing that took the sound effects artists who worked on The Exorcist three months to produce, with layer upon layer of wild animal noises, squeaky doors, and the transmission of a 1942 Nash. But she got up and stomped into the kitchen to fetch the tasty treat for Little Zilla.

While she was upstairs, the phone rang. “Hi, Aaaaaaron,” said a minuscule voice. “Is Leeeeeeah there?”

“Hi, Meliiiiiiisa,” I said. “She’s feeding the liiiiiiizard.”

But Leah was already harrumphing down the stairs, still glaring at me, and I pointed to the phone in my hand, then to the one on the kitchen wall. She didn’t smile, but nodded.

She and Melissa were deep into conversation when I heard a loud scuffle outside the window. I looked out, and two Midland Heights police officers were holding Preston Burke’s arms. They’d clearly pulled Burke down off the ladder, and were talking to him. He appeared perplexed.

I opened the door and called to the one I knew. “Hey Craw-ford,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“Isn’t this the guy the chief told us to watch for outside your house?” Crawford said. “He was doing something to your front window.”

“Yeah,” I said, walking down the stairs to them. “He’s fixing it. I hired him.”

The two cops looked at each other, then Crawford shrugged. They let Burke’s arms go. “That’s what he said,” Crawford reported. “But you can understand. . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “You did your job exactly right. I’ll tell the chief.”

“Can I come in for a minute?” Crawford asked. I knew he was just checking to see if Burke had, in some way, taken my children hostage and was coercing me into letting him repair my window, so I waved Crawford into the house while his partner continued to question Burke.

Crawford looked around and saw one 12-year-old boy, approaching his father’s height, with his knees on the floor, his hands on the coffee table and his feet on the sofa, and one eight-year-old girl, approaching the height of the average lawn gnome, sprawled out flat on the floor in the kitchen, phone cord tracing to the wall five feet above her head.

In other words, the usual at my house.

“Situation normal,” I told Crawford. “He’s telling you the truth. But I appreciate your concern.”

He collected his partner and drove off. I made a mental note to call Barry Dutton and commend their work. Burke walked over to me as soon as they drove off.

“This is one secure community,” he said. “I should think about moving here.”

We went on like that for the rest of the afternoon. Melissa invaded for a while, and the two girls played on the swing I hung off the roof of our patio (we don’t actually have what you’d call a backyard), doing tricks designed to give me a massive coronary, until it was time for me to start cooking dinner for the kids.

I got out some pieces of frozen fried chicken for Ethan, since he refuses to eat virtually anything that is cooked under our roof, and put them in the oven on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil. Then I cut some potatoes very thin, sprayed them with cooking oil, and put them on another cookie sheet, similarly prepared, to “fry” in the oven. For Leah, I dredged a piece of boneless chicken breast in matzo meal, then seasoned it with the Colonel’s recipe of eleven herbs and spices, eight of which are salt, and put that on the same sheet as Ethan’s dinner. The sound I heard off in the distance was James Beard spinning in his grave.

Just about the time I started calculating my children’s cholesterol levels, the door opened and Abby, looking as flustered as I’ve ever seen her, came in and pointed at the door.

“Isn’t that. . . do you know who. . . why is. . . Aaron!”

It was so cute, I could barely stand explaining the situation to her, but by the time I got to how Burke was saving us $1,600, Abby was grinning. We sat in the kitchen until Burke knocked on the door to say he was leaving, and would be back in the morning. Abby and I waved, and he sighed (I like to think) and walked out.

“It’s a shame,” I said. “That there aren’t two of you to go around.”

“Maybe the guy who looks like him has a sister who looks like me,” Abigail said.

I snuggled close to her and kissed her on the cheek. “Looks are not all there is to you,” I said. “She’d have to be the most wonderful woman in the world, too.”

“Aaron, you make such lovely use of hyperbole.”

Silly woman. She thought I was exaggerating.