Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

someone is trying to tell me.

      “I told him to call Daddy,” Dana says over her shoulder as she heads down the freshly wallpapered hallway toward my beautiful salmon-colored kitchen which looks alternately like an early sunrise or a deep sunset depending on where the real sun is at the moment. Of course, there is no sun now. “But no, your son had to call Drew.” She says his name like it’s covered in bird droppings.

      “Call for what?” I ask, hurrying into the living room where I find Drew and Jesse playing cards and Alyssa in her pajamas all but asleep in Drew’s lap. My living room is a beautiful deep hunter-green. Drew looks like he belongs there. And he looks good with my little girl in his lap, too. Damn good.

      “Turned out to be nothing,” Jesse says, while Drew points at Alyssa and smiles apologetically to indicate that if he moves Alyssa will wake up. She’s got her thumb in her mouth and her face is tear-stained.

      “What turned out to be nothing?” I ask while Jesse picks a card from the deck like I’m not even there.

      “Your idiot son thought someone was shooting at us,” Dana says. She’s got her arms crossed over her chest, where I know her sleep shirt says Bite Me.

      “Shooting—” I start to say, but Drew interrupts me.

      “Everything is fine,” he says in a voice that insists don’t lose it now, while he casts a warning glance at Dana. “Jesse had the presence of mind to call me, I happened to be in the neighborhood. There were no gunshots.”

      “And no one called me because…?” I ask.

      “Because I thought someone was shooting at us. When there are gunshots, you call the police,” Jesse says.

      Alyssa stirs in Drew’s arms and I take her and head for the stairway, carrying her up to bed while Dana reminds Jesse he didn’t call the police. He called Drew.

      “I thought you were never coming home,” Lys says against my neck.

      I want to tell her that she could have called me. That my cell phone is on the kitchen phone’s automatic dial, which she certainly knows how to use—heck, she does it often enough—but I figure we can have that talk tomorrow. This is just the animated feature and I’ve got the best-picture-of-the-year award waiting downstairs. So I just kiss her forehead, slip her under the covers and go back to the living room.

      “From the beginning,” I order Jesse. He discards a seven of clubs before I take his cards away. “Now.”

      “I heard a series of cracks,” Jesse says. Dana says she heard nothing and he’s crazy.

      “Well, not entirely crazy,” Drew says, and I feel my heart skip a beat—and not the romantic, he-walks-in-the-room-and-you-see-him-for-the-first-time kind of beat-skipping. More like the-masked-men-arrive-at-your-door-and-it’s not-Halloween kind of beat-skipping.

      Two years ago my ex-husband, Rio, tried to drive me crazy—literally. He moved things, made me think I’d done things I hadn’t and hadn’t done things I had. And all because he wanted to start his own business and I wouldn’t let him put up the house as collateral.

      At any rate, he didn’t quite succeed. But I’m well acquainted with mind games and what I call the Chinese insanity torture, and tonight I realize that if Rio had had the help of the three people lounging in my living room, I’d be a permanent resident of my mother’s home-away-from-home, the South Winds Psychiatric Center.

      “Tell me what happened,” I order from between gritted teeth.

      “I’m trying to,” Jesse says. “So I heard a noise and then the window in Dana’s room broke.”

      Before I can say, “It what?” Dana corrects him and says it’s just a little cracked.

      “And there’s a little hole in it,” Jesse says. He leaves off the so there, but we all hear it just the same. “So I thought it was a bullet hole and I called Drew.”

      “And not me,” I say, just making sure I’m clear on this.

      “I told him to call Daddy,” Dana says again. “But no, he had to make a federal case out of it.”

      “And nobody, not you, not your brother and not you,” I say, looking pointedly at Drew, “thought you should call me.”

      “We knew you’d have to come home eventually,” Drew says. Maggie jumps up on the couch she’s forbidden to sit on, makes two circles and then snuggles down next to Drew. “And I think I’m better equipped to handle this sort of thing, don’t you?”

      I ignore the dig. “What broke the window?” I ask, snapping my fingers for Maggie to get down. She ignores me and closes her eyes.

      “It was a tiny pebble,” Dana says. I could swear she’s almost proud of it. “Probably got kicked up by a car, you know, like when our windshield got broken? He found it by my bed.”

      It’s a long way from the street to her window on the second floor, not to mention that her bedroom is on the side of the house.

      Drew says that it could have happened the way Dana surmises.

      “Right,” I say—like on the other hand it could have been a small asteroid from the planet Moron. “So really, someone threw a rock at Dana’s window.”

      “That’s possible, too,” he says, hiding a smile.

      I ask him if he thinks we should sleep at my mother’s, thinking that my children’s safety has to come before my own desires, which include never, ever, throwing myself on my mother’s mercy. But he tells me he doesn’t think it’s necessary.

      As a precaution, he offers to hang around for a while.

      The idea doesn’t sound half bad to me, so I try sending the kids to bed. After the protests that it’s too early, that they are too shaken to sleep (this from Jesse, the card shark), that Dana shouldn’t have to go to bed as early as Jesse since she’s older, and blah, blah, blah, they finally go upstairs.

      Making coffee in the kitchen, I ask Drew what he thinks really happened.

      “Best guess? Someone with the hots for your daughter was trying to get her attention. Wouldn’t hurt for her to pull down her shades when she’s undressing, Ted.”

      I feel my cheeks go red. After watching me do a striptease through the window of a cottage I was doing in the Hamptons over the summer, is he thinking like mother, like daughter?

      “And I think that Jesse saw it as the perfect excuse to get me over here,” he adds, rubbing my back while I get the coffee going.

      Better he think Jesse’s plotting to get him here than me.

      “And no one called me because…?” I ask.

      “Maybe Hal isn’t the only one tired of you playing cop, Teddi.” He reaches over my shoulder and pulls out the mugs and the sugar bowl from the cabinets like the house is his. “Maybe your kids have had all they can take, too. And maybe they’d like a mom who’s home at night, watching TV with them, watching over them.”

      It’s so easy for people without kids to know what’s right for parents. “Maybe they like eating, too, and having a roof over their heads,” I say in my own defense. Of course, I say this despite the fact that I’m feeling like a negligent parent, like something could have happened tonight and I wouldn’t have been here to protect them. “Maybe it’s not fair that they have to live with my mistakes—but they do,” I say. And with that I manage to spill the coffee I’m pouring and burn my hand.

      Drew grabs the pot and my hand and in one motion manages to put the carafe back in the Mr. Coffee unit and my hand under the faucet. “They’re fine,” he tells me. “Nothing happened. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

      I should have been here, and I say as much.

      “You had work to do,” he says, examining my hand and pronouncing with a look