Double Trouble
I was down in the cellar, doing yet another load of laundry, when I heard a faint but all too familiar cackle. I panicked, thinking I hadn’t shut the cellar door securely, and raced toward the stairs. The door was closed, and I sighed with relief when I reached the top stair and heard the cackle again. Quin was just outside the door. If I ha left it open even a crack, he would have wormed his way through and toppled down the cellar stairs.
After waiting for him to move away from the door, I reached up and tried to turn the handle. I jostled it again, with a little more force. It’s an old house, and our doors sometime stick. But the door wasn’t stuck. It was locked. The clever little bugger had turned the lock in the knob, trapping me in the cellar.
I called Millie to the door, and tried for about fifteen minutes to explain how to unlock the knob.
“Mama, I can’t do it.”
“Mama, it’s not working.”
“Mama, we need Daddy.”
She abandons me. I call for her a couple of minutes later.
“Mama, I in bed. I so tired.”
“Where’s your brother?” I yell, pushing my shoulder against the door, trying to force it open.
“I don’t know. ‘Nite Mama.”
I remember the bulkhead, covered with plastic sheeting to help minimize leaks from melting snow. I have no other option, I manage to open it, and, covered with cobwebs, I tear through the sheeting with a rusty old screwdriver and ascend into the backyard.
The front door, of course, is locked, so I try the backdoor. I usually keep that locked too, because I am a paranoid city girl and worry we’ll be robbed or raped or murdered in our beds, but Todd is much more trusting and always leaves it unlocked.
It figures that he would pick today of all days to listen to my paranoid rantings and actually lock it.
I lean against the door and hear lots of scuffling sounds, punctuated with squeals of laughter, and am certain the children have somehow set the cat on fire. I go to the garage, get a gardening spade, wrap it in a beach towel cause I’ve seen people do that in movies, and hurl it toward one of the windows in the back door.
It bounces off, and when it falls to the ground, the digging part comes apart from the handle. I grab a rake, and somehow manage to make an inch thick crack in the window. I worm my hand inside. (Finally my freakishly tiny hands have proved useful!) When I reach the knob I’m so relieved, I can’t even feel the glass scraping my arm. I unlock the door, pull my arm free an walk into the kitchen.
Millie, having decided a nap was not in the cards, had vaulted the “child-proof” kitchen gate, pulled a chair over to the counter, and grabbed the brand new bag of jelly beans she had insisted I buy at the grocery store just last night. She had torn a hole in the middle of the bag, and a jelly bean trail led back to the gate. She was sitting on one side, looking quite pleased with herself, and Quin was standing on the other, looking very much like one of those puffer fishes ready to blow, his cheeks crammed full of jelly beans.
