The words poured out of his mouth so quickly it was almost hard to understand him. I could hear Heidi and Sayla trying to calm him down in the background, but he was a panicking parent, so it wasn’t working.
“Actually, maybe you should take her to Urgent Care and see if she needs antibiotics.”
Canon and I shared a look while we waited for Heidi to finish what she was saying to her husband, which consisted mainly of her telling him to “calm the hell down.”
We could hear the tone of his voice changing as he did just that, but then Nemi got up and ran to the bathroom Canon had just been in and did exactly what he’d done in there, too. I didn’t think as I ran to hold the poor baby’s hair back and took the phone in there with me, meaning that the guy with the weakest constitution and what he called a ‘sympathetic stomach’ heard all of it and had to pull over to be sick.
Come to find out, the Kleins all had that stomach because Canon jogged frantically up the stairs to throw up again. I had the noises around me, like they were being played in surround sound.
Yeah, we took Nemi to Urgent Care to get her checked over and found out she had strep throat. With some antibiotics and more instructions on when to administer Tylenol and ibuprofen to get her fever down, I did my best to look after her while also parenting Bond, who was now beyond worried. The only reason he hadn’t come home was because he didn’t want his wife getting strep throat and because he trusted us to look after his baby.
Later that night, my phone rang while I was lying on a makeshift bed next to Nemi on the floor. Expecting it to be Bond, I groaned as I picked it up. Instead, it was my girl, Naomi, and boy was I glad she’d called. I was even happier five minutes later when she sent through the photo of her half-brother, Jeremy.
“Oh, Jesus,” I breathed, zooming in to see his face up close. “Can I keep him?”
Little did I know that those four words would snap a string inside Canon Klein. Then again, I’d also thought he was fast asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Canon
Whether Jacinda’s comment about Naomi’s half-brother was a throwaway one or not, it ate away at me.
That’s what I was blaming for my irrational actions two days later when my brother finally got back from his trip to New Orleans. I loved spending time with Nemi, but holy shit, a sick kid was a lot of work.
And don’t even get me started on their damn dog! I think I’d lost about ten pounds thanks to him, but I had to admit that the cookies Nemi made this morning kind of made up for it. They’d only been sugar cookie dough with candy cane Hershey's Kisses in them, but damn they were addictive.
Anyway, my irrational action happened when I was waiting at a red light, minding my own business. I had woosah tunes on, and I was squeezing the shit out of my steering wheel to stop me from driving to Jacinda’s house when I saw something moving at the edge of the road next to the sidewalk.
At first I thought it was a rat, but then I realized it was a kitten. The thing was absolutely tiny, and I couldn’t just leave it there, so I got out of the car with the hoodie that’d been sitting on the passenger seat, and spent ten minutes talking softly to it and waiting for it to get on top of the hoodie so I could pick it up.
Yes, I pissed off a lot of drivers. No, I didn’t feel guilty about it. And the reason I waited for it to get into the hoodie was that I was afraid if I just scooped it up, it’d run into the traffic and get squished.
Once it was snuggled up, I tucked it in and sat it on the passenger seat and headed to the pet store. All was going well with my impromptu plan until I felt a sting on my arm and looked down just as a black dot jumped. The thing was like a freakin’ Olympian.
“You’ve got fucking fleas? Aw, come on! I saved your damn life and gave you my favorite hoodie, and you repay me with fleas?”
I was not only going to get flea shit for it now, but I was also going to have to buy a bug bomb or something for my car. And don’t even get me started on the temperature I was going to have to wash the hoodie at. Did my mom’s machine boil wash clothes?
Pulling into a spot in front of the store, I pulled my cap lower when I recognized the car next to me as the one who’d had to reverse and pull into the other lane at the traffic lights, all the while yelling obscenities at me. Then, picking up my flea assassin, I went into the store with it under my arm.