3) Guests must be gone by noon on Saturday. No exceptions.
Felix glanced over at the three boxes of pancake mix sitting in the middle of the kitchen island. Could he pull off pancakes and bacon for six when he’d never cooked them for one? The mix came in a box labeled “just add water!” How hard could it be? He pulled out another index card, Saturday’s to-do list, and wrote: make test batch of pancakes while boys sleep.
Back to tomorrow’s list:
Get up at 5:30
Shower
Make Harry’s breakfast
Pack Harry’s lunch
Although really, Harry should be able to do those last two himself.
Drive Harry to school
Come home
Do a load of laundry
Go to Harris Teeter and pick up birthday cake
Clean the powder room
Hoover
Tidy up
Should he have hired Merry Maids? Ella had told him to not clean beforehand but merely “clear the decks.” Which made him intensely nervous that (a) people would be coming into an unclean house and (b) that he somehow needed to protect his possessions. Would they break furniture? Not use coasters? Sneak illegal substances into his house as easily as Katherine had?
He should probably stop by Pizza-To-Go on the way back from Harris Teeter. Meet with the manager and confirm that yes, they could indeed deliver four large pizzas at 7:30 p.m. (Should he have taken care of this yesterday?) Felix kept writing: Stop at Pizza-To-Go
Put soda in fridge
Put candy in bowls
Had he bought enough soda? Should he have provided more choices for the kids? And when Harry said put out a few bowls of candy, how many did he mean? This was so unlike work, real work. This was the great unknown of vagueness, and it came without explicit instructions.
Felix got up, freed the stopper of his cut-glass decanter, and poured a healthy shot of Macallan. He went back to the sofa and added hide the alcohol to his list.
So many possibilities for disaster. And suppose Harry didn’t have a good time? Suppose his guests didn’t have a good time? Shouldn’t there be more organized activities? Suppose the loo got clogged from overuse and he had to call Dickie the plumber on a Friday night? Suppose the kids stole the Mini for a joyride around the neighborhood? Did teens en masse devolve into mob mentality?
This whole event was ludicrously unstructured. The only definite was pizza at seven thirty: two cheese, one pepperoni, one Hawaiian. Although why anyone with half a brain, even a teenager, would choose to eat anything as disgusting as Hawaiian pizza was incomprehensible.
Felix pulled out the Pepto-Bismol bottle, unscrewed the top, and swallowed two pills with a chaser of single malt. A hive of stinging bees had surely taken up residence in his stomach. If only it could be this time tomorrow. No, not tomorrow, since there would be six large, smelly teenage boys camped out in the bedroom down the hall. This time on Sunday, then, with the house quiet and Harry asleep. When Harry was awake, the house was littered with the perennially half-finished: a glass of orange juice left on the island for two hours; soda cans moved to the sink but not rinsed out and dumped in the recycling; dirty crockery left on the counter and not scraped, rinsed, washed, and slotted in the dish rack to dry. (Felix refused to use the dishwasher. If he had his way, they wouldn’t have one.) The ghost of birthdays past hovered—the good old days when Ella organized extravaganzas for twenty children at a local museum and never once lost her cool.
Two more days until Ella came home and life could revert to the way it was supposed to be. The way it had always been. Well, not quite. He would still have to chauffeur Harry around and drive Ella to medical checkups and then rehab. Do the supermarket run and be the errand boy. So not exactly the same as before. In fact, nothing like before.