"Not fallen, exactly. More like arranged, I guess you'd say."
The attendants glanced at each other. The man said, "Perhaps we could have a word with your son."
"He's downstairs playing video games," I offered. They exchanged glances again. As if playing video games was not typical behavior from a boy who supposedly had just found his father dead at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe they didn't have kids, couldn't understand.
"You see, I was just goofing around," I said. "It's about their backpacks. They leave them at the top of the stairs -"
"You tripped on a backpack?" the woman attendant asked.
"No, but I could have. That was the point I was trying to make."
Angie was watching from the door to the kitchen, smiling while she ate a small bowl of ice cream. The ambulance attendants were finally persuaded that I had not been injured, nor had anyone else at this address. They returned to their vehicle, but not before warning me that if something like this ever happened again, they'd report it to the police and have me charged with mischief or making a fake call to 911 or something along those lines.
I went back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. "Dan?"
"Yeah?"
"I guess it's too late to catch her. Listen, sorry, really, it's just a big mix-up." The receiver was back in its cradle only a second before the phone rang. I snatched it up.
"Yeah?"
"Zack! Oh my God! Zack! I've called a hundred times. What's happened?"
"Sarah, everything's okay. Just calm down. Absolutely everything is okay. I'm fine, the kids are fine, everybody's fine."
"But Paul called, said you'd fallen down the stairs, that you weren't moving -"
"I know, I know, but it was really just a misunderstanding. I was just lying there, that's all."
"Just lying there?"
"Basically."
Sarah was quiet at the other end of the line for a moment. "You're telling me there's no emergency whatsoever."
"That's right!" I tried to be cheerful.
"So I'm getting written up right now for running a red light for no good reason."
Angie, who wasn't able to hear everything her mother was saying to me but knew from my expression that it wasn't good, whispered, "You want me to ask the ambulance guys to come back in half an hour? You might need them after Mom gets home."
I told Trixie that was the end of my story. She had another cookie and looked at her watch. "I really should get going. I've got to get changed."
"You look great," I told her. I waved my hands in front of me, drawing attention to my own jeans and six-year-old souvenir T-shirt from a trip to Walt Disney World when the kids were much younger. "That's the bonus of working from home. It doesn't matter how you look."
"But you don't have clients coming to the house," Trixie said. "I do."
"Hey, thanks for those tax tips. I write off some of the kitchen now, too, in addition to my study, since I make my meals here. And my model kits. If I'm writing sci-fi, I should be able to deduct a model of the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, right?"
"Absolutely." She was on her feet now.
"So what should I do?" I asked her. "To make it right with Sarah?"
"You could start by not acting like such a jerk," Trixie said. "It's a wonder Sarah didn't give you a spanking."
I chuckled. "She'd probably be afraid it wouldn't be an appropriate punishment, that I'd like it too much."
And there was the tiniest twinkle in Trixie's eye.
o o o
There was one small part of the story I didn't tell Trixie. After The Backpack Incident, when Sarah got home and showed me her ticket (a fine plus points), we had to go to Mindy's, a grocery store about five minutes from our place, to pick up some things for dinner. She was going to go alone - I think she actually wanted to go alone - but I thought it would be better if I tagged along and attempted to be helpful. Try to smooth things over a little bit. Maybe explain why I did what I did. That my motives were honorable, even if things didn't quite work out the way I'd planned.
Sarah dropped some bananas in the cart's child seat, next to her purse. "You do this kind of thing all the time," she said. "You're always telling us what to do. Don't leave the stove on, check the batteries on the smoke alarm, don't drink the milk after the expiration date, don't leave the front door unlocked, make sure the car's locked, make sure you put the steak knives in the dishwasher with the points down so no one slits their wrists when they reach in -"
"That's a good rule," I pointed out. "Remember that time you got cut?"
"Don't overload the circuits, make sure -"
"Okay, okay, but that's all good advice. It's just commonsense safety stuff. I mean, I could have fallen down the stairs, and I could have broken my neck. The fact that I didn't, that's a good thing. It's really the happy ending to this whole mess, if you want to know the truth. Remember how mad you got one day, throwing their backpacks down the stairs? I think the kids learned a valuable lesson today without there having to be an actual tragedy."