Even though we hadn’t always (okay, ever) gotten along, I considered Debbie a loving and hands-on mom, especially given the fact that she’d had all three of her babies at the same time, without the aid of fertility drugs. Multiples ran in Debbie’s family. She had an older cousin who’d had two sets of triplets, also naturally.
One might think this would have served as a warning to Debbie to use protection, but the opposite was true. Debbie was completely opposed to all forms of pharmaceutical products, including birth control—to Brad’s everlasting chagrin—and vaccinations, despite Jesse pointing out that because of people like her, preventable (and potentially deadly) diseases like measles, mumps, and whooping cough were on the rise again in the state of California.
Debbie didn’t care. She was convinced that keeping Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail (my nicknames for my admittedly adorable but somewhat high-spirited stepnieces) drug and vaccine free was the right thing to do.
Although I didn’t agree with her (and wasn’t sure how long any school, even the Mission Academy, would keep accepting her bogus “health exemptions” from her quack doctor), in a weird way I admired her fiercely protective—if misdirected—maternal instinct.
Except that this latest tiff between her and my stepbrother over the subject had resulted in a communications gap so vast that neither of them had remembered to retrieve the girls after school. That’s how I’d been forced to corral them into the backseat of my embarrassingly dilapidated Land Rover, then take them with me to the hospital when I’d heard the news about Father Dom.
Hospitals are the last place you’re supposed to take children—especially ones who haven’t had their vaccinations.
But what other choice did I have? I had to see Father Dominic as soon as he got out of recovery. They’d decided it was best to operate on his hip right away, as the “accident” he’d allegedly suffered at the Walterses’s home had completely shattered it.
So it was to St. Francis that the four of us went.
I’d realized belatedly what a horrible idea this was not only when Mopsy opened her mouth to ask, “Why is your car so old, Aunt Suze?” (it had been in the family for ages until I’d inherited it, and there was no point in my buying a nicer car, since it was only going to be abused by my terrible driving, the triplets, and, of course, mediation-resistant spirits), but when she’d followed that up by declaring, in the hospital lobby, that Father Dom was going to die.
Even worse, the redhead at the hospital’s main reception desk turned out to be someone new, who didn’t recognize me as either Jesse’s fiancée—I’d been to the hospital many times to visit him during his breaks—or a member of the clergy and therefore “family” of Father D’s, and so wouldn’t tell me the exact extent of his injuries, how he was doing, or which floor he’d been taken to.
“Look,” I said to the redhead, pointedly ignoring Mopsy, the most outspoken of Brad and Debbie’s daughters, “I get that you can’t give me any information about what room Father Dominic is in for privacy reasons. But can you at least tell me his status? He was supposed to have been out of surgery an hour ago.”
“I really couldn’t say. It’s against hospital policy.”
The redhead—her name tag said to call her Peggy—didn’t even glance at me. All her attention was focused on my stepnieces, who look like total angels to strangers, especially when wearing their school uniforms. In their matching navy blue plaid skirts, white short-sleeved blouses and knee socks, and French braids Debbie insisted on twisting their hair into every morning (which, by the end of day, like now, were always destroyed, looking like dark, wavy mushrooms around their cherubic faces), they resembled mini-Madonnas.
What they actually were was little hellions.
“Oh, my gosh, are you girls triplets?” Peggy said to them from her imitation mahogany tower. “You could not be any cuter!”
The girls ignored her, as they did everyone who asked if they were triplets, then commented on how cute they were. Flopsy poked Mopsy.
“Old people don’t die of fractures.”
“Yes, they do. Mommy’s grandma died that way.”
“Grandma’s not dead. We saw her on the first day of school, remember? She gave us stickers.”
“Not Grandma. Mommy’s grandma. Mommy’s grandma is dead from a hip fracture. Remember? She told us.”
Mopsy kicked Flopsy. “Shut up!”
Mopsy kicked Flopsy back. “You shut up!”
Flopsy screamed at the top of her lungs, causing everyone in the waiting room to look at us.
“If you both don’t shut up,” I said, “I’ll make you go sit in the car.”
“You can’t do that, Aunt Suze.” Cotton-tail was the practical trip. “Mommy says it’s against the law and if you do it again, she’s going to tell the police on you.”
Peggy overheard this, and stared at me in horror.