Terry Essig - Distracting Dad

“Well, we can’t take care of business with my father breathing down our necks, now can we? The man is lost without Mom, lost. The way I see it, the only solution we’ve got is to find him some other interest in life besides me, his only son.” Nate sat up, his irritation with his partner’s obtuseness obvious.

“A wife, for example?” Jared asked.

“Exactly. Look. It’s obvious.” Nate picked up a marker and leaned to the side, writing on a large sheet of paper clipped to a tripod. “Look, we’ll flowchart it. Try and follow along.” He wrote the word father in large block type at the top of the paper and pointed to it. “My father.”

Jared rolled his eyes and nodded. “Your father.”

“Has been sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong, making us crazy on a daily basis since my mom passed away.” Nate drew a dash down from the word father and wrote Nate and Jared.

“I still don’t think the fireworks were that bad an idea.”

“Shut up. Dad needs something to distract him from us, right?”

Jared nodded. “Okay. Distractions can be good. That would probably work.”

“He needs a woman in his life. He never bugged me like this when Mom was around. She kept him occupied.”

“I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully of the dead, but your mom was nuts,” Jared pointed out, stating what he thought to be the obvious. “Keeping her out of trouble was a full-time occupation for your father.”

Nate shrugged. It was the truth. “Mom distracted him, see?”

“Uh-huh. So we make this list of available women and this helps us…how? Exactly how do we get them together?” Jared waggled a finger admonishingly. “And no force allowed. Shotgun weddings went out a long time ago.”

Nate waggled the marker right back at his partner. “We’ll worry about that part when we get that far. Think about it. This makes perfect sense. Somebody we know is bound to have an unattached female relative of the right age somewhere in their family tree. We just have to find her. Once we accomplish that, we sic her on Pop. Women are supposed to be naturally nurturing, right? She’ll be all over him, cooking him wholesome dinners and stuff like that. He won’t be able to resist. She distracts him, see? Then he leaves us alone. Easy.”

Openly snickering at his buddy’s logic, Jared asked, “Naturally nurturing, huh? I don’t know about that. I’ve been out with one or two that would probably eat their own young.” But he gave it some thought. “You, um, really think this will work?”

Nate reached for the coffeepot that sat on a warmer on one side of the table. “Damn straight.”

Jared held out his coffee cup. “Okay, if you say so. Now, who goes on the list? And don’t say my mother. I don’t want her tangled in your nutty schemes. Then she’d start driving me crazy.”

Nate took a cautious sip of hot coffee. “No, your mother’s out. I’ll admit I thought about her, but I don’t think she’d put up with my father’s antics. Doesn’t she have any unmarried sisters or anything?”

“No.”

“Not even one?”

“No. God broke the mold after creating my mother.” Jared folded his hands together and raised his eyes piously. “Thank you, God.”

Nate slumped in his chair. “Okay, all right. Who do we know who does?”

The two men sat, marking the highly polished conference tabletop with fingerprints as they drummed their fingers and thought.

Tentatively Jared offered out loud, “Anne Reid brought in brownies the other day. She must have a mother.”

Nate snorted. “They were awful. Her mother probably taught her everything she doesn’t know about baking and Dad’s an old-fashioned kind of guy. He’d never go for a woman who couldn’t bake.”

“All right, I tried. This is your problem, you think of somebody.”

“Our problem,” Nate corrected. “Remember the contract? I can’t concentrate until we take care of this.” Nate gave Jared a mean little smile. “And just so you know, Dad’s signed up for a computer class over at the high school’s adult education program. He’s decided to help us with our books.”

Jared unstacked his feet and sat up straight, suddenly far more serious. “Fine. Mitzi Malone.”

“She was hatched, not born. Try again.”

The phone rang. Both men looked at it, then at each other. “You get it. If it’s my father, I’m not here.”

“You get it. It’s probably my mother.”

“Could be Sue Ann calling to tell you she can’t live without you. What if it’s a client?”

“They’ll leave a message.”

The machine did, in fact, pick up. Nate and Jared’s argument was broken into by a vivacious female voice. “Mr. Parker, this is Allison MacLord. I live in the condo just below yours? Please call me as soon as you get this message. There’s something leaking from your place down into mine. You’ve got a broken pipe or something. My bed’s soaked. I think you may have ruined my ceiling. Oh, ick, the carpet’s all squishy. You have insurance, right? My number’s 27…”

Nate snatched up the phone, and yelled into it, “What are you talking about Miss…whatever you said your name was? What’s leaking?”

Allison Marie MacLord held the phone away from her ear and blinked at it. One minute she’d been talking to a machine and the next a very vital, very vibrant, very forceful male voice. “Well, um, I don’t exactly know, Mr. Parker. I mean I just got home. My ceiling’s dripping, some paint’s already peeled and fallen, my mattress may never dry out and water’s welling up every time I take a step on the bedroom carpet. My feet are getting wet right through my shoes, which really makes me mad because I paid ten dollars for that water protecting spray they’re always trying to sell you at the shoe stores.”

Nate swore.

On her end, Allie grimaced. She hated confrontation. When the answering machine had picked up, she’d been almost relieved, except for the fact that leaving a message wasn’t going to stop the steady flow of…whatever anytime soon. “Mr. Parker? You are 3H, aren’t you? That’s what the mailbox says. Your next-door neighbor thought this was where you worked.”

Nate put his hand over the phone’s receiver. “Dad insisted my garbage disposal wasn’t working right the other night. God only knows what he did while he was crawling around under my sink.” He lifted his hand and spoke into the phone. “3H, yeah, that’s me. Damn it.”

“Um…” Allie sighed. This wasn’t going at all well. “Ah, I don’t suppose anyone around here has a spare key to your place?”

Nate dropped his head into his hand. “No. No spare keys.”

“You really should leave one with a neighbor, you know. What if you lock yourself out sometime? Then what would you do?”

“Miss M—”

“Allie. You should probably call me Allie. You did just destroy my bed, after all. You know, if you’d left a spare with a neighbor I could go in there for you and try to figure out what the problem is. Maybe call a plumber.”

Nate sighed. “What color is it?”

“What?”

“The…whatever that is dripping.”

“Oh.” Allie’s gaze drifted up. “It is, uh, kind of a very light brown.” It could be water simply picking up color as it passed through the beams over her head, but it could be something else totally. Yuck. “Ah, it seems to be picking up speed. I don’t know how much more my bed and carpet can absorb. If we don’t hurry here, it’s going to go down to the ceiling in 1H below me. If it hasn’t already—”

Nate swore again. “I’m on my way.” He threw down the phone and stood. “I’ve got to go. My father is singlehandedly destroying my entire building and something tells me he doesn’t carry workman’s insurance.”