Death Gets a Time-Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

need me to do?”
    I waved in the general direction of Ruby and Isaac.
    Half an hour later, when I’d finally managed to splash some cool water onto my face and stagger out of the bathroom, I found the children sitting in front of the TV, eating hotdogs. They were wearing shorts and T-shirts, and their hair stuck out in tufts all over their heads.
    “Hotdogs?” I asked my husband.
    He shrugged and said, “Dinner-for-breakfast.”
    “Shorts? In the middle of winter?”
    “Hey, they insisted. When they freeze, they’ll get the message that they should listen to their father when he suggests warmer clothes.”
    “Hair?”
    “Ruby said it’s ‘Bed-Head Day’ at school.”
    “What, did Congress make Bed-Head Day a national holiday while I was in the bathroom? They go to
different
schools. How can they both possibly have Bed-Head Day?”
    I went to the kids’ rooms, yanked a couple of pairs of sweat pants out of the drawers, and shoved my squirming progeny into them. I wiped off their ketchup-smeared faces and dragged a comb through their matted heads of hair. I gave up on Ruby’s curls, and just crammed the mass of red under a baseball cap. Then I went into the kitchen. I was suddenly famished. I riffled through the refrigerator and finally settled on some chocolate pudding packs I’d bought for lunchboxes.
    “Sweetie?” Peter said.
    “What?” I mumbled with my mouth full of pudding.
    “Should you really be eating? If you’re sick?”
    “I’m starving.”
    “I don’t think you should be eating that if you’ve got food poisoning or a stomach flu. How about some clear soup?”
    Soup? Soup! “I’m
famished
,” I insisted, and then we stared at each other.
    “Oh my God,” he said.
    “No. It’s not possible.”
    “You’re throwing up. And you’re hungry. At the same time.”
    “It’s just not possible. It’s the fish from last night. I’m sure Beverly Hills is lousy with vomiting studio executives this morning.”
    He shook his head. “But you’re
hungry
.”
    “Look, I’m just not going there. It’s impossible, and that’s that,” I said, and called out to the children to get in the car so that I could drive them to school.
    “Hey! That’s
lunch
pudding!” Isaac hollered when he came into the kitchen.
    “Don’t worry. I put some in your lunchbox,” Peter said.
    “But she’s eating lunch pudding
now
! In the morning!” He stood, hands akimbo, exuding the indignation that had lately become his specialty.
    “Don’t be stupid, Isaac. It’s dinner-for-breakfast, remember?” Ruby said, rolling her eyes in disgust. “He’s so dumb!”
    “Stop calling your brother names!” I scolded around my spoon. I stuck my finger in the plastic cup and scraped up the last of the pudding.
    “But that’s
lunch
pudding!” Isaac said again. “Not
dinner
pudding.”
    “Oh for God’s sake,” Peter snapped, and stomped off in the direction of the bedroom. I forget sometimes that he isn’t familiar with our regular morning routine of aggressive bickering. By the afternoon, when school’s over and I’m no longer trying to rush them out the door, they’ve usually mellowed into a somewhat more manageable whining squabble.
    Ruby complained the whole way about a boy in her class, Jacob, who had been picking on the girls. She had me worked up into a fit of righteous maternal indignation, but when she described how Jacob had trained spiders to attack the girls, and one of them had bitten her friend Malika so badly that her eyeball had to be removed, the kid lost me.
    “The thing about lying, honey, is that people stop trusting you,” I said, trying to sound schoolmarmish rather than irritated.
    “I’m not lying.”
    “C’mon Ruby.”
    “I’m not. I’m being
creative
.”
    I snorted and was about to blast her when a thought occurred to me. Wasn’t that basically what her father did for a living? Made stuff up? After a while I said, “Maybe you should just
warn
us when you’re being