Run for Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

had to worry?
    Where was Maeve, to tell me in her sweet but no–nonsense way exactly how much of an idiot I was?
    Chrissy’s hacking, crushed–glass cough sounded as loud as thunder to my ears, but when she tried to talk, her voice was just a weak whisper.
    “I want my mommy,” she cried.
    So do I, honey, I thought, as I did the only thing I could think of, cradle her in my arms. I want your mommy, too.
     
    Chapter 8
     
    “Daddy?”
    The speaker was my five–year–old, Shawna, watching me from the kitchen doorway. She’d been following me around all morning, a faithful lieutenant delivering frontline dispatches to a doomed general. ‘Daddy, we’re out of orange juice.’ ‘Daddy, Eddie doesn’t like peanut butter.’
    I raised my hand in a wait gesture as I squinted at the microscopic Sanskrit on a bottle of children’s cough syrup. Which patient was this for? I tried to remember. Ah, yes, Chrissy. One teaspoon for somebody two to five years and under forty–seven pounds, I managed to decipher. I didn’t have any clear idea of how much she weighed, but she was four and normal size, so I decided to go with it.
    “Daddy?” Shawna inquired again, as the microwave timer behind me started beeping like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. Between tending to the sick kids and getting the well ones ready for school, our household had now apparently entered DEFCON 3.
    “Yes, baby?” I yelled above the din, now looking around for the medicine bottle’s plastic measuring cup, which had gone AWOL.
    “Eddie’s wearing two different–colored socks,” she said solemnly.
    I almost dropped the cough syrup and collapsed in laughter. But she looked so concerned that I managed to keep a straight face.
    “What two colors?” I said.
    “Black and blue.”
    Finally, a no–brainer. “That’s okay,” I said. “Cool, in fact. He’s a trendsetter.”
    I gave up on trying to find the measuring cup — it could be anywhere on the planet by now — and started looking for an alternative. My roving gaze landed on my oldest son, Brian, eating Cap’n Crunch at the kitchen table just three feet away.
    “Hey!” he said as I snatched his spoon out of his hand.
    “All’s fair in love and especially war,” I said, drying the spoon off on my bathrobe.
    “War? Jeez, Dad, I’m just trying to eat breakfast.”
    “Slurping works pretty good with cereal,” I said. “Try it.”
    I was tilting out the dose of cough syrup when I noticed that a pregnant silence had taken over the kitchen.
    Uh–oh.
    “Well, good morning, Mike,” Mary Catherine said behind me. “What do you think you’re doing with that spoon?”
    I tried giving her my warmest smile while I groped for an answer.
    “Uhh — a teaspoon’s a teaspoon, right?” I said.
    “Not with medicine, it’s not.” Mary Catherine set a shopping bag on the counter and took out a fresh new package of Vicks children’s cough syrup. “This is what civilized humans use,” she said, producing the bottle’s plastic measuring cup and holding it up.
    “Daddy?” It was Shawna again.
    “Yes, Shawna?” I said, for the thousandth time that morning.
    “You’re totally busted!” She ran away down the hall, giggling.
    Busted or not, I didn’t think I’d ever been so glad to see anybody in my life as I was to see Mary Catherine just then.
    “You take over the brain work,” I said, and picked up a vomit pail. “I’ll go back to swamping.”
    “Right,” she said, pouring the dose of cough syrup carefully into the cup. Then, impishly, she offered it to me. “Care for a shot of this to brace you up?”
    “You bet. Neat, with a beer back.”
    “Sorry, too early for beer. But I’ll make some coffee.”
    “You’re a miracle, Mary,” I said.
    As I squeezed past her in the tight kitchen aisle, it suddenly struck me that she was a very warm and lovely miracle. Maybe she read my mind, because I thought I saw her start to blush before she turned hastily away.
    She’d