Stacie felt her phone buzz as she juggled her groceries and the keys to her apartment. She tilted her wrist so she could read the text message as it lit up her smartwatch, and as she did so, the carton of milk tipped out of her bag, hit the floor, and started spurting milk all over the hallway.
Stacie swore as she grabbed the milk carton to prevent it from spilling any more milk, then danced around on her tip toes to avoid getting the milk on her new, brown suede boots. Fortunately, the hallway floor tilted slightly away from her door, so she managed to hop over an arm of spilled milk to a narrow space of floor right in front of her door, turn the key and get into the apartment. Now, all she had to do was get the groceries into the kitchen before the milk carton dripped all over her carpet, then get back into the hallway to mop up the floor before her neighbor across the hall noticed she had made a mess.
Stacie hurried to get the first task done, then ran out into the hallway with two fistfuls of paper towels just in time to see her neighbor open her front door and look with horror at the mess Stacie had made. “Sorry, Jennifer! I’m cleaning it up now.” Stacie did her best to ignore Jennifer’s scowl as she mopped up the spilled milk.
Once the mess was clean, Stacie decided to look at the text message that had caused all this trouble as she was throwing away the milk-soaked paper towels. It was from her sister, and it said, “We need to do something about Aunt Sabrina”.
Stacie groaned. Aunt Sabrina was their ancient maternal aunt who lived in Nowheresville, Iowa. Having never married, nor had kids of her own, she lived alone in the house she and Stacie’s mother had grown up in. She always insisted she was fine, and Stacie believed her, but trust Stacie’s sister to think otherwise.
Stacie decided she needed a drink before she could have this conversation, so she fixed herself a cosmo before curling up in her favorite spot on the sofa and calling her sister.
“What took you so long?” was her sister’s way of answering the phone
Stacie sighed heavily as she debated answering the question. She decided to leave it at, “My hands were full. What’s up with Aunt Sabrina?”
“I just got off the phone with the hospital down there, and apparently she had a fall and managed to give herself a concussion.”
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“How did that happen?”
Stacie could practically hear her sister shrugging over the phone line. “She’s old. Old people fall. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she was outside when it happened, her neighbor never would have seen the fall or insist she go to the hospital. Knowing Aunt Sabrina, she never would have gone on her own, and then she’d be dead. So, someone needs to go down there and take care of her until she’s back to full strength.”
“Which will be never.”
“Probably.”
“And by ‘someone’, you mean me.”
“I would go if it weren’t for the kids.”
“Why is it that I always seem to get punished for not having kids?”
“Why is it that I always seem to get punished for having kids?”
Stacie didn’t have a reply to that, so she glared at the phone for another minute as she mustered the willpower to say, “Fine. But I’m taking your car.”
“Deal.”
To be continued…