Trouble With Twins

IT'S ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE the dawn had to be one of the stupidest expressions Melissa Theisen knew. She'd worried and raged her way through plenty of middle-of-the-night blackness lately, and when the birds started chirping to announce dawn, she never felt brighter or better. She merely felt one day closer to the edge. She watched as early morning light crept through the drapes of her Lakeview, Washington, home until she could make out the shapes of furniture in her bedroom. Her mahogany dressing table, and the matching chest of drawers empty of Stephen's things. The smooth expanse of quilt on his unslept-in side of the king-size bed. The crack in the ceiling above her head. Was it her imagination or was that crack expanding? Giving up on sleep, she rolled out of bed and padded downstairs to put coffee on, showered while it brewed, then sat at her kitchen table sipping the first steaming mug while she read over the letter once more. Stephen was two months late on child support payments. Worse, he'd missed his weekend visits with the kids. But not until she'd received the letter from the bank yesterday had she suspected the depth of his betrayal. From the midst of the careful, corporate wording, the wordforeclosurejumped out at her like a skeleton leaping out of a closet. Oh, they weren't foreclosing quite yet, but the threat was there. Not only had Stephen stopped paying her, he hadn't paid the bank mortgage, either. Ominously, he seemed to have disappeared. A year after her divorce, she accepted that he wasn't coming back. But he'd never abandon his own children. Would he? The naive part of her wanted to believe that something had happened to him. The cynical side wasn't buying that for a second. Draining her coffee mug, she rose and assembled the ingredients for oatmeal raisin muffins. It was part of her morning routine now, along with baking homemade bread--without a machine, thank you very much. As though knocking herself out to be the perfect homemaker could balance Stephen's role as the home breaker. The counselor she'd seen briefly after the separation had told her she was overcompensating for the lack of a father in her children's lives. So what? She liked baking. The activity soothed her and gave her some measure of control over the mess of her life. Not that she was fooling herself that a few muffins and a loaf of butter-crust whole wheat could make up for a missing dad, but she had to work with what she had. By the time she woke the kids, the smell of comfort food filled the kitchen and she was dressed for the day. She had to shake eight-year-old Matthew twice to get him to wake up. "Morning, sleepyhead," she said, smiling down at his sleep-pinkened cheeks and the one skinny leg sticking out from under the duvet cover patterned with vivid insects. He groaned and rolled over. "Hi, Mom." Knowing he wasn't fully functional until he'd been up for a few minutes, she ruffled his hair and left him with a reminder to make his bed. "Fresh muffins," she said, glancing back. "Your favorite." Then she stepped into her three-year-old daughter's room. Alice, like her, was a morning person. Fully awake, she sat in bed and chattered to her stuffed dinosaur. With the mixed herd of stuffed animals and dolls in her bed, she could amuse herself for hours. "Mama," she cried, holding out her arms. After a big smacking kiss for her daughter, Melissa performed the morning ritual of greeting the animals and dolls before helping her baby to the bathroom and then getting dressed. Alice was in a pink-and-purple fashion stage. Even at her tender age she was fussy about what she wore. Dresses were preferred, in pink and purple, obviously, but they also had to be good spinning dresses. If a dress didn't bell out when she twirled, well, what was the point? Already, Alice was enrolled in tiny-tot ballet and had decided she was going to be either a dancWarren, Nancy is the author of 'Trouble With Twins ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373713905 and ISBN 0373713908.