Forgetful
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Be Not Forgetful free porn video
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers
This is not a stroke story and takes a long time to get to what action there is. The title is from the King James version.
*****
I knew there was no good reason to open the door. The knock was weak, the way it was when someone figured I wasn’t home, or maybe that I wasn’t going to answer anyway. I wasn’t up for company, no matter who it was. I suppose I really hadn’t been for the five years since I’d married, then divorced, Jack.
This was my place, a three-bedroom split level a little out of the way. I didn’t even get little darlings trying to sell me Girl Guide cookies. The kid down the road sometimes came by when he needed some money and figured I needed some chores done. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t manage for myself – I’d made sure of that before I bought the place – but there were times I was just as happy to let him do it. Mowing lawns or getting the wood in can be invigorating, but their seductive lure dissipates pretty fast on repetition. Besides, I like to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit.
There was a faint tapping at the door again. Why whoever didn’t just try the doorbell I didn’t know. It hadn’t worked for six months, but I didn’t think too many people had figured it out yet. Then a muffled thump, as if someone had decided to try a knee or a foot, but only had so much room and couldn’t get a good angle. I gave up, and went to open the door. I pulled it in. No one there. I started to close the door, but slowly, as I was puzzled. There was no sign of anyone running off.
‘Excuse me, we’re down here.’ It was a high pitched voice coming from the vicinity of my navel. I looked down. Couldn’t help myself. There on my top step was an urchin, maybe five or so, short, thick blonde hair, delicate features. Boy or girl I couldn’t say. He or she was carrying a life-size baby doll, and had what looked like all their worldly goods in a green vinyl diaper bag. The doll gave an uncomfortable snort, and moved.
‘I know Ceel is just a newborn, Miss, but she’s heavy. Can you please take her?’
‘That’s a very realistic doll, Miss – perhaps you’d better tell me what to call you.’
‘Sorry. I’m Tabitha Hunt. You can call me Tabitha, if you’d like. This is my sister Celia. I know I called her Ceel, but I really shouldn’t have, you know.’
‘Fine. I’m Amelia Princeton. Is Celia your best friend?’ I suppose some remnant of the child psychology course I’d taken four years ago was coming back to me.
‘My only friend, more like,’ Tabitha muttered. ‘Miss, I mean ‘Melia, could you please take her before my arm breaks?’
I reached down to take the doll from the little one’s protective arms. I must have done something alarming.
‘No, Miss, you’ve got to support her head. She isn’t old enough to do that for herself yet.’
‘Okay. Is this better?’
‘Yes, that’s good.’
I reached down to carefully take the doll away from young Tabitha. I almost dropped the bundle as I picked it up. Sure, dolls could be made to cry, and to move, even to wet, even to weigh seven or eight pounds, but I didn’t think doll technology had made it to the creation of the sort of smell Celia was emitting just then. I rewrapped my hands around the newborn.
‘She’s real!’ I squawked.
‘I thought you needed to find that out for yourself,’ Tabitha growled. ‘Can we come in?’
‘May,’ just jumped out of me. That year teaching had had more effect on me than I sometimes allowed for.
‘MAY we come in?’ Tabitha gave the correct word far too much emphasis. I suspected that she’d been corrected before. More than once.
‘Yes, certainly, make yourselves at home.’
Now that she was not encumbered by the baby, Tabitha turned back to retrieve a bag at the foot of my driveway. Apparently there was more in the way of worldly goods than I’d guessed, though not much more.
I took the baby in, trying to be extra careful, not at all sure what I should be doing. Something about changing diapers, I expected, though I had no idea how I was supposed to do that. Besides, however attractive poor little Celia was, that smell was not something I wanted to get closer to.
Tabitha came back in with her burden, closing the door behind her. She made her way to the kitchen table, where I was holding Celia.
‘Eeew,’ she commented. ‘We’ve got to change Celia.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I volunteered bravely. ‘Will you tell me what to do?’
Tabitha looked at me strangely, her feelings compounded of equal parts relief at not having to face what her sister had just produced and disgust that a mature adult had no idea of how to change a baby.
‘Okay. To start, you need a flat surface to put her on, and not somewhere you plan to eat one day.’
That had us scurrying around the house, frustrated by the absence of suitable surfaces, until we agreed to put an old towel in the bottom of the bathtub. Tabitha had explained that while usually they used a changing table, on occasion her mother had changed Celia on the bed. Tabitha didn’t think much of that, especially when it had been her bed, and apparently they didn’t have anything like a rubber sheet to put under her. Of course, neither did I.
Tabitha helped me extract some of the necessaries from the diaper bag.
‘Here’s a new diaper, and a wipe. You got somewhere to put this stuff?’
‘There’s a bucket right here, and I’ll set it outside on the porch afterwards.’
‘That should work.’
‘Maybe it will keep the raccoons away.’
Tabitha laughed, more than the weak joke deserved, and I got a glimpse of a happy child overburdened with responsibilities. I didn’t push. That would be for later.
Once I had Celia lying down in the bathtub, suitably cushioned, I undid the diaper. I slid a clean washcloth under her, to protect the towel, while I tried to delicately toss the mess her old diaper had become into the bucket. Tabitha handed me a wipe to help clean up the mess. Poor little Celia’s bum was red and seemed sore, but generally her skin looked flawless and she seemed well cared-for. More questions for later.
‘She hasn’t got a penis, you know,’ Tabitha volunteered.
‘That would make her a boy. No boys here, Tabitha,’ I muttered as I continued the clean-up.
It took more than one wipe, and by the time I was done I thought maybe I needed a bath and, mercifully, my olfactory responses had toned down. I was about to replace the diaper when Tabitha reminded me that if there were any sores I needed to put some cream on. Fortunately for my first venture into baby-minding, there were no sores.
‘Then you just need some powder.’ She handed it to me. I was already convinced that there was no bottom to the diaper bag.
We finished up with Celia, who had started to wiggle and make sweet little noises, but now started to practise a full-throated scream.
‘I think she’s hungry,’ Tabitha whispered into my ear, likely the only way to communicate given the interference. She rummaged and found a bottle, half full of something.
‘It needs to be warmed up.’
Back to the kitchen for a few minutes, and then Tabitha showed me how to feed Celia, holding the bottle to make sure the baby got no extra air, and then burping her afterwards. It would have been an exhilarating experience if I hadn’t been so scared. I’d pretty much given up on having any of my own children.
Celia calmed down and dozed off right away. I slipped her onto my bed and then raided all of the beds and sofas in the house for pillows to build a wall around her to make sure she couldn’t fall off.
‘You could just put her in a box with a blanket, you know.’
‘I’m sorry, but I recycle, and I don’t have a box big enough.’
I sat Tabitha down with a glass of something cold.
‘Okay. Now it’s time to tell me what’s going on.’
‘What do you mean, ‘Melia?’
‘Just why are you and Celia
here? Why were you standing on my doorstep with no one around? And why mine?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, tell me what happened.’
‘I think it started when Mommy came home from the hospital with Celia. That was sometime last week.’
I nodded, encouraging her to go on.
‘Mommy was teaching me about caring for my sister, keeping her clean and that sort of thing’ – it occurred to me that Tabitha was a very old five-year-old, if that’s all she was – ‘and what she ate and keeping her safe and all that stuff.’
‘Is that why you’re so good with her?’
‘Maybe. I like to think I’m good with her because I love her.’
I hugged her close.
‘I think that’s why, too, honey.’
Tabitha and I just enjoyed the moment of closeness. My brief marriage hadn’t been blessed with children. Jack hadn’t wanted any. I hadn’t had enough confidence to defy him, and I suppose I’d been ambivalent about it. The thought of cursing a child with Jack for a father was certainly a deterrent. Cuddling up with Tabitha made me face the fact that I hadn’t been ambivalent, I’d been a coward. And it had destroyed my marriage. At least my side of it. Mind you, it had been a marriage made in hell and simple destruction was too good for it. At least I knew what I wanted now. But with someone else. And that wasn’t too likely.
‘Come on, honey, keep going.’
‘It’s more fun to hug, ‘Melia. I never did that at home.’
‘Never?’
‘Not very much. Mommy was too busy, and none of my uncles ever wanted to.’
‘We’ll get back to that. How about I hug you while you tell me what happened. You were helping your mother with Celia . . . ‘
‘Yes, I was, and Mommy said I was a big help, too.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Well, we were changing Celia and Uncle Paul – I think this one was Paul – came upstairs and told Mommy he was off, leaving, goodbye.
”One kid I can handle, sometimes, if I don’t see her too much. Not two.”
‘Not a very nice thing to say,’ I offered.
‘Not much different from the others, I don’t think. Anyway, this upset Mommy and she started to cry and then she got a funny look on her face and she told Paul that welfare paid extra for an extra child and Paul told her that she didn’t need the children or welfare and wouldn’t need welfare if she didn’t have the children but he wasn’t going to take her if she had the children so what did it matter.’
‘You make any sense out of that?’
‘Just that he didn’t want kids. I didn’t want him, so it made no difference to me, but Mommy was unhappy.’
‘What next?’
I was enthralled with this child’s matter-of-fact recitation of the facts that had led to her being dumped on a stranger’s doorstep and abandoned. Was she trying to bury her anguish? If so, she was doing a damned fine job of it, and one day not too far away she was going to explode. She made me want to be there when it happened, to pick up the pieces and try to put together one wonderful child.
‘She told Paul that she could try to palm the kids off somewhere but she really needed the money. ‘Listen, Mona’ – that’s my mom, and he was trying to convince her to give us up, I think – ‘forget the money. You come with me, you can make more in a night than the welfare gives you for a month.’ So then she says to give her three days and she’ll figure out what to do and he said okay.
‘Then it got to be today and Mommy packed my bag and Celia’s diaper bag and Paul drove us here and left us and told me to knock on the door and some old lady would take us in and we’d be fine, or maybe not. Oh, ‘Melia, there’s a letter I’m supposed to give the old lady. Paul said it might make her more inclined not to throw us back out into the street.’
‘Tabitha, do I have this right, that you’ve been dumped on my doorstep so your mother can run off with this creep Paul unencumbered by her children?’ I shouldn’t have used unencumbered, I know, too rare a word for a small child to understand, but maybe she’d figure it out from the context.
‘Yes.’ She said it in a very small voice, the first sign of true emotion I’d seen from her yet.
‘Lord.’ I was showing a little more emotion.
”Melia, can I see the old lady now? I need to ask her if we can stay for a night or two.’
‘Child, this is my house. You need to speak to me.’
‘But ‘Melia, you’re not an old lady. You’re young and you’re pretty and you’re nice.’
‘Thank you, Tabitha. I suppose Paul has the wrong house or remembers someone who lived here several years ago or doesn’t care.’
‘Doesn’t care, ‘Melia. He just wanted us gone. Mommy didn’t seem to care, either. They didn’t even wait to see if you were home.’
I could see tears shaping up here. It might not be so bad. It would doubtless be good for the child to cry some. It had been a few years since I had dealt with crying children regularly, but I doubted the basic techniques had changed any. However, the tears hadn’t come yet, and they weren’t showing up just now, either. Poor child.
”Melia, even if it’s the wrong house and you aren’t an old lady, can we stay?’
‘Certainly. I’ll have to call child welfare on Monday, though. In the meantime, we’ll have to get food for you and Celia and a few other things, I suppose.’
‘The diaper bag is nearly empty.’
‘I wondered when it would run out.’
‘We’ll need diapers and wipes, too.’
‘Shall we go wake up Celia?’
‘Well, maybe you’d better read the letter Mommy gave me for the old lady. And I don’t like child welfare I don’t think.’
‘Ever have anything to do with them?’
‘No, Mommy just said. They came by sometimes, but Mommy wouldn’t let me talk to them and there wasn’t anything obvious like blood on the floor so they didn’t pry.’
‘We’ll find out if there’s any reason not to like them, since it has to be done. I certainly can’t keep you.’
‘You sure?’
‘I think so, yes.’
Tabitha’s little face fell, almost the first sign of what had been a definitely nasty time. I couldn’t bear it. Not after everything she’d been through.
‘Of course, I could be wrong.’
Tabitha lit up like the switch had been turned back on. Manipulative little witch. We all do what we have to do to survive, I suppose.
‘Show me the letter.’
She handed over a creased and dirty envelope that was still sealed.
‘Did you read this?’
‘No, I don’t read that well yet, and Mommy’s handwriting is terrible.’
I opened the letter and read a heart-rending story of a mother, dying of cancer, who sent her children out into the world to save themselves even as she drew her last breath. It was good.
‘You know, your mother might have made a big buck with this story.’
I read it to her.
‘Those are Paul’s words, I think. I heard him telling Mommy what to write, but I thought she’d stick a little closer to the truth.’
‘No reason to, I suppose. Do you have any other relatives? Grandparents? Uncles or aunts? Cousins? A father?’
‘Not that I know. Mommy never said. I never had a daddy. I don’t think the uncles that came around were real uncles. Even Uncle Paul isn’t a real uncle.’
‘No, I imagine not,’ I muttered. Child welfare might find someone if they did a little digging, but I didn’t think it would help. It wasn’t as hard to believe that a child could have no one who cared for them as it should have been. I’d seen it before, when I was teaching. It was one of half a thousand reasons I’d had for abandoning the profession. It hurt too much.
I decided I’d better feed poor Tabitha before we went shopping. Fortunately, there were a couple of all night stores in the neighbourhood. It was still only late afternoon but I didn’t think shopping with two young girls was going to be simple and I didn’t want to force Tabitha to hurry. I was still suspicious of that failure to cry. The child was far too self-possessed, given what h
ad happened. A thought occurred to me.
‘Tabitha, just how old are you?’
‘Five going on six. I think.’
‘Do you go to school?’
‘Of course not. It’s summer. I start in the fall.’
Oh good, another problem. It was fall, September 15, in fact. Now I had an abandoned truant on my hands. That would be a problem for child welfare, I supposed. After all, it wasn’t as if I could keep them, no matter what I’d told Tabitha.
Shopping with Tabitha was an interesting experience. We’d managed to find something I could put Celia in. Fortunately, she was an extremely placid child. Likely that would change, but for now she was so young she just wanted to eat and sleep. That and be clean. We had to change her again before we went out, and that used up the last diaper in the bag. Wonderful.
The strange part about the shopping was that while Tabitha knew everything that was needed, for such a seemingly sensible child she always wanted to buy the most expensive brand, usually in the most expensive sizes. Not necessarily the best. Never in a decent quantity. And never on sale. I’d squeezed out a few minutes to do a little on-line research, so I had a few ideas starting out. The best rated diapers (if you weren’t going for cloth) were the second cheapest going, were frequently on sale, and were much cheaper in large packages. I insisted on getting them, much to Tabitha’s disgust. The same was true of powder, and house brand baby oil (which the internet had told me was the same stuff as the most expensive brand) was a lot better deal, especially in a large bottle. I followed my nose, and the freely offered advice of the other mothers in the store, and let Tabitha determine what we bought, but not which brand or quantity. Afterwards, I counted it up and I’d saved more than a quarter of the cost. It might have been closer to half if I hadn’t let Tabitha talk me into the high end wipes, but even I could see there was a difference.
Celia wasn’t on solids yet, and I didn’t think she would be for quite some time, so we bought formula. There’s a way to make it at home, but I wasn’t going to experiment with a baby I’d only have for a couple of days. I found a basket that would do for a bed and bought some bedding to make it comfortable. It was hugely oversized, since my mother had once told me that I’d grown like a weed in my first two months. Better allow for it.
Tabitha was easy to please about food. I was a bit of a stickler for proper nutrition, and I wouldn’t have dropped a nickel on tinned spaghetti or any of its clones. I was a little surprised that she didn’t insist. As it turned out, she was heartily sick of the stuff, since it had been breakfast, dinner and supper for as long as she could remember, at least when the meal hadn’t been some other kind of noodle. I was amazed that she hadn’t turned into a pasta blob. I gave her fresh tastes, which she adored, though she hated mushrooms.
I had to make three trips out to the car when we got home. The giant economy size packages I’d picked up were mostly too big for Tabitha to help with, though she tried. Once everything was inside, Tabitha and I spread it all out, just to get an idea of what we had. Who knew one baby could require so much! I knew I had more than enough for the two or three days I expected to be stuck with the two of them, though I couldn’t have resisted the price difference for quantity if I’d been bound and gagged. Then it was time to feed Celia and change Celia and I wondered if what we’d harvested would last until Tuesday.
Tabitha and I scraped together a supper, mostly out of leftovers, which she seemed to enjoy, even the salad. Then it was time for a bath and bed. Tabitha was surprised by the bath, though she wasn’t resistant. She was dirtier than I’d expected. She had given me the impression that she was a fastidious child. We found a nightie in her bag, but it was so dirty and torn I couldn’t let her use it. One of my T-shirts, way too large, of course, would have to do. There would be more shopping tomorrow, I thought. Celia, fortunately, had cleaner clothes in better condition, buried in the bottomless diaper bag.
Tabitha tagged along when I started a wash for everything she’d brought, except her doll. She actually volunteered ‘Mrs. Sweet’ for the laundry once I explained that clean clothes meant fewer germs, which would help keep Celia healthy. She took in the mini-lecture like she was Louis Pasteur discovering the germ theory of infection. I had it repeated back to me several times. I began to suspect her of a very subtle but strong sense of humour.
Oceana
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