“Take it easy,” my sister pleaded. “I know you want out of here. I know you’re afraid to give up control of the situation, and I get it. I do. But you need to let them go. Let’s start with one. Just one. Let one of them go, and I’ll give you what you want.”
“It won’t stop bleeding,” Delia cried.
Vero gripped my hand. Her lip trembled.
“It’ll stop soon, Delia. I promise.” There was an undercurrent of tension in my sister’s voice, as if she was barely holding it together. “It’ll be okay. But right now, I need to help your brother.”
Zach cried out. I couldn’t take it anymore. I tore out of Vero’s arms. With shaking hands, I grabbed the key from the top of the doorframe, jabbed it into the lock, and threw open the door, my chest heaving.
Vero slammed into my back as I lurched to a stop. Zach’s cries fell abruptly silent, and three heads turned to look at me.
“Hey,” Georgia said with obvious relief, “I didn’t hear you come home.” My sister sat cross-legged on the floor in front of my toilet, an open bag of fruit snacks in one hand and a single orange gummy held aloft in the other. Zach perched on Delia’s old potty training insert in front of her, red-faced and furious.
“What’s going on in here?” I asked through ragged breaths.
“Potty training,” Georgia said proudly. Zach whined, teetering on the knife-edge of a tantrum as he grabbed for the fruit snack Georgia held out of reach. “Nope. I told you, buddy. This is a negotiation. You don’t get to make any demands until you drop me a deuce.”
“What’s a deuth?” Delia asked.
I followed the red trail on the floor to my bathtub. Delia’s head peeked out from a mountain of pink-stained bubbles. “Look, Mommy!” She flashed me a wide, gap-toothed smile. Her tongue poked through the bloody space where her front teeth used to be. “I loth’d my teeth!”
I sagged, holding myself up against the counter as Vero doubled over laughing behind me.
“What?” My sister scowled at us. “What’s so funny? I read all the potty training blogs. This is how you’re supposed to do it.”
Vero snorted, clutching her chest and rubbing tears from her eyes. She pulled it together long enough to pat me on the shoulder. “I’ll get the carpet cleaner and the Magic Eraser.”
“Where’s Aimee?” I pulled Zach off the potty seat as Vero went off in search of cleaning supplies. He squealed like a pissed-off pig and wriggled out of my arms, waddling out the door after Vero, an angry circle imprinted on his butt.
“You just missed her,” Georgia said. “She got a phone call a few minutes ago. Tore out of here like her hair was on fire. Must have been an emergency.” She rose stiffly to her feet, peering into the empty toilet. With a disappointed shake of her head, she popped the fruit snack in her mouth.
Exhausted and numb, I dropped to my knees beside the bathtub and planted a kiss on Delia’s suds-covered head. “What happened to Delia’s teeth?” I asked my sister.
“She got tired of wiggling them and decided she didn’t want to wait for them to fall out on their own. Aimee was busy making the popcorn. I was up here with Zach. We didn’t see Delia tie her teeth to the pantry door and kick it closed. She nearly gave Aimee a heart attack with all the screaming and the blood. It’s a good thing I was here. I don’t think Aimee could handle the gore.”
An anxious laugh bubbled out of me. I hauled Delia from the bathtub and wrapped her in a towel. “Those teeth weren’t ready to come out, sweetie. Why would you do that? That must have hurt.”
She blinked up at me as I rubbed a towel over her hair. Her tongue poked through the hole where her teeth used to be, making all of her s’s sound like a lisp. “Vero thaid it’th not enough to want thomething. She thaid you have to make your own luck. Now the tooth fairy ith going to come, and I’ll get two hundred dollarth.”
“Two hundred dollars?” I laughed. “I don’t think the tooth fairy carries that kind of cash.”
“But I need it to help Vero.”
“Why does Vero need help?”
“I heard her talking on the phone. She thaid if she can’t get two hundred, she’ll be in big trouble.”
My face fell. “What kind of trouble?”
“A man got really mad at her becauth she lotht a marker. I told her she can have my purple one becauth I don’t like purple, but she thaid that won’t help. She needth a really big one.”