Ratio(93)
What she got in return were four big brown eyes looking back at her.
“Okay, what should we do first?”
“We eat our lunch first,” Koemi, the older one said.
“And you eat too,” Ruka said.
“Mommy say make you eat.”
“Oh really?”
She collected the empty juice boxes and tossed them away. She wasn’t even close to being hungry, but needed to find a way to get the girls to eat later.
“Big news!” June said, trying to break the ice with her nieces that were normally much more raucous. “I have ice cream for later.”
“We can’t have ice cream…” one said soberly.
“No sugar…”
“Makes us wiggle…”
“And no juice after dinner…”
“We don’t sleep good…”
“Might wet the bed.”
“I see,” said June, doing her best to suppress a laugh at the tennis match dialogue. “Well, we better follow mommy’s rules, huh? But right now I have a big, big surprise!”
“Mommy gave us homework,” Koemi said. Her legs swung back and forth as she sat on the dinner chair, getting close to returning her sister’s kicks. “Read the books first before we play.”
“Oh? You go to school now?” June asked, repositioning the girls’ chairs further apart.
“Mama gave us books to read.”
“Wow! Can I see one?”
Ruka scampered off to a guest bedroom to where their knapsacks sat on a bed. She returned a moment later with a stack of kids’ books.
“These are my new books…”
“Mine too!”
“Oh, so cute!” June said, slowing flipping through the first book, something with comical pictures of animals speaking in short sentences to each other. “You’re big girls, learning to read now.”
“Just little words,” Koemi mewed in a tiny voice.
“We can write our names.”
“We’ll practice later, okay? I have lots of paper to use.” June looked at the next book, something that looked familiar from her distant past. “These books are so cute!”
She gave them both a book and asked if they could read something to her. While they picked through colorful pages, June put Amy’s new number into her phone, labeling it only as ‘new’. Once the girls had read what they could, June tried again to spring her surprise on them.
“Guess what?” she asked, looking back and forth between them. “Auntie has a big surprise!”
They looked up from their books.
“There’s fish in the pond!”
“Yellow fish?”
“Of course!”
Both the girls jumped down from their chairs and bolted for the back garden.
After feeding the goldfish in the small backyard pond, June worked the energy out of them with several games of hide and seek. Counting to ten one last time, June slipped the phone out of her pocket and made a call.
“What’s wrong?” Amy asked as soon as she answered.
“Nothing. Everything is fine. I just wanted to check the number is all.”
“Did they eat?”
“In just a few minutes. Right now it’s hide and seek.” June heard the girls giggling from their hiding places not far away. “They’re learning to read already?”
“Just stick the books in front of them if they get bored. If you want, you can read the stories to them. They like bedtime stories these days.”
“I heard about the ice cream rule.”
“Give them sugar after dinner and they won’t conk out till dawn.” Amy laughed. “And you really don’t want to give them something to drink in the evening.”
“Unless they find it themselves. But hey, who’s the guy?” June asked, still trying to pry information from her sister, the real reason for the call.
“We’ll talk later, ‘kay? Bye!”
The call ended abruptly.
“You rat…”
June pretended she was surprised when she found the girls in the same hiding places. All three had gotten bored with the game, so they turned back for the sliding patio door that led into the living room.
Just as June looked up, she stopped and grabbed the girls.
CHAPTER THREE
June pulled the girls back and hid them behind her. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded, focusing her eyes dead forward.
“New friends,” a man said. He had a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask over his head.
Standing just outside the patio door, he raised his arm, a pistol in his hand. Two other men in rubber masks raised their hands, also with guns in their grips.
“What the…”
The man posing as Ronald Reagan fired a shot, the aim somewhere past June. The little girls shrieked. June pushed them down onto the patio floor, crowding them under her slender body as best she could.