The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(63)

I still find time to text Levi once or twice an hour.

And when I bring Hudson home after his morning preschool, I find my entire kitchen coated in squirrel-footprinted flour, two made-with-love-but-not-talent pies cooling on the oven, tampons scattered about the living room, Zoe wailing along to one of her new favorite songs, using a pretend microphone as she shows off her best Waverly Sweet impersonation, and Levi sitting on a white sheet in the middle of it, sporting fairy wings, while Piper paints his fingernails purple.

I can’t decide if I’m horrified or absolutely, completely, positively in love.

Confession: Part of me asked him to come back so my girls could one day tell people about the time Levi Wilson, international pop god, babysat them.

Other confession: I think this is both the stuff of nightmares and better than my wildest dreams.

Why are my tampons all over the living room?

“Skippy!” Hudson yells.

He bolts for the squirrel, who’s sitting on top of the bookshelf, chewing on a tampon that’s still in its wrapper, and starts to climb the shelves like a monkey.

“Don’t move!” Piper shrieks at Levi.

Zoe stomps a foot. “Ugh. Now I have to start my song over.”

“Hey, Ingrid,” Levi calls. “I can’t move. The couch is lava and my force fields to cool it aren’t dry yet. Smart move bolting those bookshelves to the wall.”

Giselle’s sitting at the dining room table. “I told him not to leave the pies on the counter with the squirrel loose, but he doesn’t pay me for my wisdom.”

“Mom, did you know Levi knows Waverly Sweet?” Zoe bounces on her toes. “And if you say yes, he’ll text her a video of me doing her song. Say yes, Mom. Say yes.”

“Your cuticles are really bad,” Piper tells him. “But not as bad as Mom’s when she had toe fungus.”

I follow Hudson and grab him before he can climb the shelves. “Thank you, Piper. We don’t talk about toe fungus with strangers.”

“Levi’s not a stranger, Mom. He’s Captain Lava-Man, and he knows how to sign all the bad words in the dictionary.”

His eyes go wide, and he twists to look at me. “She asked if I knew them. I didn’t demonstrate. Cross my heart.”

I sign learn better signs before traipsing around the living room, shoving tampons into my pockets, trying to figure out how to say both thank you and so I’m officially mortified out of my mind and understand if you want to bail on me forever without my kids catching on to the warring emotions battling in my head and my chest.

“He also knows how to sign please pass the mashed potatoes and who let the dogs out?” Piper beams at him.

“I got bored on the plane,” he reports.

“Please pass the mashed potatoes?” I repeat.

“And hungry.”

I start to laugh, but—Oh my god.

Piper’s using my wedding dress as the towel covering the floor to keep nail polish off the carpet.

I stifle a whimper.

Does Levi know he’s sitting on my wedding dress?

It’s white, but it wasn’t traditional. Linen instead of satin and lace. Curve-hugging, because my shape was cute, curvy, and perky back then, as opposed to droopy, saggy, and one-too-many-pints-of-Ben & Jerry’s now. I should’ve gotten rid of it when Daniel left, but I probably thought I already had.

Hudson was only a few months old. Zoe had just started kindergarten, and Piper was still adjusting to her hearing loss, as was I. Thinking was less at the top of my mind than surviving.

Leave it to my girls to find it and slice it up for a tarp.

And sliced it is—the jagged edges are fraying, which suggests this wasn’t something they did today.

The streaks of various colors of nail polish across it indicate they’ve had it a while.

Both my girls go suspiciously quiet, then each point at the other. “Piper found it!”

“Zoe cut it!”

“You never wear it!”

“We needed a cape!”

Once again, I’m squeezing my eyes shut.

One… Two… Three… I didn’t have a positive emotional attachment to the dress, but it’s still my dress.

Four… Five… Six… “It’s fine. It’s fine. But don’t cut things up that you find in my closet.”

“It wasn’t in your closet. It was in Zoe’s baby blanket tub.”

“I told Piper we still needed to ask you first, but she already cut it with your nose hair trimmers.”

Seven… Eight… Nine… Ten.

Not quite enough, but it’ll have to do. “Have you had lunch?”

“Levi made us eat carrots.”

“Excellent. I have to get back to work, and I’m going to pretend I haven’t seen a thing up here, and ask next time. Also, do not let the squirrel in my bedroom.”

“But he was freaking out about the closed door, Mom. He has anxiety.”

“He’s a squirrel.” I snatch one more tampon out of the straggly sweet potato vine that Piper had to grow for school and that I forget to water all the time. “And he’s getting into things he should not get into while we have guests.”

I need to count to ten again.

“Did you eat?” Levi asks me.