Wrapping Up (Mitchell Family #4.5)(2)
Author: Jennifer Foor

Noah walked up to me and kissed me. I noticed right away that his lips tasted like bubble gum. “Wow, someone just brushed his teeth with superhero toothpaste.”

He opened his eyes wide. “How did you know that, Mom?”

I grabbed him in for another hug. “Because Moms know everything.”

Noah stood there with wide eyes. He went running up to the bathroom so fast that I couldn’t help but know he had done something. By the time I got into his bathroom, he was flushing the toilet. He turned to face me, but put his hands behind his back and looked down. “Noah, what are you doing?”

He shrugged his shoulders but wouldn’t answer.

“You better start talking, young man, or I will have to get your father.” Threatening to get Colt was like telling him that Santa wasn’t real. It was devastating.

“No, Mom, please don’t tell Dad.” He looked down and shook his head. “I accidentally dropped a couple marbles in the toilet.”

I walked over to the toilet and looked inside. Sure enough, at the bottom of the toilet were at least twenty marbles of all different sizes. Since the toilet was still running, I knew he had already flushed it.

We both leaned in and took another look. I turned my head toward my son as he turned to look at me. “So how many did you get to flush?” He shrugged again and I watched his face turning red. “Where is the bag that was full of marbles?” I asked because I knew I couldn’t figure out how many were missing. He had just got a bag of thirty new ones at the store with his grandmother.

Noah pulled the bag out of his pocket and right away I knew it was empty. I grabbed it out of his hand anyway.

“Noah, where are the rest?”

He took his index finger and pointed in the toilet. Without speaking I looked in the toilet again. Half were already down the drain. I shook my head. “Why did you put the marbles in the toilet?”

“It was an accident.”

I put down the toilet seat and sat on it. “Noah, this wasn’t an accident. If it was an accident then the bag would be in the toilet too. I think you dumped the marbles in there. You better start telling me the truth right now.”

“I was just trying to get the underwear to flush. I thought if I put the marbles in the water they would help the underwear go down the drain.”

Oh shit! He flushed his underwear. Wait! What?

I heard Colt cussing from downstairs and I got up to see what the fuss was about. He was standing in the laundry room as brown liquid was coming out of the drain of the utility tub. I put my hand over my mouth, knowing exactly what was going to happen next. “The septic is backing up. We need to call the guy to come out and get this fixed. Don’t turn on the water at all until I can get someone out here.” The smell of fecal matter filled my pregnant nostrils and I immediately wanted to vomit. “Didn’t we just have the tank cleaned out a few months ago?”

I held my nose. “Yeah.”

“Well, what the hell could be causing this backup?”

A pair of underwear and a pack of marbles……..

“I’ll call the septic guy.” I hurried out of the room before he could ask me any questions.

“We need to get this fixed before everyone shows up; otherwise we will need to move Thanksgiving back to Mom’s house.” Colt’s words made me sad. This was my first time making dinner at our house. The whole family was coming and I was so excited about it. The last thing I wanted was to have to move dinner because of a drain problem.

Since I knew that the family was coming in the morning, I had to find a septic guy that could fix our problem immediately. Just one accidental flush and we’d be looking at new carpet. I was mad at my son, but I was also afraid of what his punishment was going to be once his father found out what he’d put down the drain.

Once I got a hold of a company, I went into my son’s room and found him pouting on his bed. “Are you going to explain to me why you flushed a pair of underwear down the toilet?”

“I heard you saying that you had all of the laundry in the house done, so when something bad happened, I just flushed them.”

“Something bad? What are you talking about, child?”

“I sharted.” Now, I wasn’t sure what was more shocking. The fact that my child said the word or that he knew what it was.

“You what?” I just needed to hear it once more, in case I was losing my mind.

“I sharted and got poop in my underwear. I didn’t want you to be mad at me.” He looked down at his bed and traced the fabric. “It wouldn’t go down, so I put the marbles on it to make it heavier.”

“Stop saying that word, Noah. That isn’t a nice word.”

He looked really afraid. “Are you going to tell Dad?”

I threw my hands up in the air. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, the whole family will be here tomorrow and you have now clogged up all of the drains with marbles and underwear. There is no telling how much it is going to cost us. Why would you do something like that? You know better and who taught you the word ‘shart’?”

Some little kid at school was really going to pay…

“Uncle Ty.”

Chapter 2

Colt

After paying out the ass for someone to make a service call after hours, to unclog my son’s underwear from our plumbing, Noah sat on the couch waiting for me. He knew he was in deep shit and refused to even look at me.

“Son, why would you do something like that?”

He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

“Look at me when I’m talkin’ to you.”

Noah looked up, but was still sniffling from when the serviceman came inside with a pair of little boy underwear and a handful of marbles. He knew right there, his secret had been revealed. I could have guessed as much. Christian was too small to flush a toilet and Savanna and I would never have done something like that.

“Noah, you just cost your mother and I a lot of money. I just want to know why you chose the toilet. Why didn’t you just throw them in the trash?”

Savanna came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. “He didn’t want us to know that he had an accident.”

An accident? He was almost six years old. “Was he sick to his stomach?”

Savanna held her hands up like she had no clue why he’d done it. We both looked over at Noah. “I wasn’t sick, I just sharted.”

“Sharted? What the..? What is a shart?” Apparently I was getting too old for all these new terms.