Read Family Counsel (The Samuel Collins Series Book 2) for Free Online

little old lady.
    “Mrs. Howard!” Oliver exclaimed, hugging her around her legs. 
“Max threw up and I slipped in it.”
    “Oh my. Is he better now?”
    “Yeah,” said Oliver.
    “Guess what I have in my back yard?” Mrs. Howard exclaimed like
she had just remembered, then she answered before either of us could guess.  “A
mama fox and her babies!”
    “A fox?” I said skeptically.  “Are you sure it’s not a coyote?”
    She looked at me like I was an ignoramus. “I call her Foxy
Mama,” she said, without dignifying my question with a response.
    “Can we come see ‘em?” Oliver asked.
    “Well sure,” she said.  “Go get Max and you boys can come with
me.”  
    Oliver and Max took off with Mrs. Howard, and Morgan and I went
to retrieve them after she woke up from her morning nap. Sure enough, there was
a fox, not a coyote, with her four babies, playing in the back yard.
    “They’re called kits,” Oliver informed me. “Baby foxes are
kits.  And look, Tag and her babies are here too!”
    Before my arrival in the Park, the Town had started trapping
deer and moving them to ranches to control the numbers in the herds. One doe
that was carted off to a near-by Army training facility made her way home with
a red ear-tag still intact. We took to calling her Tag.  Tag had been having her
babies in Mrs. Howard’s back yard every year for more than a decade, and she
was back there with her twin fawns, alongside the family of foxes. Between them
and the birds hanging out around Mrs. Howard’s bird feeders, it looked like a
bona fide wildlife sanctuary. 
    “The boys tell me you have a new cat,” said Mrs. Howard.
    “Not by choice,” I said.
    Mrs. Howard patted my arm.  “Two cats are no more trouble than
one,” she asserted.
    “Oh yeah?” I said, looking around.  “Well I notice you seem to
be lacking in the cat department. Why don’t you take it?  Every little old lady
needs a cat.”
    “Are you saying I’m old?”
    “You’re missing the point.”
    “Come on,” she said, turning me toward the house. “I’ve got
some chocolate we can eat while you take a look at my leaky faucet.”
    “Leaky faucet?  But what about the cat?”
    “And I’ll take that precious baby while you fix the faucet,”
she said, reaching for my kid.
    “And I’ll take your complete indifference as a no. ”
    Toothy grin.
    I filled in Mrs. Howard about the weekend activities while I
fixed her leaky faucet. All in all, things had improved immensely after the
first day. There was no more vomiting; no more cat turds; Black Cat had settled
in like she’d lived there all her life; and even the Siamese was keeping his
hissing and growling to a minimum.  In terms of action, we didn’t see much.  I
turned down Niki’s offer to go for drinks.  I did manage to get some things
done around the house while Max and Morgan napped, but everything required two or
three times as much time and effort as it should have, depending on how many of
my kids were awake.  I decided that practicing law was a breeze compared to
child rearing.  Full-time fathering was exhausting. 
     
    My bride arrived home that evening right in front of a huge
storm system that had been making its way up from Mexico.  According to the
weatherman . . . excuse me, the meteorologist . . . that kept breaking
into my TV show, the storm had dumped six inches of rain in neighboring
counties over the past two hours and carried with it tornadiccells.  Tornadic
cells?    I love it when professional people make up words.  I made up a
word in a brief one time – philanderacious – and the judge actually
called me on it in a footnote of his opinion, but it didn’t stop him from
ruling in my favor. 
    The first sprinkles were just starting when Maddie came in, and
the four of us went out to greet her.
    “Whale hello all of you!” she exclaimed, giving us all a
collective hug.  “How did it go?”
    “It was great,” I said.  Now that she was home