TONY'S ANGELS: Chapter Three

"What's this business about The Flying Nun being too sexy?" were the first words out of his mouth when he rejoined Michelle in the kitchen.

"Not the nun, honey. That playboy, whatzhizname... who always flirted with her," she responded.

"What playboy?"

"The millionaire playboy. You know, the… the sexy Latino playboy. I'd like to keep them as innocent and free of all that stuff for as long as we can."

"Uhh… weren't those hopes pretty much dashed when Santa and Mommy got caught under the Christmas…"

"Yes, yes, please," she scowled, needing no reminder. "I told them it was a criminal impersonating Santa and that he was resisting arrest... Be sure to remember that."

"I was half-naked, honey..."

"Yes, because I was strip-searching you after you'd resisted arrest, okay?... Don't forget that. It's one of Georgia's favorite stories, so be sure to keep the details straight."

"Y'know, that kinda thing only encourages them to wanna become Feds, Michelle," he complained.

"They're not gonna be nuns, dear. I'm sorry… Really, I don't know why you persist in bringing that stuff home for them."

"Oh, they're gonna be nuns, all right… All of them," he firmly and confidently decreed, shaking his head in wholehearted agreement with himself. "Religious holidays are gonna be a big deal around this house someday..."

Michelle closed her eyes and shook her head in her usual amazement.

"Did Olivia end up becoming a nun?" she hated to remind him.

"Yeah, well... I made some mistakes with Olivia, okay? I admit that. I didn't... y'know, involve her early enough," he ruefully lamented. "They didn't have all this stuff on the internet back then, like… Ya can download nun coloring books now, y'know. And paper dolls…"

Michelle wanted to laugh, but was too absorbed in trying to visualize the type of clothing items a book of paper-doll nuns might contain.

"There's these auction sites, too, where ya can find...What the... What thehell are ya...?"

His words evaporated in mid-sentence, his feet suddenly seeming to momentarily freeze in their tracks as he stared at her in wide-eyed, dry-mouthed disbelief.

"Am I talking to myself around here, or what?" he demanded to know, abruptly changing topics and tone as he propelled across the room to where she stood, tiptoed, reaching for a stack of bowls inside an overhead shelf. "Didn't I just get through telling ya that I would take care of the heavy lifting?"

"It's four Little Mermaid bowls," she gently pointed out, having no idea what "reaching" and "heaviness" had to do with each other and very much doubting that he did either.

"You were on your toes, Michelle!" he roundly busted her, apparently convinced that toe muscles played a key and critical role in successfully retaining a fetus within the uterine cavity. "Do ya think I'm blind?"

Blind? No. Insane? There was ample evidence within this conversation alone to forego the requisite three signatures legally required to commit someone and throw away the key.

"Don't get yourself all upset, now, honey," she said in an even, soothing tone, waddling over to the open silverware drawer he'd abandoned when he'd made his Olympic-worthy dash across the kitchen. "It's Friday. We have a lovely evening ahead of us..."

"What do you think 'heavy lifting' means, anyway, huh?" he demanded with a frustrated scowl. "I'd love to know what goes on around here when I'm not home..."

"The gardener and pool boy are sworn to secrecy, so don't even bother," she grinned.

"I do the heavy lifting," he reiterated the rules, failing to see the humor in her statement. "Do ya think you could please just try to remember that? Geeziz..."

"I will," she ignored him with a warm smile, counting out the flatware and wondering if there was a weight limitation on how many spoons could be held in the same hand before qualifying as "too heavy" in the mind of a lunatic. "Tell me what finally happened with Hammond today, hmm? Did he ever get back to you?"

"Please… don't make me laugh," he grumbled, still thoroughly annoyed but working to pull himself out of it. "He's been wanting to merge those two departments for years. He's not about to sign off on an increase."

"Still, it never hurts to submit a formal request," she offered an encouraging word, feeling a familiar ache to be back at her station amid the thick of things. "At the very least, you're officially on record in support of shifting some manpower into..."

Her comments were abruptly placed on hold by the jangling of his cell phone. As he dug it out of his back pocket, she could feel her heart sinking at the prospect of his being called into the office, therein sending their long-awaited plans for the evening up in smoke.

"Almeida," he said into the mouthpiece, flashing her a comforting glance before checking his bare wrist, then the clock above the doorway, to see if the graveyard crew had yet to transition into their shift.

Lowering the burners beneath the pots, Michelle checked their levels against the hand-drawn chart he had made for her and taped to the wall above the stove years ago. From the corner of her eye, she anxiously watched his expression slowly morph from a frown into a confused squint, as though trying to either figure out who the caller was, or what was being said. At least that eliminated the likes of Hammond and a number of other work-related contenders, she took heart in safely deducing; he'd have instantly recognized their voices and would be barking, or at the very least, seething, by now.

"Uhh… I thought you agreed not to call me anymore," she heard him say in a low, terse voice, turning his back and taking a couple of safe-distance steps away from her. Michelle's eyebrows instantly leapt upward in reaction to the classic line nervously whispered into the phone by cheating husbands to the cheap, young chickies they kept on the side.

Knowing her marriage to be as solid as granite, she nevertheless gave the knob on her internal need-to-know mechanism a hard turn to the right, ratcheting up to an auditory level that generally only dogs could appreciate. As she busied herself burying the Little Mermaids in strawberries and cream, the eye in the back of her head watched him parking a hand on his hip and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, obviously going out of his way to exercise patience with the caller.

"Yeah, well, just bring it to me," he said, conspicuously efforting to keep his voice at a calm, controlled level. "I told you not to... No, just… Hang up now and just bring it to me... No, right now. Where are ya?" he asked, clawing his forehead for another silent moment, then angling his head in the direction of the doorway as Riley turned the corner and moseyed in with Michelle's cell phone pressed to her ear.

"... but my one, umm... It doesn't work anymore, Daddy," she continued her end of the conversation in a low, soft whine, coming to a halt and looking up at him with wide, innocent eyes.

"Yeah, 'cause ya... Hang up the phone," he scowled, clapping his own cell shut and stuffing it back in his pocket. "That's because ya got it all wet, like ya know you're not supposed to... Hang that up," he firmly repeated himself.

"I don't know how," Riley's tiny voice brooded into the mouthpiece, stalling another precious few seconds before having to see an end put to her foremost favorite pastime: talking on whosever phone she could get her hands on, to whomever answered whichever button she decided to push. Her list of respondents was a long and distinguished one, too, including such notables as the Secretary of State, the Deputy Director of the CIA, and the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who'd told her about the new kitten his grandson, Thomas, had just gotten for his birthday; the Director of Homeland Security, who at first had ordered the call traced and a police car dispatched to the house, mistakenly thinking she was in some form of distress, but with whom she'd gone on to hold a number of follow-up conversations, finding him to be a very nice man; Division Deputy Director Brad Hammond, who on the other hand had yelled at her and made her cry; the nice lady, Chloe, who could type and talk to her at the same time, and to whom she could wave if she stood on the lawn precisely at the time the satellite went by; the senior Senator from California, who'd gone to college with a man named Riley, although it was the man's last name, not his first; and her personal favorite, Mr. Fat, who took telephone orders at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away from her parents' office and could recite, from memory, precisely what each had ordered the last time they'd called in for a delivery.

"You knew how to turn it on with no problem, though, didn't ya?" he stoically challenged, cocking his head to the side and holding his hand out to her.

With lips in full-pout position, and a wounded-eyes expression that Michelle always said was identical to his own, Riley reluctantly stepped forward and relinquished custody of her mother's phone, then turned and marched toward the door with a deep frown, fuming that her fun had been completely destroyed after only her second call of the evening.

"Not so fast, you… C'mere," he summoned her back above the squeals and chatter now echoing from the staircase inside as The Pack made their way down to the dining room. "I want ya to stay away from the phones, y'hear me? They're not toys," he sternly reminded her, putting a stack of linen dinner napkins in her hands to carry to the table for him. "Ya call me if it's an emergency, and that's it," he reiterated the rules for the hundredth time as she turned the corner of the kitchen doorway and stormed away in a huff. "People better start listening to me, or I'm gonna start kicking some tail around here... I mean it," he added for good measure, with enough volume and bravado for the entire household to hear, which immediately raised concern in the dog, who got up and trotted away from a shoe she'd earlier come across in the garage.

Michelle tried hard to contain her laughter in response to his hollow threat, but half of it nevertheless managed to come snorting out of her nose.

That would be the day, she thought to herself: Tony Almeida was wholly incapable of raising a finger to his babies, much less "kicking tail." His only saving grace was the volume of his voice and the convincing manner in which he levied his threats, an art form originally studied at Quantico and perfected in CTU holding rooms. Fortunately for him, it worked beautifully on the girls, always stopping them dead in their tracks whenever he achieved a particular tone and tenor. With the grace of God, his luck would hold out through their teenaged years without their ever catching on that their tough-talking father — the guy with the gun — was nothing but a big, vociferous marshmallow who'd been tightly wrapped around each of their little fingers since the first breath of life they'd ever drawn.

"I mean it, Michelle," he blustered, following her into the dining room, holding a handful of dishes at his side, like file folders. "I'm tired of talking to myself around here…"

"Don't upset yourself, dear," she said, still snickering inside. "Could you carry in those strawberries from the kitchen, please? They have to weigh at least six or seven ounces…"

"Not funny, Michelle," he assured her, making his first of no fewer than five trips back and forth between the kitchen and dining room.

On his last lap around the table, now alive with its usual animated chatter, he filled glasses of milk while continuing to growl out varietal edicts, warnings, and complaints — among them, the size of the phone bill, with commentary on how he ought to own stock in the company, considering the amount of cash he poured into it every month — before finally settling down in front of a steaming heap of spaghetti with his name written all over it. Bless Michelle's heart: she might not know how to cook very well, but she knew how to make it hot.

"When are ya gonna tell us the surprise, Mommy?" Georgia whined from across the table.

Through a long, slow, pre-chowdown sip of his favorite Tuscan wine, he exchanged an eye-lock with Nalda, whom he had no trouble identifying this time, given the beaming, Cheshire-cat smile she sported in knowing silence.

"Later, honey. After we're done," Michelle said, taking a moment to lambaste her husband with her eyes for letting them know that a surprise even existed, therein assuring a dozen more suspense-filled questions and whine-laden pleas before dinner was through.

"What's the baby doing, Mommy?" Nalda wanted to know.

"Exactly what you should be doing right now — eating," Michelle replied.

"Wiss a fork?" Riley asked, her head snapping toward Michelle in dire curiosity, followed by Tony's head snapping at an equal or greater speed, only in alarm.

"No, with a special tube inside that goes right to the baby's tummy... Ask Daddy to draw you a picture later," she suggested, biting her lip to keep from giggling as she felt his eyes burning a hole through her head.

"Cookies!" Laura squealed, the first to lunge forward upon locking eyes on the platter at the center of the table, competing with her sisters to be the first to snatch a handful and crumble them atop the cream-soaked strawberries their father had laid out before each of them.

"Uhhh… I believe you've already had yours," Michelle mentioned to Riley, whose entire body was flat on the table by now — her way of making up for the advantage in arm length that her older sisters had over her.

The three-year-old halted in mid-reach and looked up at her mother, first with surprise and then with the creased, crooked eyebrows of a red-handed thief, caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar.

"Huh?" she nonetheless responded in complete innocence, stalling for time while she weighed the chances and likelihood of denying her earlier theft and actually getting away with it. No need to look to her father for help, as she generally would at a time like this; he was the one who had found the chocolate chips in her socks, after all, so the chances were slim that he'd back her in whatever excuse, plea, justification, or denial she might be able to come up with in the next few seconds.

Michelle maintained a fixed frown until Riley slowly withdrew her hand and backed her body off the table. Wasting no time in shimmying down from her chair, she marched toward her father with her head lowered, muttering something under her breath, exhibiting mannerisms so similar to Tony's that Michelle had to consciously corral a burst of laughter.

Silently and without assistance, or invitation, for that matter, Riley mountain-climbed onto her father's lap and positioned herself with her back to him, kneeling on his thighs and planting her elbows squarely on either side of his plate to balance herself.

"I'll have sketti," she looked up at her mother and announced, intent on putting a positive spin on her negative situation, though sounding more like a departing Jeopardy contestant, none to thrilled to be going home with a lame consolation prize instead of a suitcase stuffed with cash.

As her sisters snickered under their breath at her ill fortune, she picked up her father's salad fork and paused momentarily to blow hard on the steaming heap of pasta before digging in.

The briefest glance at Tony's expression forced Michelle to immediately look away, biting the inside of her cheeks in another gallant endeavor to prevent a blast of laughter from freeing itself.

"Can I, uhh… can I get ya anything with that?" he sarcastically inquired over Riley's shoulder as she stuffed her cheeks in angry silence, cooperatively tilting her chin upward for only a brief moment while he slipped his dinner napkin around her neck and tied it cowboy-style, hoping to spare himself the task of changing her into another nightgown, which would mean having to deal with a whole other set of microscopic buttons.

Resigning himself to sharing dinner, he went in for a quick forkful while Riley was busy sucking a long strand of spaghetti into her mouth, making a slurping noise that sounded like feeding time at the zoo.

"Mmmmm... good cooooooookies, Mommy," Georgia's tiny voice tauntingly cooed in Riley's direction, followed by the predictable triplicate chorus of hand-muffled snickering, successfully pushing the three-year-old's Almeida-Outburst button, genetically gifted to her from her great-grandfather, Pop.

"Quiet,thupids!" she roared, her tiny fist pounding against the table hard enough to make the wine gently rock in her father's glass beside her.

"Hey, none of that," Tony firmly corrected her, eyes flashing inquisitively over at Michelle to get her read on the over-the-top reaction.

"Your choca-holic gene, not mine," she conveyed to him with amused eyes, reminding him of the inherent risk to life and limb associated with denying Riley the substance she needed to feed the monkey on her back.

"You," he said, directing a controlled, though steely, no-nonsense voice at the collective Pack, "What did I tell ya about needling her like that?"

"Soooooooooorry, Riley," they robotically sulked out the mandatory apologies in a jumble of soft, sing-songy voices colliding into each other.

Riley said nothing, angrily refocusing her attention on her second dinner until a fingertip interrupted her, lightly tapping against her shoulder.

Knowing what was expected of her, she cocked her head to the side and thought for a moment before raising her eyes and glaring at her sisters.

"Thorry!" she yelled down the table, just as loudly as before.

It was Tony who struggled to maintain a straight face this time, watching the back of Riley's head promptly descend and her shoulders hunch up, muttering something indiscernible before resuming the task of consuming his dinner.

Her disposition and temperament so often reminded him Pop's. She was like a grouchy old man at times, born with the same short fuse as Pop — and himself, if he wanted to be honest about it — given to muttering under her breath whenever things weren't going her way. Still, little cranky quirks aside, he had always found Riley so much easier to deal with than the triplets, whom had overwhelmed him from the very start just by the sheer number of them all. Complicating matters even further was his wholesale inability, from Day One, to keep track of which was whom. Michelle, who'd never had a moment's difficulty telling them apart, even when their backs were turned to her, had tried to come up with ways to help him easily identify each, including a color-coded clothing system: Nalda, pink; Georgia, green; and Laura, violet. But it turned out to be a complete disaster, since he could never remember which name went with which color.

She then went on to assign them different gemstones, placing a corresponding bracelet on each of their wrists, and depending on the outfit, sometimes their ankles, as well — Nalda, ruby; Georgia, sapphire; and Laura, pearl. But she had to eventually abandon that system all together when he suddenly began calling them by their gemstones, since Ruby, Sapphire and Pearl were all female names as well. He himself then came up with what he thought was the perfect solution — getting rid of the color-code entirely and simply ordering a load of white t-shirts with their names printed large on the front and the back — but Michelle had promptly shot down the idea for reasons he still didn't fully understand.

Riley, on the other hand, was a breeze by comparison: there were no colors or gems to deal with, and only one name; plus, just to ensure that he remembered it, Michelle had suggested that he come up with it himself. So he had named her Riley after his favorite L.A. Laker's coach, Pat Riley, whom he adored. If ever Martians were to invade earth and force all men to marry men and women to marry women, he would marry Pat Riley, he'd explained to Michelle one night, who had needed a moment to wind down from laughing hysterically before asking him why, if that were the case, he didn't just simply go with "Pat," a name that was as much a girl's as a boy's. It had been the first thing he had thought of, too, but had instantly dismissed it, he explained, because it would've reminded him too much of Patricia Perelli, who had made his life miserable in the third grade, making eyes at him all the time, which his buddies never failed to torture him about.

"I don't wanna hear that kinda language coming out of you again. Understood?" he stated over Riley's shoulder in his firmest Dad voice, mournfully watching another spaghetti-twisted forkful leaving his plate.

"Yeth," she brooded in a quiet voice before shoveling it into her heavily sauce-encircled mouth.

Too hungry at this point to continue fork-sparring with her another minute, he hand-signaled the daughter closest to the cookies — whomever she was — to pass one over to him, immediately feeling Michelle's eyes fall upon him, frowning out a reminder that bad behavior shouldn't be rewarded. But he generously bestowed special dispensation upon himself this time, so hungry he could eat his own hand and failing to think of another way to get his dinner back without an ensuing barrage of tears.

"Why don't ya try just asking your mother if you can have another cookie... hmm? Did ya ever think of that? Maybe if ya asked a little more often, instead of just swiping them..."

Riley, in fact, had not thought of that. Her head shot up; her face illuminated; her salad fork hit the side of his plate with a clang. The man was a genius.

"Mommy?" she instantly turned and asked with her softest voice and widest eyes. "Can I has, umm... Mommy, I... Mommy, can I has another, umm... cookie?... Pleathe?" she threw in at the last second, remembering how thrilled her mother always got whenever she, or one of her sisters, would use that word.

"Well..." Michelle said with a contemplative sigh, her heart panging and her face washing over with a visible glow, "since you asked so nicely..."

She pretended to pause and think it over for a moment, leaving Riley dangling in wide-eyed suspense.

"And since you said 'please,' which you know I like to hear..." she continued, "I guess you can have just one more..."

Riley's face immediately reilluminated, snatching the cookie from her father's hand like a junkie going for a loaded crack pipe.

"What do you say?" Tony prompted her with another light tap against her shoulder, wondering if his words had even been heard above the feverish chomping.

"Sank you, Mommy," Riley invested a breath between chews to reply, though glancing up at her father as she did, sincerely grateful to him for having come through for her once again.

"Mommy, can't we just have a liiiiittle hint about the seeeeeeeecret?" Laura led the whine-off this time, compelling Michelle's eyes to once again land with a thud upon her husband.

"Just a little one, Mommy?... Pleeeease?" Georgia begged on the heels of her sister's request.

"You can tell them the first part," Tony took the reins and announced, nodding in Nalda's direction, whose face instantly took on a warm, beaming glow. "Just the first part, though... The TV part," he instructed her.

"Mommy's letting us stay up to watch Aunt Olivia on TV," Nalda breathlessly shrieked, greatly relieved for the opportunity to spill at least half her guts, knowing she would've otherwise burst at the seams if she'd had to hold the entire secret in for even so much as a second longer.