TONY'S ANGELS: Chapter Four

Freshly shaven and dressed in his most comfortable jeans, Tony stood hunched over the dishwasher, feeling a familiar kink settling into his back as he waited for the next daughter to step up with the next item to be loaded in.

"This is the one Riley ate bisketti with, Daddy," Georgia said in her soft, tiny voice, always announcing how each item had been used, and by whom, before handing it over to him.

"Thank you," he softly replied, making a mental note to ask Michelle if such announcements were considered normal.

While Georgia got back into line, her clone took possession of a teaspoon handed down to her by Nalda, whose turn it was to wear the apron and rinse each item from atop her perch on the step ladder.

"This one was Mommy's, but she didn't use it," Laura reported, not feeling any particular need to document each item herself, but nonetheless following her sister's lead.

"Thank you," he gently repeated, resisting the temptation to shoo them all out of the room and finish the tedious task twenty times faster himself. But he never had the heart to deprive them of their favorite nightly chore so resigned himself to seeing the ritual through to completion, utilizing the portion of his brain that had yet to go numb on him.

"What the hell is—what the heck is your mother doing up there," he thought aloud, wondering why Michelle was taking so long to get dressed.

"Daddy said a curse!" Nalda squealed with unbridled glee, abruptly dropping the spoon she was rinsing and scrambling down the stepladder.

In a flash, three hands were inside his pocket, battling to be the first to emerge with a quarter.

"Easy, easy!" he ordered, commanding them back a few steps with the point of a finger.

Withdrawing a handful of change, he distributed a quarter into the first two anxiously awaiting palms, and two dimes and nickel into the third.

"No, Daddy, a quarter!" Laura whined in a semi-panic, instantly eliminating any doubt as to which triplet he was dealing with. Laura was the most sensitive of the three and always the first to set off the waterworks at the drop of a hat.

Her quivering lip made his stomach clench, the same as it always did whenever Michelle was on the verge of tears. It never ceased to amaze him how similar they all were to her; not just in appearance but in the way they acted like her, too, with each of them seeming to have inherited an entirely different portion of her personality. It was as though it had been carved into thirds and divvied out among them, with Nalda receiving all the fearlessness, forcefulness, and leadership qualities of her mother while Georgia reflected her strategic-thinking and problem-solving side.

And then there was Laura: the walking Michele Sensitivity Center and embodiment of everything soft and sweet and gentle about her. Laura was his sniffler; his snuggler; his softie; the one who desired a little more one-on-one face time with him than the others; the one whom he had always found himself feeling a bit more protective of. Just as her mother had a way of making him feel vital as a man, Laura had always made him feel vital as a Dad. She never had to tell him that he was her hero; he knew by the way she would instantly seek him out whenever she felt the least bit threatened or intimidated.

And, just like her mother, Laura would grow up to become the premiere wedding crier of the three; of this he was certain, evidenced by the stream of tears preparing to plunge from her puffy eyes.

"It's the same thing. Look," he quickly explained, now in a semi-panic himself, scooping her up from the floor as deep, gut-wrenching sobs began to accompany the tears now cascading down her baby cheeks. Pulling a chair away from the table, he seated himself with Laura positioned sidesaddle on his lap. "Ten, plus ten, plus five. See?" he explained, pointing out the value of each coin in her hand, which she held straight out, and open flat, as though someone had crazy-glued radioactive isotopes to her palm.

Her clones looked on with worried, sympathetic gazes, glancing at one another, then down at their own quarter, as if psychically deciding who should make the ultimate sacrifice and offer it to their cheated sister.

"Riley!" he turned his head toward the kitchen door and hollered, cupping his palm over Laura's ear to shield it from his thunderous volume.

He waited until the ensuing patter of feet, interspersed with a few bunny hops, had come to a halt at the head of the stairs.

"Yeth?"

"Get a quarter outta of your mother's bag and bring it to me," he shouted, eyeing his most comfortable shirt, already heavily saturated with tears.

"Who's hurt," Michelle called down the stairs a moment later.

"Everything's fine, honey," he assured her at the top of his voice.

"Everything doesn't sound fine," Michelle called back, with suspicion. "Who's bleeding?"

"It's nothing. Just…nobody, honey. It's just a mathematical misunderstanding."

"A what?"

"Finish what you're doing up there, all right?" he called back to her, in frustration, watching helplessly as Laura proceeded to wipe her runny nose against his pocket.

In a flash, Riley rounded the corner in a light sweat, missing a slipper but victoriously holding two quarters over her head.

"What does two dimes and a nickel equal," he quickly quizzed her.

"A quarter," Riley breathlessly answered, handing one over to him and—though technically not entitled because she hadn't been present at the time he had uttered the curse word—keeping the other one for herself.

"See?" he said to Laura, feeling fully vindicated but nevertheless removing the isotopes from her hand and replacing them with the single coin.

Her tears immediately ceased, like someone turning a faucet off. Meltdown averted. Another crisis resolved. It was moments like this when he found himself wishing they were their thirties.

Sighing deeply, he rose to his feet with Laura in his arms, planting a light kiss against her wet cheek before lowering her into The Pack and herding them all toward the stairway. With the patience of even the most decorated of patron saints, he fell into line behind the mad flurry of nightgowns and curls, his stomach tightening again as they competed to beat each other to the top, with Riley fighting the hardest of all for at least a respectable third-place finish.

"Easy," he ordered, shifting his focus away from them and onto Michelle, who stood at the head of the stairs, silently scanning for blood.

"Do I want to know what you were fined for?" she inquired, once he had joined her.

"Daddy said h-e-double-hockey-sticks, Mommy," Georgia immediately snitched, prompting her father to cock his head and glare at her through threatening eyes, though inwardly experiencing a rush of horror at the thought of them possibly inheriting some of Amanda Almeida's traits, too.

"You look pretty," he leaned in and murmured against Michelle's perfume-scented ear, draping his arm around her shoulder as they slowly strolled behind their chattering gaggle, engrossed in now arguing over whose quarter was the largest.

Michelle patted the sweater covering her voluminous middle and chuckled at the notion of anyone finding her pretty in her balloon-like state. But she knew that his compliment was genuine and sincere from the countless times she had caught him gazing at her over the years, throughout her assorted pregnancies, with eyes radiating what could only be defined as pure, unadulterated love.

Once inside their bedroom, he liberated himself of his sticky, damp shirt and handed it off to Michelle, then sprawled out across the bed, awaiting the girls' inevitable scramble to join him.

"Somebody get me a shirt," he murmured mid-way through their mountain-climb up his body, smirking to himself as they instantly reversed course and scrambled down at double the speed, this time squabbling over who should get to deliver it.

"Don't get too comfortable," Michelle warned when the corner of her eye caught him turning onto his side and resting his head against his arm. The familiar sight sent her mind barreling back to the day they had gotten the triplets home from the hospital, and the hours he had laid across the bed, in that very spot, gazing in wonderment at the babies lined up in a row beside him. She smiled warmly, recalling how absorbed he had been in studying their identical features: the tiny half-moons on their fingernails; the delicate rims of their ears; the deep, perfectly defined cleft between their nostrils and lips….He had later told her that none of it had seemed real to him until that moment; how only then had it struck him that they were real, live, actual little miniature humans, wholly dependent on him to shelter and protect them. Michelle had reminded him at the time that she, too, would be participating in the venture, though knew that he hadn't even heard her, having already returned his full attention to the babies by then.

"How come you got all pretty, Mommy?" Georgia off-handedly complimented her, taking possession of the clean white shirt her mother had just passed over to her. But no sooner had she gotten the question out when the doorbell rang.

"Easy on those stairs!" their father hollered out behind them, retrieving the trampled shirt that Georgia had promptly dropped to the floor before bolting from the room with the rest of her sisters. He hated those stairs, especially when they were descending them. One trip on the hem of a nightgown and…

"We're buying a new house," he abruptly announced, leaving Michelle somewhat stunned as he dashed from the room, throwing his shirt on and barking out warnings about opening doors to strangers.

"Darlings!" Amanda Almeida cried out as the door swung open, dropping to one knee in a pose reminiscent of Al Jolson's legendary performance of "Mammy."

"GrandAmanda!" the triplets shrieked in unison, invoking the name the family had come up with after Amanda had decided that the "Grandma" title simply didn't work for someone so youthful and vital as she.

While The Pack clamored around their adoring grandmother, from whose outstretched arms dangled full rows of shopping bags, Riley silently fixed her saucer-sized eyes on her grandfather making his way past his wife in the doorway.

"Look how much they've grown, darling," Amanda scolded him, in near tears—the man who had cold-heartedly separated her from her beloved angels for what felt like an eternity now that she had them back in her arms. "I told you they would grow!"

"Children are known to do that, sweetheart," Jim Almeida wryly reminded her, holding his arms out to his approaching son, whose face he kissed before scooping him into his signature bear-like embrace.

"I wasn't sure you were gonna make it alive," Tony chuckled, not in reference to his parents' trip from the airport but the vacation they were just now returning from—a birthday surprise, from his Dad to his Mom, consisting of an extravagant month-long rail trip aboard a private string of rented Pullmans on the world-class Orient Express. And just to make it a birthday gift to beat all, he had not only whisked Amanda off, but with a half-dozen of her closest girlfriends in tow.

"It was all smooth sailing after Budapest," Jim smirked, reiterating his gratitude to his son for having intervened with a call to the consulate after Amanda and her entourage had managed to create a near international incident in a marketplace in—appropriately—the Pest region of Budapest.

"Such ill-mannered merchants," Amanda could be heard tsk-ing from across the room, but her sentiments were instantly drowned out by a sudden hail of record-high squeals as Lou huffed his way through the door, lugging a four-wheeled steamer trunk behind him, which he dropped, with a dull thud, dead-center in the room. A moment later, a treasure-trove of trinkets and baubles, collected from every whistle stop between Paris and Istanbul, was strewn as far as the eye could see.

As Tony poured Scotch for his father and Lou, Jim Almeida made his way through the crowd, cognizant of the tail he had picked up at the door, now following closely behind him.

"I believe we've already met," he casually mentioned, with a perfectly straight face after making himself comfortable his son's favorite cushy, oversized wingchair. "Thanksgiving Day, wasn't it?" he continued, feigning a hazy memory.

Riley stood frozen, as though standing in the presence of the great and almighty Oz, barely able to nod her head in shy affirmation. Jim worked to maintain a straight face, settling in for the delicate task of slowly breaking the ice with her, a ritual they'd always gone through since the day she had could walk and, thus, surveil him.

"You're the one who's good with numbers, if I recall. And gymnastics," he added, charmed by the genuine awe she would always exhibit in the first few moments of their meetings. "Tell me, have you given consideration to entering the Olympics?"

"Yeth," Riley shyly responded after an eternity of silently picking at her fingernails, unsure of how to answer at first, since she'd never heard of the Olympics before.

"Balancing is your forte, if I'm not mistaken," her grandfather continued on in an easy, conversational tone.

Riley shyly bobbed her head, but before she could even get the chance to ask if he'd like to see her hop on one foot, her mother had entered out of nowhere and seated herself in his lap.

"If I were a betting man, I'd say this one was a boy," Jim smiled, gently smoothing his hand across the area of her fitted sweater that had just received a good, hefty kick.

"With a promising future in Soccer," Michelle giggled.

"Nooooo, you go!" Riley abruptly interrupted, bounding forward and tugging hard on her mother's sweater until she had succeeded in getting her to move away, only to find herself standing shyly before her grandfather again, frantically trying to recall where their conversation had left off.

Another painful moment of silence ensued before Amanda Almeida's voice could be heard above the festivities, replying, "Thank you, I'd love a martini, darling," to her son's offer to pour her some coffee.

"I've got it, chief," Jim announced, ready for a refill himself. Slowly rising from his seat, he watched Riley's eyes follow him up until her head was cocked all the way back. "Would you care to join me?" he inquired, smiling down with warm eyes and and extended hand.

Honored, she nervously grasped hold of his pinky and fell into step with his slow, easy gait, oblivious to her parents' chuckling at the sight from across the room.

A few minutes later, even the triplets fell quiet as Riley's bunny-slippered foot made a torturously slow appearance from around the corner. Another few carefully executed steps revealed her hands wrapped firmly around her grandmother's martini glass, with Jim Almeida following behind, leaving just enough distance between them to convey his confidence in her balancing abilities, but not too much so as to preclude him from stepping in to rescue her, if need be.

A light, itchy sweat coated her brow, causing her curls to cling to her skin, but she resisted the urge to brush them away, remaining fully focused, instead, on keeping her feet moving steadily forward and her eyes glued tightly to the wobbling liquid.

"You're doing splendidly, darling," Amanda beamed with outstretched hands and misty eyes. Take away Riley's hair length, and replace the nightgown with Dr. Dentons, and it was like watching a slow-motion home movie of their son at the age of three.

The glass in her hands was cold; the tension in the room thick enough to slice.

"You're almost there," Tony softly encouraged her, holding his breath—mostly to keep himself from laughing—as Riley took her final step and, with the steadiness of a laser surgeon, passed the glass into her grandmother's hands. Taking a moment to ingest a few panting breaths of relief, she turned to her grandfather, whose quiet nod of proud approval drowned out all the other accolades around her.

"That's one impressive balancing talent you've got there, young lady," her grandfather complimented her as she accompanied him back to the chair and eagerly climbed into his lap, the ice now formally and officially broken.

She felt her head swoon from the intoxicating aroma of Old Spice: her second-most favorite scent in the world, next to the fragrance of her father's neck.

"So, tell me, have you ever visited the Alps?" her grandfather asked.

"Yeth," she replied, slightly stretching the truth.

"Well, y'know, while your grandmother and I were traveling through Austria, I recalled your mentioning that you liked elephants, and it reminded me of a great warrior named Hannibal, who once rode an elephant across the Alps…" he said, reaching inside his jacket pocket and producing a tiny charm bracelet, laden with clusters of gold elephants musically clinking against rows of mountains. "And, well, I just thought that you might enjoy this—May I?" he asked before gently clipping it to her wrist.

The surprise was unexpected, and the bracelet so beautiful, that it took her breath away. But before she could even begin to thank him, the triplets—adorned in the native dresses they'd haphazardly pulled over their nightgowns—had descended upon their grandfather, begging to know if anything was inside his jacket pocket for them. Not until after a baby pearl bracelet, with a golden initial to identify each, had been attached to their wrists did Riley exhale with joy and relief, realizing that her grandfather had selected the mesmerizing elephant bracelet especially and exclusively for her.

"Five minutes, people," Tony called out from the family room where he and Lou were firing up the DVD recorder in anticipation of Olivia's appearance. The five-minute call was fair warning for everyone to fight over seats before the show began, at which point forward there would be no talking.

Laura secured the coveted spot on the "L" side of the L-shaped couch where her parents stretched out with each other—shooting her father a guilt-inducing pout before climbing aboard, still not quite ready to forgive him for trying to gyp her earlier with those two measly dimes and a nickel—while Riley tucked herself into the couch's opposite corner, alongside her grandfather. Beside him sat GrandAmanda, her arms and lap monopolized by the two remaining sisters, which nothing on earth could've thrilled her more. Lastly, Lou got the ultra-cushy armchair, which was a-okay with him, as his back was still killing him from lugging in that damned steamer trunk.

"Tonight on Larry King Live," the host's voice sing-sang over his jovial theme music, "our first guest—gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated for the third consecutive year—international supermodel and bestselling author Olivia Almeida, here to discuss her wildly popular new fashion manifesto, 'Orange: The New Blue'…"

"What's he doing there!" Tony exploded at the top of lungs, the first to break his no-talking rule the instant the camera had widened to reveal Olivia—looking like the first million she'd ever made—with Gerald seated to her left, looking like…well, Gerald.

"He's her manager, darling," Amanda said.

"Her gold-digger manager," Lou clarified, still choking on his beer at the sight of Gerald's suit, the price of which he didn't even want to imagine.

"And her fiancé," Amanda firmly reminded them all, though with less than wholehearted joy and approval.

"And whose fault is that, Ma? Huh?" Tony reminded her back. "How many opportunities did Lou and I have to bust this thing up, with you foiling our efforts every time. Huh?"

Amanda Almeida sighed in quiet defeat. Perhaps her son was right. Perhaps she should've looked the other way, at some point or another, and allowed them to execute one of the many heinous ploys they had hatched up through the years. But that was all water under the bridge now. What was done was done. It was Olivia's life, and she adored the man, whom they, too, would all come to love someday; or, at the very least, become experts at faking it.

Tony quietly fumed for the full fifteen minutes of Olivia's segment, trying to comfort himself with the knowledge that all was not thoroughly lost; that the night was still young and just getting started. While the appearance of his Mom and Dad had fulfilled the second half of the big surprise, not even Michelle knew about the final, upcoming part. It was a birthday gift that he would bestow upon his Mom in just a short while, but one the entire family was going to love. Especially him.