Chapter Text
The day that would go down in history as That One Time Things Went Horribly Awry started off like any other calm, normal, Rose-filled day.
“Alexis!” David thumped his fist against the door, his hand making a satisfyingly loud thwack against the cheap pressboard. He waved his phone in the air, uncaring that his sister couldn’t see him do so. “You’ve passed your allotted morning routine time by thirty-seven seconds!”
There was a muffled thump behind the door, followed by an indignant squeal. “Oh, my god, David!” The lock disengaged with a click, and Alexis’s towel-clad head appeared amongst a wave of lilac-scented steam, wearing an annoyed expression. “You made me drop my toning mist!”
“Wow, how inconsiderate of me,” David retorted, arms now crossed, tone deadpan. “Almost as inconsiderate as you’re being right now, encroaching on my bathroom time when I’m late for work!”
Alexis rolled her eyes at him. “I told you already, David,” she sniffed, going for a hair flip before belatedly remembering the towel. She recovered the motion by tip-tapping her fingernails up David’s arm, which he immediately recoiled from with an appalled look; the sweater he was wearing was suede, and she knew that. Alexis scrunched her nose at him, before continuing, “Ted just told me last night that the island we’re staying on doesn’t have any running water. I’m two weeks away from losing access to daily skincare, David, and I’d appreciate a little compassion.”
David, whose sympathy for Alexis's various plights had died after his seventh wire transfer to an American consulate, could feel his expression transforming into what his mother endearingly termed his “splenetic howler monkey” look. Eyes wide, forehead pinched, mouth agape, indignant rage flaring through his nostrils. “Compassion? You want compassion? Here’s some compassion for you.” He leaned his face in closer to his sister’s, and enunciated obnoxiously, “Use more toning mist!”
Losing his temper with his sister, while cathartic in the immediate aftermath, ended up backfiring spectacularly on him, as with one infuriated, “Ugh, David!” Alexis swirled back into the bathroom and slammed the door in David’s face.
David blinked at the re-closed door, aghast. It’d been another Open Mic Night at the store last night, and David had spent most of the evening drowning himself in Jampagne, in an effort to suffer through Bob and his meandering stories without killing someone; skipping out on his morning routine was simply not an option today. How could he be expected to sell high-quality, luxury face products to his customers when he had entire luggage sets perched beneath his eyes?
He was nearly half an hour late opening Rose Apothecary, and he hadn’t even gotten to exfoliate yet. Patrick was going to kill him.
As David weighed the pros and cons of lighting a fire in the wastepaper basket to smoke Alexis out -- pro, the bathroom becomes his; con, the sprinklers go off and he’s set back another forty minutes picking out a different outfit because, again, suede -- there came a rapid knock knock knock behind him.
Somebody was at the front door.
David looked back and forth between the two doors in exasperation, already done with this day. Who could it be at this time in the morning? Every person of his acquaintance respected his “no guests before ten” rule except for Stevie, but he had it on good authority she’d packed away more Jampagne than he had last night, and therefore didn’t expect her to emerge from her office lair anytime before noon.
David eyed the bathroom door again, critically. Maybe if he only pretended to answer the door, he could lure Alexis back out into the open and slip in behind her while she was distracted…
There was a second volley of knocks, louder and more rapid than the first. Throwing up his hands, David bid his youthful-looking pores a silent adieu and stomped his way across the cheaply carpeted floor.
“Is that Ted?” Alexis called, wisely still behind the locked bathroom door. “If he’s brought me a ‘sorry there's no indoor plumbing’ gift, leave it on my desk, please!”
“If it’s those chocolate truffles he makes,” David called back, one hand on the knob of the front door, the rest of his body twisted to face where his sister remained sequestered, “then I’m eating one for each extra minute you spend in that bathroom!”
“No, David!”
“Oh, I’m gonna!” David pulled open the door, half-expecting to see Alexis’s straight-laced veterinarian boyfriend on the other side, holding a plate of homemade goodies and wearing his ever-present, boyish smile.
It wasn’t Ted.
Something burbled. David looked down.
Oh, god. It was a baby.
“Um.” David stared down at the lumpy pink face barely visible beneath a sea of pastel-colored blankets, snugged securely within the bowels of a navy blue carrier. “Can I help you?”
The baby didn’t answer. Because it was a baby.
“I… think you have the wrong door…?” Still clutching a hand to the doorknob, David stuck his head out of the room and looked up and down the walkway running along the front of the motel, searching for a wayward parent or maybe an unfamiliar vehicle the baby and its carrier accidentally fell from. That seemed like the sort of parenting one could expect from the residents of Schitt’s Creek.
The sidewalk was deserted, the sleepy guests of the motel yet to stir. There was a scattering of beat up sedans and late model minivans parked along the row, silent and misty-windowed from a long night of disuse. Stevie’s car sat next to the black Lincoln nearer the office, with Roland’s truck parked in front of David and Alexis’s room. Other than that, the parking lot was deserted.
“Anybody lose a baby?” David called out hopefully, to no avail. He glanced back down at the bundle of blankets, mouth pulled up in an uncomfortable grimace, eyebrows high on his head. What the hell was going on?
If Alexis was ordering things off the black market again, David was going to kill her.
There was another knock -- officially David’s new least favorite noise, oh my god -- from behind him, and David craned his neck around just in time to watch his father stroll into the room, crisp gray suit impeccable, with a stack of notecards in hand.
“Kids, you up? I’ve got some jokes for Roland’s mayor roast I’d like to run by you, and I thought… ah, David!” Spotting his son standing frozen in the open doorway -- looking, David would imagine, like a fashionably chic deer who was .2 seconds away from being pulverized by an 18-wheeler -- Johnny ambled his way to David’s side. “I’ve come up with some real belly-achers that I think you’ll find are more than -- oh, my.”
Johnny dropped his notecards, and David felt something in his cheek twitch as he watched them scatter to the four corners of the room. Eyes widened with surprise, Johnny pointed at the navy baby carrier. “That’s a baby.”
“Oh,” David said, the stare he gave his father deeply incredulous, “is that what it is?”
“Now’s not the time for your snark, son,” Johnny admonished, his gaze never wavering from the bundle out on the doorstep. He was still gesturing with his finger. “Why’s there a baby outside your door?”
David used the entirety of his upper body to shrug. “I don’t know!”
“Babies don’t just magically appear on doorsteps, David!”
“It's not like I put it there!”
“Well, somebody did!”
“Why are you yelling at me?”
“I’m not yelling!”
Their yelling seemed to upset the baby, who kicked out one of its tiny feet before letting out a fitful wail.
David and Johnny both took a wary step backward.
“It’s crying,” Johnny said, back to pointing out the obvious, and something in David’s cheek twitched again. “David, it’s crying.”
David grit his teeth. “Yes, thank you, I’d noticed.” Creeping an infinitesimal step closer, he nudged the plastic front of the carrier with the toe of his boot. “There, there, little bald person.”
The wailing grew louder. David sprang away from the carrier, wringing his hands.
“Maybe it needs to be picked up,” Johnny suggested from behind him, and David couldn’t help but notice his father was now standing significantly further away than where he’d been stood half a second ago. Johnny waved a hand at the carrier. “Pick it up, David. Try that.”
David stared at his father in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me.” When Johnny continued to stare back at him, no other suggestions forthcoming, David turned back to the baby carrier and bit his lip. Gingerly, and with great reluctance, he reached out his ring-laden hand and picked it up. Surprised with how heavy the carrier was, David spun around to face his father, the arm holding the carrier fully extended in front of him, his face twisting up with panic. “Now what?”
Johnny appeared stumped by his question, and David spared a moment to give silent thanks to his old nanny, Adelina. He never would’ve survived his childhood otherwise, that much was clear.
The baby’s cries ratcheted up in volume. David and Johnny stared down at it with identical looks of alarm and revulsion.
Suddenly, Johnny snapped his fingers. “Swing! You need to swing it, David.” He mimed the motion with his own arm, and David transferred his look of revulsion from the baby over to his father. Johnny repeated the action, oblivious to his son’s death stare. “You spent days in your swing when you were a baby and Adelina had that brief hospital stay, and you absolutely loved it.”
“Sounds to me like it was less ‘enjoyment’ and more ‘coping mechanism,’” David retorted, but nevertheless he began swinging the carrier with stiff, jerky movements of his arm. Already he could feel the sweat forming at his hairline. He hoped this worked quickly, he did not have the upper body strength required to keep this momentum going for long.
“Less like you’re swinging a baseball bat, David, and more like a golf club.”
David shot his father a frustrated look. “Do I look like a man who understands sports references?”
“Well,” Johnny floundered, “pretend it’s one of your mother’s alligator handbags, then…”
“Okay, I think that’s enough suggestions coming from you, thanks --”
Amidst all the bickering and arm-swinging, the baby’s cries continued to grow in volume. They’d grown so loud that even the most self-absorbed members of the Rose family could no longer ignore them, and with the sound of two doors squeaking open, Moira and Alexis joined the fray.
“Okay,” Alexis sniffed, her hair towel gone and one eye smudged black at the waterline, “whatever’s happening out here? Is detrimental to my line application, and I’m wearing the wrong skirt to pull off this sort of look.”
Moira, as usual, was a bit more blunt. “What is that reprehensible caterwauling? Has someone trod on David’s Giacomettis again?”
David pulled a face at his mother, outraged on behalf of his shoes. “First off? They were my Magnanni loafers, and the leather was never the same again! Second,” Here David physically stumbled, the force of his swinging arm creating a pendulum with the baby carrier that was starting to get away from him. “Second?” he panted, raising his voice to be heard over the warbling cries. “I have never, in my life, ‘caterwauled.’”
Moira and Alexis both came to a stop on either side of Johnny, their eyes trained on the carrier swinging from David’s hand.
“Um?” Alexis tilted her head to the side. “Ew.”
It took Moira longer to recognize the baby carrier for what it was. An alarming concept, for a mother of two. “Oh, John!” she finally gasped, her eyes widening as her hand clutched dramatically at Mr. Rose’s lapel. “Does that tackily-adorned holder contain within it someone’s bebe?”
“I’m afraid so, sweetheart.”
“It’s an infestation!” Moira cried.
Alexis clutched at her shirt and hopped from foot to foot, her eyes darting around the room as though she expected more babies to scurry out from underneath the beds.
“I’d hardly call one rogue baby an infestation, Moira,” Johnny argued. “There’s simply been a mix-up, that’s all. Someone’s left it here by mistake.”
“Uh, hello?” David waved his free arm around, gaining the attention of his family members. “Can somebody do something? Because this mistake,” he nodded his head at the baby, “is making my arm go numb.” Unable to take the physical exertion any longer, David dropped the carrier onto the floor and stretched out his back, wincing.
Back on the ground once more, the baby’s cries grew to an almost deafening volume. Moira clutched at her neck. “This simply will not do!” she declared. “I have an opening night to prepare for, and I cannot do that with all this squalling happening next door! You should put it back where you found it, you two, posthaste.”
“We can’t just leave it outside, Moira,” Johnny said, his tone dubious. “What will the guests think?”
The Roses collectively stared down at the blue carrier, watching in silence as the bawling infant squirmed and kicked beneath its blankets.
“Maybe David should take it out?” Alexis finally suggested, and the glare David shot her could have melted the skin right off her face.
“Take it out? I’m not taking anything out!” David paused, before conceding, “That sounded better in my head, but all of you still know what I meant!” He looked back down at the carrier, barely repressing a shudder at the thought of actually handling the baby. He had no idea where the child had come from, for all he knew it could be crawling with infectious diseases. Like the bird flu. Or Zika.
Johnny, however, perked up immediately. “Yes, Alexis, yes,” he said, nodding at his daughter, who preened happily back. Catching David’s look of abject horror, Johnny shrugged helplessly, “We have to do something, David, it’ll wake up the entire town if we don’t stop its crying soon.”
David swept out a hand. “Be my guest! No one’s stopping you from picking it up!”
“Well.” Looking suddenly uncomfortable, Johnny’s eyes darted between David and the carrier. He coughed delicately. “Well I would, son, but you see my back has this twinge in it...”
“Somebody needs to do something!” Alexis said anxiously, bouncing on the spot while her hands twisted in the fabric of her skirt. She stood on tiptoe to peek down at the carrier over David’s shoulder, and something in her expression softened by the smallest fraction. “It must be so uncomfortable, the poor little gnome, surrounded by all that cheap polyblend.”
David flapped his hands at his sister. “Then pick it up!”
“Ew, David, no! You pick it up!”
“Me? Why me?”
“Finders keepers, David. You opened the door.”
David gaped at her in disbelief. “Because you were hogging the bathroom!” he snarled, waving his arms around.
It was around this time that Moira, finally overcome from the stress of the morning, let out with her own piercing, dissonant wail.
The crescendo of noise swept down David’s shoulders, jangling along his already over-wrought nerves. He pressed his balled-up fists against his cheeks, the blood in his temples pounding. “Oh, my god, fine. Fine!” he finally snapped, shaking out his hands and glaring at each of his family members in turn. “I will take it out!” Steeling his shoulders, he crouched down next to the baby carrier, took in a calming breath through his nose, and lifted up the blanket.
It was impressive, seeing something so small make so much noise. Clad in a pastel yellow onesie and a knitted white hat, the baby waved its minuscule fists around its head and kicked out its legs as it wailed, eyes scrunched closed in a reddened, squashy little face. A set of bulky belts and complicated-looking buckles strapped the baby into the seat, and David paused to eye the restraint system dubiously. He was positive that nothing short of an engineering degree was going to get the baby out of that constricting mess.
Alexis leaned over David’s back, humming curiously. “I think you need to push the red button, David,” she said while pointing over David’s shoulder, and David slapped away her hand as he hissed, “Do not rush me!”
Moira, who’d calmed down once it’d become clear that she herself would not have to handle the noisy infant, was now observing the situation before her with a detached sort of interest. “I simply cannot conceive how someone could willingly leave their suckling at the threshold of our feckless David,” she said to Johnny, catching it when David threw a glare at her over his shoulder. “Nothing personal, dear,” she simpered, “but unless you hold a familial bond with this bebe, it makes no sense whatsoever why anyone would leave its care in your inproficient hands.”
“Alexis lives here too, you know,” David reminded her, and Moira’s eyes slid over to her daughter in faint surprise, as though only now noticing her presence. Alexis harrumphed at her. “Besides,” David added with a grunt, his hands struggling to unhook the straps from the harness, “the last woman I slept with was Stevie, so unless she has the gestation period of an elephant...”
“I beg your pardon?”
The four Roses looked up; in the open doorway stood Stevie, wearing her typical uniform of comfortable-looking clothes and long-suffering expression, complexion a little paler than usual but otherwise unaffected. Unlike David and his numerous eye bags, her heavy night of drinking was not immediately apparent.
David and his eye bags hated her just a little bit.
“Stevie!” Johnny exclaimed, sounding equal parts surprised and relieved by her unexpected appearance. “What’re you doing here?”
Stevie held up her phone. “My email kept going off,” she replied, in that halting, slow way of hers. “Someone on Yelp keeps sending the motel messages, something about excessive noise, specifically --” she squinted down at the screen, “-- caterwauling?” She stared down at David, watching while he struggled with the carrier’s bindings. “Is that a baby?”
Johnny rounded on his wife. “Did you negatively review the motel to get Stevie to come and help us? That affects our star rating, Moira! How many did you send?”
Stevie held up seven fingers, and Johnny gasped, “Moira!”
Mrs. Rose spread her arms wide defensively; one of her hands still clutched a cell phone within its grasp. “Well, I’m sorry, John,” she cried, sounding anything but, “but somebody had to do something! The success of Cabaret depends solely on its director being well-rested and clear-headed! And anyway, who better to care for the decrepit and woefully abandoned but our dear Stevie?”
Stevie blinked between the Rose parents, looking nonplussed. “I don’t even know what ‘caterwauling’ means.”
“It means ‘to make an ungodly noise the likes of which man has never heard before,’” David informed her, his head half-stuck beneath the shade covering the top of the baby carrier. “Also, ‘like cats in heat.’” The plastic piece David was futzing with finally clicked apart, and he whooped. “Yes! I got the bastard. Sorry,” he added as an aside to the baby, grimacing at his poor choice in words.
The baby caterwauled back.
Alexis loomed over him again, her blonde hair brushing against his shoulder and making him twitch. “There’s still the buckle between its knees, David, see? Right there...”
“Drink bleach, Alexis.”
“Is anybody going to explain what David is doing to that baby?” Stevie asked the room at large. “Or why he even has one in the first place?”
“It’s certainly not by choice!” David griped, just as the buckle clicked open in his hands. “Somebody left it on the doorstep, and I’m the hapless fool that answered when they knocked!” His fingers shook as he pushed the straps away from the baby’s shoulders, wrapped his hands beneath its arms and slowly, hesitantly lifted it out of its carrier.
The crying diminished almost instantly.
“Oh, my god!” Alexis crooned, clasping her hands beneath her chin.
“Oh, my god,” David said, horrified, as he held the baby at arm’s length in front of him.
Its chubby legs were scrunched up against its body, its diapered butt sticking out behind it. It looked impossibly small once removed from the carseat, and David watched with trepidation as a dark blue eye popped open and eyed him balefully.
Behind him Alexis “aww’d”, and a light flashed above him. David blinked and looked up at Stevie, who was holding out her phone, smirking at him. “This one’s going straight to Patrick,” she told David, uncharacteristically gleeful.
Momentarily forgetting what he was doing, David tried to lunge for the phone, the thought of his unedited visage bared in stark relief for his boyfriend to see too horrible to conceive. He stopped short, however, when the jostling movement caused the baby he was holding to squeeze its eyes closed, wrinkle up its forehead, and double down on its intense, squawking cries.
“David, what did you do?” Johnny remonstrated, watching with wide eyes as David scrambled to his feet, his elbows locked, the baby held awkwardly between his hands.
“I pissed it off somehow!” David paced between his family members, trying his best to foist his yowling burden onto one of them. “Obviously it doesn’t like me, somebody else take it!”
“Ew, David, ew!” Alexis squeezed her arms to her body and squealed when David approached her; he turned to Moira, who immediately feigned a dizzy spell and slumped into a nearby chair; and Johnny nearly tripped over Alexis’s bed in his haste to back away.
David glowered at his family, his chest heaving; he could feel a vein throbbing in his forehead. “I won’t forget this,” he promised them, voice hushed.
Stevie, who’d used David’s distraction to her advantage by snapping a couple more pictures, eventually took pity on her friend and beckoned him over. “David, come here.”
Relief washing over him, David nearly tripped over himself in his haste to get to Stevie. “Oh, thank god…” He frowned in confusion when, instead of taking the squalling infant from his arms, Stevie guided him into pressing it gently against his own shoulder.
“Uh, what’re you doing?” he asked, voice rising in panic at the first touch of the warm, staggeringly small body against his shirt. “Do you see what I’m wearing?” He tried to pull away even as his hands fumbled to hold the baby securely against his chest. “This is dry clean only!”
“Make sure you support their neck,” Stevie told him, ignoring David’s objections as she configured his hands so that one supported beneath the baby’s butt, and the other cupped the back of its head.
“Okay, but what do I do if it starts leaking?” David asked, wincing as the baby squawked into his ear.
Once again, his concerns were soundly ignored. “Try bouncing a bit,” Stevie suggested, demonstrating the motion and rolling her eyes when David continued to stare at her, unimpressed. "I had a lot of younger cousins growing up. Trust me, David.”
Feeling uncertain, and more than a little foolish, David bent his knees and began to bounce. Surprisingly, miraculously, blessedly, the baby fell quiet.
Johnny clapped his hands together. “Well done, Stevie!” he cried, cutting off when he noticed the three identical scathing glares David, Moira, and Alexis were sending him. Clearing his throat, Johnny continued in a much quieter, more sedate voice, “Very impressive, Stevie. Very impressive.”
“It’s just basic baby care, Mr. Rose,” Stevie shrugged. “No big deal.”
“My dad’s idea of good parenting involves visitation hours and forgetting to send home birthday presents while vacationing in the Maldives,” David told her, still bouncing awkwardly on the spot. “To him and my mother, you’re basically the Messiah.”
Johnny frowned at his son, but didn’t deny it.
“That’s… not weird at all,” Stevie said after a brief pause. She took a step backward and gestured to the door. “Is there anything else you need, or can I go back to playing Candy Crush?”
"You could help by taking this thing off my hands," David said, and he tried to communicate with his eyes how the future of their friendship rested on her response.
Stevie's mouth twitched. "I'd rather try my hand at caterwauling."
David stared at her. Apparently, she hadn't received the message. Alexis raised her hand. “I have something you can do,” she said, and before David could process what was happening, she was scurrying her way past him, purse in hand. “You can drop me off at Ted’s place. We’re supposed to be picking up iodine tablets for our trip. I’m not quite sure what those are,” she admitted, twirling a lock of hair between her fingers while she pondered, before giving a careless shrug, “but if they’re anything like the pills I accidentally took that one time I went to Burning Man, then our trip is going to be so fun.” She emphasized her last two words by booping Stevie twice on the nose.
Stevie, who was more than used to the Roses and their antics by now, suffered through the boops while looking only mildly uncomfortable.
David, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little vexed. “Hello?” he said, staring after Alexis, who gazed uncomprehendingly back at him. “You’re going to leave, just like that, while the rest of us have to deal with this?” He dipped his head to the side, indicating the baby.
“Not all of us, dear,” said Moira, who’d produced her own handbag out of nowhere and was now slipping a pair of sunglasses onto her nose. “As much as I wish I could stay and help you with your infantile dilemma, alas. The theater calls." She bestowed a pitying smile on her eldest child, and David’s mouth dropped open in betrayal. "Have courage, David!”
“That dizzy spell really cleared up nicely for you, huh?” David snarked, pivoting on his heel so he could adequately glare a hole through the side of his mother’s head as she made her way across the room.
Moira fluttered a hand at him. “There’s a lesson to be learned in all of life’s tribulations, dear." She touched a finger to the side of her nose. "Next time I do believe you’ll think twice when a stranger comes knocking on your door.”
David scowled at her. “Fine, go ahead and leave with the other two traitresses over there,” he called, his bouncing turning almost manic as he glared hatefully at the three women in the doorway. “It’s times like these where you learn who your true family is.” He turned back around just in time to catch Johnny trying to sneak into the other room. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Uh,” His escape attempt foiled, Johnny rocked back on his heels, fumbling to come up with an adequate excuse. “Well David, with Stevie leaving her post at the desk, I need to be in the office for check-outs.”
“I have a store to open!” A fact which none of his family seemed to care about at all. “I’m already forty-five minutes late! What am I supposed to do with this thing? Bring it with me?” The thought alone didn’t bear repeating.
The other four shared a look. “You could… call someone?” Alexis suggested.
“‘Call someone?’” David repeated, his face rearranging itself and, oh good, the howler monkey look was back. “You think I should ‘call someone.’ Who? Who should I call, Alexis? Is there a baby pick-up program I’m unaware of? Like trash? Should I call the baby trash pick-up people?”
“I don’t know, David, the only other time I had to deal with a baby was when that sketchy Ukranian tour guide tried to sell me one in Moldova.”
Johnny immediately began interrogating his daughter about how she'd ended up in Modolva, which Alexis waved off with a negligent, “Nineteen was a trying age for me, Dad.”
“You okay, David?” Stevie asked, her tone innocent even as her mouth struggled to withhold a laugh. She motioned at him with her hand, “Because your head is starting to do that thing where it bobs around uncontrollably…”
“I’m aware of what my head is doing!” David snapped, mid-bob, and the baby in his arms startled. “Oh, god.” Eyes widened in fear, David looked down at his shoulder; the baby was really starting to wriggle now, its arms moving restlessly against David’s shirt as two tiny feet kicked out a fitful rhythm along his stomach. “Oh god, it’s moving. It’s moving! What do I do when it’s moving?” he asked, looking up imploringly --
-- into an empty room.
Horrorstruck, David stumbled his way out onto the walk, just in time to inhale the cloud of dust kicked up by the Lincoln’s tires as his mother peeled out of the parking lot. Coughing and sputtering, David staggered his way back into clean air, watching through stinging eyes as his father's retreating back disappeared into the office. A car honked, and David looked up; Alexis was waving goodbye from the passenger seat of Stevie’s car.
“Good luck, David!” she called through the open window.
“I hope you get eaten by a tortoise!” David shouted back. “... the hell am I gonna do now?” he asked himself. He turned around in a circle, bouncing his arms incessantly, desperate for someone to take this wailing banshee child off him.
Something pinged in David's back pocket. It took him forty-three harrowing seconds to maneuver the baby successfully into one arm -- there’d been more than one near-drop, but minimal crying from either of them -- but soon enough David was fishing out his phone, and unlocking the screen with a trembling thumb.
It was a text from Stevie. Talk to Roland.
David made a face. Him? Willingly converse with Roland Schitt? Hard pass.
Another text was coming through, the indicator dots blinking at the bottom of the screen.
Avoid touching the soft spot on top of the baby’s head.
David felt his eyes bug out of his skull. “Avoid touching the what?”
Another ping. Still reeling over Stevie’s second, horrifying missive, David swiped open the third message.
It was from Patrick, David realized, his heart doing the same giddy flop it did whenever his boyfriend’s picture popped onto the screen. There were no words, though, only a picture. The front of Rose Apothecary to be exact, with its windows darkened, its floor deserted, and the CLOSED sign hanging jauntily in the middle of the front door.
Wincing, David checked the time, then cursed. At this point, he was convinced that his morning could not possibly get any worse.
A door opened to his left, and Roland Schitt strolled out. “Hey, Dave! Just the man I wanted to see.”
Son of a bitch.