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She gets up only to take a phone call from the head of the DC bureau. By the time she satisfies the early-morning neuroses of two new weekend anchors and their veteran EP and, after staggering slightly as she descends from her home office back to hers and Will’s bedroom, arrives at her side of their bed to find it already occupied by two small blonde girls who have been locked into place by one of their father’s arms.
Leaning over their daughters, she gently tugs Josie’s thumb out of her mouth and pulls the duvet up to cover Charlie’s bare legs, and then sincerely wonders how Will can continue to deny his own snoring when Josie does it almost as loud as he does. When she finishes looking over the mess of limbs (and hair) Mac snags her robe off the footboard and quietly creeps downstairs.
She collects the morning papers off the front stoop of their brownstone, and shuffles through the various editions as she crosses through the living room to the kitchen. Fumbling her glasses from the counter to her face, she reads the front page headlines and goes through the routine of preparing the coffeemaker for her ritual twelve cups of high-octane French blend. When that’s done, she moves to the kitchen table, and sits in one of the two seats without some sort of booster strapped to it.
Not without taking her highlighters with her, of course.
When she’s about halfway through the front section of the Times, she hears a small pair of feet walk down the stairs, through the hall, and stop. Looking up, she sees her five-year-old son smiling at her from the doorway. Bouncing on his toes, he waits until she smiles back at him to rush towards her at the table, sliding over the tiled floor in his socks.
“Momma?”
Teddy is no longer dressed in the pajamas she know she put on him last night, but she decides not to question it. There’s really no arguing with the Captain America pajamas Jim bought him, even if she knows that he took them out of his hamper. (Mac has come to the conclusion that Teddy associates Will with Captain America, for whatever reason, and all things considered she has no problem with their son thinking their father is a hero.) She just needs to get more proactive about moving them from the hamper to the washing machine before he can get his hands on them at bedtime.
“Morning, baby,” she says, and wraps her arm around him, pulling him to her side and kissing the top of his head.
“Is everyone still asleep?”
She hums in the affirmative, absently combing Teddy’s hair into place with her fingers.
Allowing her to keep him close, he tucks his head under her chin, watching as she continues to speed read through an article on the newest economic crisis in the EU. “Can I help?” he asks, pointing a small finger to a swath of bright yellow over black newsprint text. “Momma?”
She’s about to answer when the coffeemaker beeps.
Placing the highlighter down on the table she stands. Teddy follows her to the counter, curling himself around her leg as she pulls a mug down from the cabinet, and the canister of sugar away from the wall. When he loosens his grip on her thigh so that she can retrieve the half-and-half from the refrigerator, but still remains quite attached, she snorts loudly.
“Can I have some too?” he asks, once she’s successfully maneuvered back to the coffeemaker. “Momma? Can I have coffee too?”
“Sure.” Mac places a hand on top of his head and reaches up for a second mug, one of the cheap plastic sort that the kids usually drink hot cocoa from during the winter months. Just like her Dad used to do when she and her little sisters were small, she fills the mug with a half an inch of coffee, a pinch of sugar, and the rest with half-and-half. Stooping awkwardly (with him wrapped around her leg as he is) she hands him the cup. “Both hands,” she instructs, “And watch as you carry it to the table.”
Teddy looks proud of himself, taking small steps to his chair.
“I have coffee,” he says after placing his cup on top of his placemat. Smirking, he climbs up onto his chair, and Mac nearly laughs at the expression on his face. “Like a grown-up.”
“That’s right, sweetheart.”
After fixing her own cup—one sugar, a dollop of half-and-half, and the rest piping hot black coffee—she returns to the table, sitting down next to him. Slurping down his incredibly diluted coffee, Teddy enthusiastically kicks his feet out, one of them coming to rest on her knee and Mac takes it in her hand, giving his toes an affectionate squeeze.
“Do you want the comics, honey?”
He shakes his head. “I wanna help.”
Biting her lip, she looks at the array of newspapers and Sunday editions in front of her, before snagging the one she hardly ever looks at: Will’s copy of the Wall Street Journal. (She thinks she’ll enjoy seeing the look on his face when he decides to grace the morning with his presence.)Pulling it out of its plastic wrapping, she unfolds it for Teddy and places it in front of him, saying nothing when he grabs her green highlighter from the pile, pulls off the cap, and begins crookedly highlighting a random section of a front page article.
“Thanks, Teddy bear,” she says, watching him color over an unflattering picture of Rupert Murdoch with great amusement.
Five minutes later, he asks to trade his green highlighter for the orange one in her hand, having covered above the fold with a truly impressive amount of ink. Taking a large mouthful out of her mug, she hands it to him, and then grabs the pink one for herself next.
“Why does Daddy sleep so much?”
Pressing the cap end of the marker to his chin, he flips the paper over, and then upside down. Holding a laugh, Mac reaches over to fold out a section for him.
“Is it ‘cause he’s old?” Teddy asks, pursing his eyebrows together as he determinedly marks up the top of one column, and then the middle of the one next to it. Mac leans over to see what he’s “reading”, and nods approvingly at his choice of an editorial on the new chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Figuring that the actual explanation—that his father was kept occupied with some strenuous activity between her legs last night—is not anywhere in the ballpark of appropriate, she instead answers, “Well, Charlie and Josie are still asleep, too. What do you think?”
“I think they’re lazy,” Teddy answers flatly, disinterestedly turning to a new page. “What’s this?” he asks, perking up.
Mac looks over to see that he’s pointing to unflattering caricature of the Governor of South Carolina. “A political cartoon.”
“He has five mouths,” he giggles. “That’s funny.”
“Yes, it is.”
The Governor’s five gaping mouths wind up covered with a smear of neon orange before he gets bored again, and Mac realizes she probably should have screened the newspaper before handing it to him. Although, she figures, the Journal is usually pretty friendly in how it covers anything Will does, so she doubts that Teddy will run into anything like the critiques the Post still runs from time to time. Not that he’s reading quite yet, but Teddy knows how to recognize his last name, and News Night, and definitely a cartoon version of his father.
But, Mac figures, it’s not like she has a folder of her favorite lampoonings of Will from over the years in her desk at ACN.
Definitely not.
The two of them settle into silence. It’s nice, and still early enough that there isn’t too much noise coming in from outside either, and she’s able to read through most of the front of the Washington Post before she hears Teddy’s stomach rumble next to her.
Looking up over her glasses, she sees him look down and frown, patting his hands over his belly.
“Hungry?” she asks.
He nods. “Yeah.”
She has to lean back in her chair to see the clock hanging over the stove—just past eight o’clock. And if she knows Will, and their daughters, they’re entirely capable of staying in bed until ten o’clock, eleven, noon. Casting her glance to the ceiling, she listens for a moment to ensure that no sound is coming from upstairs.
Satisfied, she nods, caps her highlighter, and places it down on top on top of the page she’s just finished reading through. Next, she pulls her glasses off her face, and rests them atop the newspaper as well. “Want to go to the diner? Get pancakes while your sisters sleep?”
“Can I get more coffee?” Teddy nearly shouts, throwing himself out of his chair. “Momma, can I—?”
Mac wonders briefly if she’s created a monster (a monster in her own image, nevertheless) but the diner they usually takes the kids to in Tribeca serves coffee to tables in individual carafes, so she figures she’ll just order him his usual milk and pour in the same amount she did the first time.
“Of course.” Pushing up from the table, she stands and with no rush, ushers him out of the kitchen. “We’ll have to be super quiet while we’re getting dressed. Can you be super quiet?”
She thinks there’s a pile of clean clothes enough for both of them atop the dryer in the basement.
“Uhuh,” he answers, nodding voraciously.
They leave fifteen minutes later, after she writes a note telling Will where they’ve gone and sticks it on the (still mostly full) coffeepot. It’s not until there’s a plate full of bacon in front of them (she offered Teddy the bench opposite her in their booth, but instead he slid in after her and tucked himself into her side, and Mac is hardly going to complain about that) and Teddy is slurping down another cup of “coffee” that her BlackBerry chimes, notifying her of a text from Will.
What the fuck happened to my paper?
Lifting the checker-patterned diner-standard coffee cup to her lips, she replies, Teddy improved it. I think it’s better this way :) before tucking her phone back into her bag and ignoring it for the rest of her meal alone with their son.