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Mickey had never realized just how many ridiculous things kids put in their goddamn tiny mouths.
“Spit that out before you choke on it,” he orders frantically as his daughter tries to take a bite out of a hotwheels car.
"Put that thing back where it came from or so help me," he snaps when she tries to eat a dead cicada off the porch.
“Are you trying to poison yourself?” he asks as he just barely manages to grab the laundry detergent before she can drink it.
“You’ll eat dirt but not greenbeans?” he asks plaintively when she shovels a handful into her mouth outside after a failed attempt at dinner. Her dirty brown sneer speaks at the name of the vegetable speaks volumes.
“You know what, yeah, that tracks,” he corrects himself, and brings his beer to his lips. “Carry on.”
He’s become an expert at avoiding catastrophe at this point, and could write papers on the effects inappropriate items have on a child’s digestive system. A PhD in when to worry and when to pretend you didn’t see it for the sake of your own sanity, that’s him.
So when he’s on the phone with Ian, trying to get information on exactly what just happened with Liam’s school and what they need from him, and Brit tugs on the leg of his pants until he looks down into her wide eyes and full, chubby cheeks—
Well, it’s pretty obviously a case of the latter.
“Hang on kid,” he mutters, then, “No, Ian, not you. Keep talking, you moron.”
Brit tugs again, a little harder.
“Not right now, ok?” Mickey hisses, turning the phone this time to keep Ian form hearing. “I’m kinda in the middle of somethin’.”
She whines, lips pressed together to keep something—he doesn’t want to know what—from falling out.
And Mickey, trying to hear Ian better and focus on the words coming through the phone, turns away.
“So they need us to cut a new check,” Ian is saying, “for the tuition, but also for the—”
Brit shrieks. An impressive feat, considered she won’t open her mouth.
“Is that our daughter?” Ian cuts himself off. “Mickey, why is she screaming?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Mickey retorts. “Why aren’t you tellin’ me what I need to know?”
“Mickey,” Ian says again, stern, and Mickey sighs.
“Fine,” he mutters into the phone. “But I’m puttin’ you on speaker while I deal with this, so you can hear how stupid it’s gonna be.”
“Don’t say that about our—”
“Ok, what’s the big deal here, kid?” Mickey speaks over him, turning and looking down. “If you decided to bulk up for the winter,” he says, gesturing at her bulging cheeks, “you’re a few months too late.”
He’s met with the saddest brown eyes he’s ever seen, teary and wide over comical chipmunk cheeks. Brit doesn’t answer him, and he’s about to prompt her to use her words, when she opens her mouth and points inside with a shaky finger.
And Mickey laughs.
“Sorry, sorry,” he chokes out as she stomps her little foot and points harder. “Okay, here,” he adds, kneeling down and reaching forward with one hand as he sets the phone down with the other. “The fuck did you put in there this time?”
He presses hands to her bulging cheeks, tugs her mouth wider. Slides a finger inside without hesitation, a movement long ago perfected and no longer worth even a grimace, and brings it back with something waxy and brown in the crook of it.
“Oh shit,” he says, wrinkling his nose as he brings the offending substance closer to his face. “Don’t tell me this is…”
He looks closer. Sees little strips of colored paper, and the edge of a well-known logo. Brings his finger to his nose, and sniffs.
He laughs again, much to Brit’s annoyance.
“I know the colors are pretty, kid,” Mickey starts, wiping his finger on his jeans and poking it right back into her mouth to fish around some more, “but you’re supposed to color with crayons, not eat ‘em.”
Brit holds her stubborn silence, glaring even as he keeps her jaws pried open to help her.
“And what,” he asks as he finishes. “You forget how to spit things out or somethin’? Didn’t have any trouble when your dad tried to feed you brussel sprouts last night.”
“Ew,” is all the thanks he gets once her mouth is clear, and a wet knee as she proves that she does, in fact, remember how to spit.
“Fuckin’ kids,” Mickey says to himself as she runs right back to her coloring book, and shakes his head. “A damn miracle she still has a stomach with the stuff she tries to put in it.”
“Mickey,” Ian’s voice comes from the phone, sounding far away and tinny. “You almost ate her play-dough like, two days ago.”
Mickey grabs the phone from the floor, and promptly hangs up.