The Night of the Twice-Burnt Chicken

It had to be a snow day, did it?

Well, a snow day for Lou, anyway. 

Which is the worst kind of snow day there is.

The Others had a two-hour delay. And it was all somewhat bogus. Just some slush on the roads that was pretty much gone by the end of rush hour. Most of our driveway didn’t have any snow on it. But I digress. Allow me to get back to living with Lou.

[And yes, I’m well aware that had this exact weather event taken place back in the day when I was a teacher or student, I’d be complaining about principals sending us to school in treacherous driving conditions.]

After dropping The Others off around 10am, we detoured over to the grocery store for a few odd necessities. I had prioritized cooking pancakes and tidying the house for the cleaning ladies and forgotten to drink my coffee. 

Plus, I was feeling a head cold setting in. 

I had also just yelled at The Others for trudging around the backyard in their tennis shoes and school uniforms, through snow and dog poop, while they waited for me to get myself together.

And then some idiot parents were blocking the kindergarten drop-off line.

So, I’ll admit that I wasn’t in the best of moods as Lou and I meandered through the store.

“Lou,” I leaned in and whispered to him, “you’re killing me.”

“Well,” he jutted out his chin as he peered up at me. “You’re killing me.”

Hmm. That doesn’t really seem fair given what he put me through the night before. Or, more accurately, what I put myself through in response to Lou’s actions.

Tighe had gone to pick up Nate from basketball practice and I was just about to slide a large pan of nachos into the oven for dinner. 

It wasn’t supposed to be nachos. It was actually supposed to be a big pot of white chicken chili, but it burnt on the stove on Sunday when we were at Sam’s basketball game. Tighe was home but couldn’t smell the charring beans and chicken, thanks to his head cold.

I salvaged what hadn’t been on the verge of combustion and declared that we’d feast on nachos later in the week. So I could burn this very same combination of chicken and beans a second time. 

As I was assembling the nachos, Lou was climbing on and off the kitchen countertop. Multiple times, he pushed the knife set aside and began fiddling with the dials and buttons on the toaster oven. And multiple times I told him to get down and to stop trying to burn the house down. In fact, I actually physically removed him from the counter multiple times. 

At which point he started pulling the sports water jugs out of the cabinet and tossing them like frisbees across the kitchen. Most of them still had water in them, so in a few short minutes, there were three or four puddles of water spread out across the floor. And because the lids had opened in the process, the puddles were growing in size as water just poured from the spouts. While Lou, quite pleased with himself, sat and watched. 

“Get out of here!” I screamed at him, picking him up under both armpits and plopped him down on the dining room floor. He crawled under the buffet and turned to glare at me.

From the dining room table, Tess and Sam looked up with curiosity for just a quick moment before returning their attention to the dinosaur puzzle they were working on.

I threw some wads of paper towels onto each of the puddles and then finished up with my Instagram-worthy nachos.

“Look,” I said to Lou as I called him into the kitchen, “I’m sorry I yelled at you, but you made a mess even after I told you not to make a mess. Now I need you to help me clean it up.”

I fetched some dish towels that were hanging on the oven, and he dutifully, almost eagerly, pushed the towels and water puddles around the floor with great sweeping motions. It was actually just increasing the scope of the mess, but whatever. Just trying to hold him accountable. And he loves the attention and praise. Like the rest of us.

I had been ignoring him, he caused a ruckus, which required my attention, now he’s getting the attention. He wins. Again.

But in his attempt to clean, he got wet. So we took off his shirt. And then he announced, with urgency, that he had to pee. We left the tea towels on the floor and I flipped on the bathroom light for him and retreated five or six paces to the stove to put in my world-famous nachos. 

Since the chicken had already been burnt and was rather dry, I decided to simply broil the nachos at the highest setting. Just for a few minutes.

And for some reason, immediately after peeing, he took off his pants and underwear. I heard the toilet flush and then the sink turn on as he washed his hands. As I pulled some salad ingredients from the fridge, I heard porcelain rattling. I craned my neck and said, “Lou, please don’t do that!”

It’s becoming my mantra.

For some reason—I guess because he’s a boy and boys’ brains are wired to either break stuff or figure out how things work—he’s been lifting the lid from the tank and peering in after he flushes to watch the stopper and the water refill in the tank. Plumbing is in his genes, I guess. 

I don’t really like when he does it because the porcelain lid is pretty heavy and I assume he’d likely break it, as with most things he touches. 

“Oops, sorry,” is becoming his mantra. 

And what happened next I’m not exactly sure. All I heard was a crash! A shatter. Almost like breaking glass. Or breaking porcelain.

“Lou! Did you break the toilet?”

I rushed in and found the lid inside the tank, vertically, which is not even close to how it’s supposed to be. I lifted it out and set it in its rightful place.

“I dropped it,” he said, not the slightest bit remorseful. 

“Okay, well, I’ve asked you not to do that! You could break the lid!” 

“Okay, I’m sorry,” he hung his head in mock shame as he skulked into the dining room to help Sam and Tess with their puzzle.  

It seemed like a non-event in the life of Lou until, a few minutes later, as I was slicing cucumbers and mushrooms in relative peace, I heard water trickling. I stepped into the bathroom to check to see if Lou had shut off the faucet all the way.

He had. 

But still, I heard the water. 

I glanced down at the floor next to the toilet, and a giant puddle, larger than all four of Lou’s earlier puddles could not escape my eyes. It was most definitely growing, pooling up towards the top of the baseboards and fanning out around the base of the toilet itself. 

“What the—”

I removed the tank lid, expecting to see a large crack or hole, but there was none. But when I crouched down on the floor, water was in fact dripping quite rapidly from the bottom of the tank. I peered in again and ran my finger along the bottom of the tank.

Yep, sure enough, I could feel a very tiny hairline fracture on the bottom—small, but very problematic. 

Recalling the time when I was a kid when our second floor bathroom leaked through the floor into the kitchen ceiling, I panicked.

“Oh my God, this is bad! Sam, Tess, I need your help!” 

I scurried back into the kitchen and grabbed a very large mason jar and sprinted back to the bathroom floor to hold it in place under the drip.

“Towels! We need towels!”

“Where do we keep towels?” 

Sam and Tess had heeded my request for help, but stood there uselessly, watching me attempt to problem solve on an empty stomach.

“Sam, how do you not know where we keep towels? We’ve lived here for five years!”

But there was no time to muse at Sam’s cluelessness. 

“Never mind, there are a few beach towels in the laundry room—grab them! Quick!”

Still crouched down holding the mason jar, I was snarling under my breath.

“This is bad, this is going to be an expensive fix,” I was glancing down at the floorboards that already seemed to be curling up with wetness. Then louder, “We don’t have the money to redo a bathroom right now, Lou!”

I didn’t see where he went, but I wanted him to feel some remorse. 

I frantically grabbed the two beach towels Sam had brought down, one Fortnite and one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and thrust them on top of the ocean of water. The jar was already full, so I emptied it into the sink before nestling it among the towels, propping it at an angle to catch the constant dripping.

And I preached about what a catastrophe this was the entire time. 

“Sam! Bring me a plastic cup!” I called, realizing I could outsmart the toilet.

I dipped the cup into the tank and dumped its contents into the sink, hoping to empty the tank so it would stop leaking. I had forgotten that the tank automatically refills when the water level drops to a certain point.

“Oh, no! We’re just going to have to keep emptying this jar for an eternity.” 

Finally, Sam and Tess recognized that my negativity was kind of a downer, and since they weren’t really useful anyway, slinked away, back to their puzzle.

“Lou! This is really bad!” I called out to his undisclosed location, hopefully still somewhere in the house.

Suddenly I remembered the nachos!

“Sam, Tess! Quick, turn off the oven!”

“How?”

“Press ‘cancel!’ It’s a red button!”

“What? Where?”

They both stood there, gazing like blind men at the buttons on the oven. 

“There’s no button that says ‘cancel.’”

“Yes, there is! It’s red!”

Not trusting the stability of the jar, I didn’t want to leave my squat position on the bathroom floor, but I had to save the nachos!

The jar would be fine for just a second, the once-burnt chicken would not.

I practically threw my body at the oven, slamming my fingers at the red button that read “clear”—dammit, Sam was right—ceasing the broiling process. I peaked into the oven door and spied the crisp, blackened chips and brown bubbly cheese. 

Burnt. 

I reached for the towels that hang on the oven, but they were missing—still heaped on Lou’s ponds of water on the kitchen floor. Shoot, where do we keep the oven mits? How do I not know where the oven mits are? We’ve lived here for five years. 

I pulled open random drawers until I found them—in the drawer right next to the oven.

“The chicken burned again! This is terrible!” 

I was incredulous. Not only that the chicken had burnt for a second time, but also that our toilet was just spewing water onto these very ancient hardwood floor planks. Who knew kids would be so expensive? Tuitions and clothes and food and sports equipment, yes, but toilets?

Back to the squat position on the bathroom floor—the cramping in my hips was breeding resentment. 

What was taking Tighe so long?

I pictured Tighe at the school gym laughing it up with the other dads, offering rides to all the other boys, and taking the longest route possible home. Probably listening to my favorite podcast or something, too. 

Tighe walked through the door a minute or so later, to a chorus of “Lou broke the toilet!” from Sam and Tess. 

“And the nachos are burnt!” I chimed in, practically in tears. “I’m so sorry!”

I spent the next two minutes or so trying to show Tighe the tiny hairline fracture in the bottom of the toilet tank. He has bad eyes, so finally, he just had to take my word for it. 

“So why don’t you just drain the tank and turn the water off, so it doesn’t keep filling.”

Ten seconds later, the entire crisis was fixed. 

Well, not the entire crisis. Tighe had to remove the old toilet and buy and install a new one—all covered by Home Depot gift cards from my mom, by the way. So for about twenty-four hours, when nature called, we had to use one of our remaining four toilets elsewhere in the house. It was tragic.

Oh, and Lou’s whereabouts? He was hiding and not very well. He was actually totally naked in the dining room, under the buffet. Correction: not totally naked. His socks were still on. And he wasn’t exactly remorseful, he was smirking.

And the nachos? They were pretty good, actually. We broke off the charred edges and topped with some guacamole and everyone persevered. 

Until the next morning when I checked my phone to discover that Lou had a snow day. An entire day with Lou. My supervision would need to be more vigilant. More on that to come…