A/N Thank you, Tallis224, for the unintentional bunny

June, 2015

If You're Looking For Trouble, I Can Give You A Wide Selection

Before Ducky and I became permanent fixtures in each other's lives, his mother had started a long slide into the often painful, bewildering universe of the Alzheimer's patient. Sometimes she was off in her own world, with her own cast of characters; sometimes she was dead on target for who people were and what was going on. (And who's to say which is the "real world," hmm?)

When Lexi appeared on the scene that seemed to pull her back into our side of the black hole, as though the neurons that were firing in proper synch had joined forces and moved into one house. Ducky likened it to a terminal patient pulling forth the will to live through a major holiday or event; I misunderstood his meaning and gave him one hell of a snark.

Over the years one thing he had discovered helped her focus and concentration was doing puzzles. (Forget Sudoku.) Crossword puzzles—either big (BIG) print or someone would sit with her and write in the letters she dictated. Word searches. We—thanks to Charlie and some of her friends—stumbled over "'find the hidden object" puzzles online, and Victoria loved them. But her favorite, ever since she was a little girl, was jigsaws puzzles.

When we merged households we discovered that as big as Mallard Manor was it wasn't a Tardis with infinite storage capacity; something would have to give. That something was all three of us paring down possessions and donating them to charity. First to sort through was the tonnage in the attic, declared by Ducky to be, "Seventy-five per cent utter crap." At my startled look ("crap" just seemed so uncouth from him), he said, "Go upstairs and see for yourself, it's the appropriate term for the situation."

The attic isn't some crawlspace with a pull down ladder, something suitable only for Snow White's roommates. It's a finished room that spans the length and breadth of the house, with windows on all four walls. And it looked like Martha Stewart's worst nightmare. (When "Hoarders" appeared on TV a couple of years later, it inspired another round of cleaning and culling. Some of those shows were only a few steps away from what had been upstairs.) One entire corner—corner being 8'x8'—was nothing but neatly stacked jigsaw puzzles. Everything from landscapes to Santa Claus shilling Coke products, kittens playing with yarn to double-sided puzzles, 3D puzzles, a solid red puzzle, a puzzle made from a photograph of Ducky as a toddler—it was mind-boggling. Mother got into the swing of things and said they should all go—she had "a sufficiency" in her room. (She had four dozen in her room.) (The puzzle of Ducky, we kept.) Ducky made a suggestion and we toyed with the notion of taking them to the store, selling them and donating the money to charity—but saner minds prevailed. ("Adding on a second floor?" Lily asked. She, Ev and Charlie had spent the weekend helping us shovel out the Agean stable upstairs. The puzzles went in the donate pile.)

But even though it took two trips for Hermitage Animal Sanctuary to collect everything we got rid of, we still had a lot of stuff in the house—including stacks and stacks of jigsaw puzzles. Victoria might spend hours on the computer playing hidden object games but just like I have a Kindle and enjoy it immensely, she will never give up her old fashioned jigsaw puzzles and I will never give up my books. I prefer life when it isn't either/or; so does she. I'm lucky that way—I like my mother-in-law.

While we did baby-proof the house to a certain degree (plugs, poisons, pointy things got capped, locked or put up high; expensive rugs and objets d'art went upstairs to the attic), many things remained. You can't wrap the world in cotton or a child never learns to respect the word "no" and understand boundaries. (We weren't going to go as far as Jeff Foxworthy's comment about his dad's thought on child-proofing the house, "Let him pull the TV over on himself a few times, he'll learn!") Since kids have the attention span of a gnat, rules had to be repeated and reinforced, but we generally fared pretty well. "Unless you have permission, don't mess with things that don't belong to you" is a big, big rule in our house.

Enter schoolmates to the scene.

Different parents have different methods of rearing children. We tend toward mildly authoritative with a good bit of democracy. I thought we were on the casual, permissive side of the scale until Lexi went to school and I started hearing tales of children staying up until midnight (not sneaking books as Lexi did—staying up as in with permission and knowledge to play video games that, in my opinion, should be banned if you have anyone under 25 in the house or watching Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street), friends having screaming fits over what was being served for dinner and parents giving in and ordering pizza (if you don't like what I'm serving, you have two other choices: make your own or starve)—in general, kids with a total lack of discipline and boundaries. The inmates were clearly running the asylums.

We didn't run into too many problems when she brought home a friend for dinner or a sleepover. Most kids have something in their primal, lizard brain that says what flies at home is not necessarily what flies at Missy's house or with Jack's parents or Lexi's grandmother and they moderate their behavior. Most kids.

Lindsay Gallagher had been a tough one. Lexi was temporarily in her sway, emulating her "if you scream and yell and pitch a fit in public, your parents will give you anything" school of thought. That got squashed, fast and hard. Acting out because she was the tug-o-war prize in an ugly divorce, Lindsay was a terror. When Lexi first asked if she could have Lindsay sleep over for the weekend, my instinct was to say, "Hell, no." I said yes. We spent Friday night and most of Saturday setting and reinforcing a hundred times over what the rules and boundaries of the Mallard household are. She chafed. She balked. She squawked. But by Sunday the generally happy tenor of our home won her over—a bit, anyway. She was quiet and subdued when her mother picked her up—but no longer sullen and bratty. A step up.

From pre-school to the summer before second grade, Lindsay was a frequent visitor. We thought (but never said) that she looked at our house as a refuge; when her mother won custody and was allowed to move out of state, they stopped by so Lindsay could leave her guinea pig with us. While Ducky and Lexi got Fred settled in his new home, Lindsay and I watched from a couple of feet away. She sighed, a sad, grown-up sound. "I wish I could live here forever." Refuge.

I wish so, too, I wanted to say. But it wouldn't have helped. Instead, I said, "That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said. Thank you, Lindsay." I leaned over. "Mrs. Mallard has a good-bye present for you, too." (She had already received several—Ducky had burned a set of CDs of Gilbert and Sullivan tunes (Lindsay had never heard of G&S before our house and had been a quick convert), Lexi had carefully decorated an address book and matching journal (with our address and phone numbers the lone entry) and I had made a tin of her favorite "kitchen sink" cookies.)

She looked up at me in pleased shock. "Really?"

"Really."

Fred happily housed in the hutch next to Harvey, the rabbit, we headed back for the house. Mother and Suzy were in the living room, waiting, a box sitting on the couch next to Mother. "I've never been to North Carolina," she said, giving Lindsay a shaky hug.

"Maybe you could all come and visit?" Lindsay suggested timidly.

Mother beamed at her. "That would be lovely!" Ducky and I exchanged a glance; we don't plan too far in advance with Mother. To put it gently, she is "not young." (Quoting Maggie Smith in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, "I don't even buy green bananas!") She held up the unicorn and rainbow bedecked box, about the size of three extra-large pizza boxes stacked together. "This is for you. Happy birthday, dear!"

Lindsay smiled gamely—she understands Mother's slip-ups. "Thank you." She sat down next to Victoria and started tearing off the paper.

Mother had bought the gift on a secret trip with Suzy, so we were all in the dark. When the paper was pulled away, I wanted to clamp my hand over my mouth. A jigsaw puzzle. A 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of hundreds of cats playing in a field of wildflowers.

Lindsay looked up at her uncertainly (a frequent emotion around Mother) and Victoria reached up a trembling hand to take her chin in her fingertips. "You are… a good girl," she said very quietly.

After a few months of dinners and overnight visits, Lindsay had adapted well to our family structure. But one weekend started off badly from the moment her father dropped her off. She almost catapulted from the car and was upstairs in Lexi's room in a nanosecond. Every conversation was fraught with exclamation points. "No!" "I don't care!" "Yes!" "Go away!" She wouldn't tell us what the problem was, she wouldn't tell Lexi—we finally had to stand firm on the "if you can't be happy, be civil" rule and she lowered the volume… but something was simmering just below the surface.

It boiled over Saturday morning. She was found repeatedly breaking one of the big rules of the house: don't go poking in stuff that doesn't belong to you. She was reminded and scolded repeatedly for poking through our bedroom, Ducky's desk, the attic—I barely refrained from screaming, What has gotten into you? I knew what had gotten into her—two parents who didn't know how to do the job they had taken on and she was caught in the crossfire. So I carefully chose my words and gently but firmly laid down the law. Until Saturday morning.

Something—who knows what—set her off and she became a whirling dervish. She screamed and howled in a temper tantrum that should have had the cops on our doorstep. She threw things, she hit back when we reached out, she ran through the house at Mach 5—straight into Victoria's room.

Straight into the closet.

Straight into the pile of jigsaw puzzles.

The things she had thrown had, fortunately, not been breakable. Pillows. Books. Magazines. Coats off the coat rack.

Jigsaw puzzles.

Before we could get to her (dodging the flying boxes was difficult) she had thrown over a half dozen boxes overhead. Pieces scattered to the four corners of the room, landing on and under everything. Foot and Pye took great interest, batting the pieces like tennis balls into the hall and across the way, down the basement steps, into the kitchen... God—by the time this was through, there would be puzzle pieces through all three floors of the house. Lexi huddled next to me, arms around my waist and face buried in my stomach, crying and trembling, while her father tried to get close enough to stop the storm.

Victoria, who had been on a morning walk with Suzy, entered her room with a stunned look. "Stop that!" she shrieked. "Stop that—right now!" Her voice can carry when she wants it to. Lindsay dropped the puzzle she was holding and Ducky swooped in to grab her by the arms. She started to struggle and Victoria carefully picked her way through the mess to stand in front of her, a scant five feet of pissed off old lady. "You naughty, wicked girl!"

To my shock, Lindsay burst into tears. So did Victoria.

A few hours later, when things were calmer, we sat down at the kitchen table. Lindsay still couldn't share what was hurting so much, but she was truly, honestly repentant. Just as we did with Lexi, we let her figure in her own punishment. The first thing she said was, "Please… let me come back?"

"Lindsay… there are house rules," I said gently.

"I know! And I'm sorry! Really, really, I'm sorry! I didn't—I just—" She started to cry again.

"We will give you another chance," Ducky said. "But this cannot happen again. Or anything like this. You know that if something is bothering you, Mrs. Mallard and I will always have the time to listen. But you have to use words when you're upset. Or if you don't have the words, you can draw how you feel. Or hit Lexi's karate kick stand in the basement. But you may not hurt people. And you may not destroy things. Is that understood?"

She nodded. "I promise. I'm sorry." She gulped her tears back. "Lexi—Lexi said the rule is, 'let the punishment fit the crime.'"

"Yes…" I said slowly, prompting.

"Um… I have to fix up everything I messed up. And…" She looked from one of us to the other. "And… I have to find all the puzzle pieces. All of them. And put them in the right boxes. Even if that means having to do all the puzzles to get it right. And…" Her eyes filled with tears again. "I have to apologize to Grandma Mallard. I want to apologize." The tears spilled over again. "I'm sorry!"

It was a helluva lot of puzzle pieces. It took almost two years, until just after last Christmas, to complete the task (as best we could). After the first couple of weeks, it stopped being a punishment and started being an enjoyment. We all pitched in with the sorting and sifting and solving—and Lindsay did a lot of growing up over that time. Too bad her parents didn't.

Now she looked down at the puzzle with a funny smile on her face. "Thank you."

"Whenever I do a picture puzzle… I shall always think of you," Victoria said.

Lindsay's look became an embarrassed one. "Even the 3D puzzle of Buckingham Palace?" Two years of hunting and we were still missing seven pieces.

Victoria held her arms up for another hug. "Especially that one."