Word Count: 459
“Not now, Timmy, I’m making dinner. Go ask your father.”
“Let me just sit and relax a minute, will you, son? I’ve had a hard day.”
“Come on…please? Pleasepleaseplease? You guys are always too busy to play with me.”
His mother hollered out from the kitchen. “All right. We’ll play Hide-n-Seek. Go hide and dad and I will come find you. Won’t we, Norman…”
“Yeah, you go hide. Sweetheart, you count,” said his dad, and set his drink down and opened the newspaper.
“One. Two. Three,” she counted out slowly and loud. She counted up to two hundred.
“Dinner’s ready,” she told Norman. He got up and sat down at the table. “Here we come, ready or not,” he yelled out.
“He’s eaten?”
“Mac and cheese,” she said with a smile.
He helped her clear the table and load the dishes. They sat down to watch some TV.
“Oops!” she said, “We forgot to find Timmy.” Norman went upstairs, came down, and said, “I believe he’s ‘hiding” in bed.” They both grinned and settled back into the sofa. At bedtime, they both blew a kiss into his room.
But Timmy didn’t come down in the morning and they both were a bit concerned about that. “Don’t worry, I’ll find him,” she told him. “Call me later from work.”
She spent most of the day searching. She even looked in the attic and down in that dark cellar room. When he called she told her husband that maybe he could come home early and look too.
They called the police who suggested he must have gone outside and been kidnapped. After a year they gave up all hope. They missed their son terribly, felt a bit guilty too, but with time the heartache eased up and they nearly forgot him with the arrival of two more little boys.
“Let’s play Hide-n-Seek! Come find me!” Charlie the older one said and the little one nodded in glee.
“You go hide then,” said his mother, “and Daddy and Joey and I will come find you.” She turned off the stove and started counting loudly to ten. Her husband folded the paper and took the little one’s hand.
After five minutes they started to get worried. After seven, really anxious. At nine minutes missing they started quite tearing the house apart.
“I know where Charlie went,” announced Joey. “He’s in the cupboard upstairs in the hall.”
“Why Joey, that’s cheating,” his father said, but they all headed upstairs in a group.
They opened the door and with a big sigh, his mom laughed and said, “We found you!”
And as Charlie crawled out, they looked deeper inside and though a bit of a shock, they found Timmy too.
