Chirping

As Ter and I were leaving for work the other day, I casually said to one of the bears, “Cardie, you have the con.”

“Okay, Mum,” he replied.

Fast forward to that evening. Ter picked me up from a massage appointment after work and the house was dead dark when we arrived home. She unlocked the door and swung it open for me to go ahead. I started slowly up the stairs, nursing a knee that had just endured a bone-deep fingering courtesy of my RMT.

Chirp! said the smoke detector, advising us that the battery was dead.

“Well, that answers my question,” I remarked.

“What question is that?” Ter asked from below.

“I’d been wondering if that alarm even has a battery.”

Really. Five years into our residency and the alarm hadn’t so much as peeped.

“It’s a nine volt, right?” I asked, trying not to limp as I fetched the stepladder from the back hall.

“I think so,” Ter replied. “Geez, I hope we have a spare.” She went straight to the kitchen stash and hallelujah! A nine volt battery was nestled among the plethora of AAs we keep on hand for our gazillion remotes.

She was brave enough to try the ladder first, but even with my bum knee, she’s not as steady on her feet as I am, so I got the short straw. (Actually, I practically thrust her aside to “let me do it, dammit!”) Up I went, recalling the old alarm at Rockland and what a pain it had been to get into the battery compartment. I can puzzle out just about anything given time, and after a few seconds of eyeballing this one, I pushed on the little door. It popped open without protest. Too easy! I happily pulled the battery and exchanged it for the replacement Ter handed up to me.

All the while, every thirty seconds, the alarm cheerily went Chirp! While I was up there, I decided to test the alarm. Darned near blew out my eardrums, but the thing worked so I closed the compartment door and came down the ladder. Ter and I high-fived, did the power pose (there’s nothing two girls and a Tiguan can’t do!), and I hefted the ladder down the hall.

I opened the back door and … Chirp!

Ter and I traded scowls. “That battery must be dead too,” I said.

“Gods know how old it is,” she morosely agreed.

I brought back the ladder. She steadied it and I climbed back up to see what the frack was going on. I pulled the battery and flipped it end to end. “Oh yeah,” I said, “it’s been leaking.”

“Great,” she said, dryly. We looked at each other until one of us suggested we might be able to leave it until morning.

The alarm disagreed. Chirp!

Turns out its one of those safety coded ones that’s wired into the house and won’t shut up unless a working battery is installed.

I came back down the ladder. “I’ll go,” I said, meaning to the hardware store.

Ter gave me the shark-Finn look. “Not with your knee. I’ll go.” But I think it was more to spare herself the intermittent and insistent Chirp!

She was back in twenty minutes, the new battery was installed and the ladder posted in its designated spot shortly thereafter. Blessed silence descended. My knee was treated to some ice, and the evening passed as usual. We only wondered for a minute or two exactly when the alarm had begun to chirp, as no one had been home for most of the day and the bears weren’t saying.

But the next work day, as we were getting ready to leave, Cardigan piped up, “Mum, I don’t want to have the con anymore.”