Fixing Lia

by Jamie Bennett

  She looked down, not meeting my eyes. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I shouldn’t have argued about that. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “I get it,” I told her. I had to squeeze the words from my throat to talk. “You can’t help yourself, because you and your husband are terrible people. You liked to hurt me and despite what you think about how noble you were acting, you hurt Jared. You were selfish and spiteful while you pretended that you were so loving and wonderful. But guess what? You lost, Jill. You’re lashing out, trying to make me angry, because you lost. Because I have Jared, and you have nothing.”

  She took a breath, like a sob. Tears streamed down her face and I was almost crying too.

  “You were supposed to stay away from me,” I reminded her. “Don’t think I won’t be calling this in. Good luck getting another foster placement after they hear how you harass other families! So you’ll always be alone, and I…” I had so many other things I wanted to say, but my frustrated anger choked me and I couldn’t get the words out. I threw my broken umbrella on the ground and got in my car, and I drove away as fast as I could with my whole body almost convulsing in emotion. I sped to Jared’s school and dropped off the bag, then went to the Whitaker building as quickly as traffic would allow.

  I pictured Jill Samotny’s tearful face as I drove. “I hate you,” I muttered aloud. How dare she come crying to me, expecting sympathy and forgiveness? I didn’t have either of those things for her because she and her husband had caused their own problems. Now she understood how it felt to have someone you loved ripped away from you.

  The problem was that I knew that feeling all too well, and despite my intentions, I did start to feel sympathy for her. Forgiveness? No, that was never going to come.

  “Everything ok?” Amy asked me when I jogged into her office fifteen minutes past the time that I was supposed to arrive.

  “Everything’s fine,” I told her. “Great. I’m very sorry I’m late. Somehow, Jared managed to leave his backpack at home, so I had to double back for it. I’ll stay after to make it up or I’ll work through lunch.”

  She waved that away with her hand. “Crap like this happens when you have kids. I’m late constantly, so much that sometimes Steve and I are coming to the same building but have to take separate cars so he won’t miss a meeting or a call. So dumb. And when we come together, I can make him leave work earlier and we get to be alone on the drive, which is a much better way to start and end the day.” She paused. “That was nice of you to bring your brother’s stuff to him.”

  I shrugged, happy that she had noticed, but I was still very worked up. And I was trying very hard to calm down and hide it. “That’s what parents do, right?” She nodded vigorously in agreement. “Oh, I forgot,” I said. “I was going to show you a picture of Jared.” Connor had taken some of the two of us working on my house. We smiled through a pane of glass, both of us looking genuinely happy. I held out my phone to Amy.

  “Oh, my God…you two look exactly alike!” she marveled. “He’s adorable.”

  I nodded and felt my heart gradually slow towards a normal pace. Amy would definitely be on my side against Jill Samotny, but I had to keep shoring up my connection with her to make sure. “Thanks,” I responded. “Not that I have anything to do with his cuteness, but thanks.”

  She laughed. “That’s how I feel when people give my son compliments. I contributed some DNA, and it feels weird saying thank you about it.”

  “You should bring him in some day, so I can meet him,” I suggested, and now she beamed.

  “I definitely will. He’s not a great office worker,” she noted. “Two-year-olds usually aren’t, I guess.” She looked at the picture again. “I can’t get over how similar you and your brother look. Those big, beautiful brown eyes and your silky hair. You probably don’t even have to straighten it,” she said wistfully. “It’s so thick, you lucky girl. Who do you take after, your dad or your mom?”

  “Our mom. Sona,” I told her. I hadn’t mentioned my mom’s name in years, and now twice in one week. “Here,” I said, and flipped through my pictures. “Here are my parents.”

  “Oh, what a beautiful couple.” She glanced up in concern. “Lia, are you crying?” she asked.

  “Sorry. Sorry, this is really inappropriate.”

  Amy started crying, too. “Are you missing your parents?”

  I shook my head. Yes, always, but I forced myself to knock it off because I was at work. And crying never solved anything, it just wasted time and made you look weak. “Please tell me you’re not thinking about your kids being orphans,” I told her.

  She hiccupped a laugh. “I totally was. I can’t imagine what you guys went through.” She wiped her eyes and also handed me a tissue from her desk. “I’m on a knife-edge of crying at all times. Argh! Hormones.” She hiccupped again. “You know what we should do? We should work really hard this morning, then go shopping this afternoon.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Can we pack eight hours of work into the four hours before lunch?” she mused. “We can certainly try.”

  “Um, would Dayana be coming with us?”

  “No, she called in sick,” Amy said. She looked hard at her screen and started typing. “I’m going to try to make this happen. Let’s shoot for noon.”

  And I worked my butt off and I really did get about double my usual load done, just out of excitement. My job was sort of secretary/office manager/receptionist, but I was watching Amy and learning a little of what she did as an accountant. It was interesting—maybe something I’d want to do. I briefly imagined my CPA certificate hung under my diploma on our wall before I got back to the grindstone.

  “Let’s go,” Amy urged a few hours later. She was eating what looked to be pieces of raw spinach. “Yum, this is so good. Want some?” She offered me a leaf.

  “No, thanks. Maybe if I sautéed it with a lot of butter and salt,” I suggested. I was gathering up my bag as I said it, because it looked like we really were going to play hooky from work.

  Amy was also watching me as she ate her raw vegetable. “You don’t have a lot of personal stuff in your office,” she noticed. “You know what? Neither does Dayana.”

  I had noticed that the surface of Dayana’s desk was now clear. I figured that she’d probably already worked her last day at Amy Whitaker and Associates, and that she was using up the sick time she had accrued before she clued in Amy to that fact. Or maybe she was just gone for good and we wouldn’t hear from her ever again. “Yeah, I’m not much of a decorator. I’m ready. Where to?”

  “First we should go to your apartment to make an inventory of what you have. This is so exciting!” She actually bounced a little as she thought about the project of re-doing me. “Can you drive? Steve and I came to work together today and I’ll leave the car with him. Of course, I’ll give you gas money.”

  “No, you don’t have to do that, and as far as inventory, I can tell you exactly what I own. Two pairs of black pants—”

  “I need to see for myself,” she insisted, and we went down to the garage. I wished I had thrown out all of Jared’s candy wrappers in my front seat because I saw Amy frowning a little at them, clean-living woman that she was.

  I hustled her out of the car and up the stairs at my building. “Let me go in first,” I said, like I did for Jared, to give a quick check for safety.

  “Why?” Amy asked, and walked right in. She stared around. “Oh, my God! You’ve been robbed!”

  I quickly looked but the TV was still there. “No, no I haven’t. See?” I pointed to the screen, then just to make sure, I walked into the bedroom where Jared’s game thing was enshrined in its special case on the table next to his bed. Those were the only two things we owned that were worth stealing, but I knew from experience that thieves would cart anything away.

  “Sorry,” Amy said when I came out of the bedroom. “It looks so empty.”

  “Does it?” I stared around the room in surprise. I guessed if you took ou
t the bag of laundry in the corner, it really didn’t seem very inhabited. “I told you that I don’t have a lot of stuff.”

  “Why?”

  “It got pared down when my brother and I moved into my uncle’s house, then the hospital…almost everything disappeared after that. And every time I moved between foster placements, I seemed to have less than before.” I shrugged. “It was easier not to have a lot, anyway. I did keep some of my brother’s baby stuff and a few things of mine from when I was younger.”

  Amy glommed onto one detail. “What hospital?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

  “We were living with my uncle and I got hurt,” I explained simply. “My brother got sent to one placement, and later I got sent to another. We didn’t live together from the time that he was four until last year. Five of those years he was with one family,” I started to explain, but stopped myself. “Want to look at my extensive wardrobe? See if you can guess at my previous profession just by studying what I wore.”

  “Well, I did read your résumé,” Amy said a moment later, when I had laid out my clothes on Jared’s bed. “But even if I hadn’t, I think I could have guessed ‘server.’” She felt the fabric of my pants. “Some kind of poly blend…”

  “Those hold up great and hardly any food shows on them,” I said appreciatively. Amy winced.

  “Ok, we have some work to do,” she said cheerfully. “I used to go shopping with my friend Caroline all the time. I have a real eye for bargains.”

  “Speaking of money, uh, I don’t really have that much to spend,” I said carefully.

  “I know, that’s ok. We’re only looking at accessories today so I can get an idea of your taste. I can’t get a good sense from your wardrobe and your apartment,” she told me, looking at the identical black pants and empty walls. “So let’s set our budget at twenty bucks each, is that doable?”

  “It is. Really? Twenty?”

  “We can make it stretch. Let’s go!” she told me, nodding. “But first, we need to eat. What’s the closest food around here?” I tried to think of where we could get something organic as we left my apartment.

  She told me in the car about her weekend plans, visiting with her husband’s mom. “I hate going, it’s always terrible. I can’t stand to see her and I hate for Steve to have to, but he feels this sense of responsibility. He feels that way about a lot of things and a lot of people, something he’s working on.”

  I was confused. “Isn’t that a good thing?” I asked her. “It’s good for adults to be responsible, especially since he’s a father. Right?” I couldn’t imagine why she would want him to be any other way.

  “He’s a wonderful father, and a wonderful husband, but he’s too hard on himself, that’s what I mean,” Amy explained. “I don’t want him to feel like he is personally obligated to take care of everything and everyone. And I try to be compassionate about his mom, because as Steve says, she clearly has undiagnosed mental health issues. But that’s hard because I know how badly she treated him and his brother. It’s like, if someone wrongs the person you love…” She smacked her fist into her hand. “Know what I mean?”

  I did, very well. “So you have to see her?”

  “We do, but we always put strict time limits on it, and we don’t bring our son. What about you and Jared? Are you doing anything fun?”

  “Well, um, we’re going to a football game.”

  “In the winter? Who plays now?” she asked.

  “The Junior Woodsmen. It’s like a minor league thing for football,” I said.

  “Junior Woodsmen,” Amy repeated thoughtfully. “I feel like I know someone who plays for them.”

  “Do you?” I asked. “I go north on the Lodge, correct?” I turned the wheel, and also tried to turn the conversation away from Connor.

  Amy sat up straight and snapped her fingers. “Yes, I remember! Teddy Hayes, Connor’s little brother. He’s apparently the only person to ever come out of their snooty high school with any chance to go somewhere in sports. Are you going to watch him? Don’t they play up north?”

  “They have an away game in Toledo,” I said. “We’re going to drive down, Connor and my brother and I.”

  “Wow, from ‘there’s nothing going on’ to heading away for the weekend,” she marveled. “I’m impressed.”

  I actually started to laugh. “No, we’re not ‘heading away for the weekend,’ we’re just driving an hour to sit on bleachers, with my brother there! It’s only because Jared is a big football fan and Connor is really good to him. It’s just really, really nice.” He was, that was just the heart of him.

  Amy looked my way like she didn’t believe that, but she shrugged and talked about other stuff, like me getting on the wrong freeway.

  Connor called while we were leaving the little shop where Amy and I had spent a lot of time and she had spent way more than the twenty dollars she had allotted. He had been calling now and then, to talk to me about my house and the contractor who had come out, and just to say hi. This was one of those times.

  “I’m here at the gym, but without my lifting partner,” he told me. “Who’s going to spot?”

  “Do you mean me? I can’t even pick up the bar you use,” I told him. He had waited for me outside of the gym on Monday, and on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. I had never worked out more in my life, but I had never agreed to lift, however much he had urged me.

  “You have the muscles from all the tray-carrying you did,” he said.

  “And tray spilling,” I reminded him. “Don’t forget how I let loose with the champagne.”

  “That worked out for the best. What are you doing?”

  “Amy and I ducked out of work early,” I said, and I sounded almost gleeful. “We went to this really cool little shop she knows with all this handmade jewelry, and I got a pair of earrings.” Despite her urging, I had limited myself to one item, and it wasn’t the expensive necklace with the silver disc that looked like the moon rising above the river. I had just bought the glass for my house and we had fixed most of the windows over the weekend, but now I had to get the paint for the exterior and materials to shore up the porch, and that was going to be expensive. And Jared really was growing, and needed some new clothes and a serious haircut, and the amount of groceries I was purchasing since I wasn’t bringing food home from the restaurant anymore seemed to have gone up exponentially.

  The weekend before, Connor had helped me with every window on the ground floor and Jared had too, asking questions and learning about building and construction. Afterwards, the three of us had gone out for pizza (two extra-large for three people, which kind of boggled my mind). Then on Sunday, Connor had invited Jared to come play lacrosse with him again, with him and an old teammate and that guy’s son. I had meandered around the track while the four of them had played two-on-two. Jared had loved it, every moment of it. He hadn’t talked about much besides lacrosse for the past week. I was looking to maybe sign him up for a team, but the fees were another reason I wasn’t buying any jewelry.

  “I guess I’m glad I stuck to the gym instead of going shopping with you,” Connor said. “Not that anyone had asked me to come.”

  “If you’re fishing for an invitation, the next time Amy and I ditch work to look at jewelry, you’re welcome to tag along,” I said. “I have to go, though, because we just got to my car.”

  “Call me later and we’ll figure out a time for us to meet on Saturday. I want you to come by my parents’ house before we leave for Toledo.”

  “So you can introduce me to them?” I asked. No, I wasn’t going to do that. I was staying as far away from them as possible.

  “No, they won’t be there,” he told me, and I relaxed until he continued. “You’ll meet them at the game. Call me later,” he repeated, and I said I would.

  “Everything ok?” Amy asked.

  “Sure. Yeah, I just need to hurry a little to drop you before I get Jared.” I picked up the pace. His parents coming to the football game this weekend
wasn’t something I was prepared to think about at the moment. Because I wouldn’t be meeting them, I’d be seeing them again. I wondered if they would recognize me after seven years or if they had swept me out of their minds like they’d swept me out of the hospital.

  Chapter 7

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I knew that Connor came from a wealthy family. But still, it was somewhat of a shock to see the house where he had grown up. It was like the biggest, nicest house in Detroit, but surrounded by acres of lawns and trees, stone walls, and what were probably beds of beautiful flowers and gardens in the summer when the weather was nice. It was stunning. I got out and took a breath of the cold, sharp air. I really liked their cornices.

  “It’s just like he described, isn’t it?” my brother asked me excitedly. “Connor!” he yelled, and jumped out of the car. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who had been getting texts and calls. The night before, Jared had been laughing while he talked on the phone, and when he hung up and I asked him who it was, he had said, “A friend.” Then later, when I had called Connor back, he told me that he had been discussing the football game with Jared, among other important sports issues.

  The twelve-foot front door swung open and Connor came out of the house. “Hi. You guys are early.” Connor shook hands with Jared and put a Junior Woodsmen baseball cap on his head, which my brother loved and thanked him for profusely. “Do you want to come inside before we head out?” he asked us.

  “No,” I said immediately, and a little too loudly, and both of them stared at me. “I just want to get going to Toledo.”

  “Lia made cookies for us to eat,” Jared said. “They smelled really good.”

  “Reason enough to hit the road,” Connor agreed.

  I shrugged. “We’ll see. I picked up a few things from the pastry chef at Le Feu. The restaurant before Anson’s place,” I explained.

  “How many restaurants have you worked at?” Connor asked.