“It's tough having little ones,” I said.
“Not these guys. I meant Jessie's mother.”
Sunshine pointed at her dad. “Christopher is acting out because of YOU.”
“Uh-oh. Is Daddy in trouble?” Laughing, Ryan reached over his seatback with one long arm and tried to tickle Sunshine. She dodged him, giggling. The car lurched sideways. Another car honked.
Our driver looked over at Ryan. “Dude.”
“Sorry, bro. Hey Karen, this is my friend, Vance.”
“How ya doin’?” Vance looked in the rearview mirror at me. “Welcome to the Anderson Traveling Circus.”
I nodded back, and he returned to business. On the freeway, he drove fast and well, despite the clamor from the back seat where Christopher was whacking everything in sight with a plastic bat. Ryan yelled at him to stop before switching on the audio system. The boom and beat of hip-hop instantly prevailed, a new and overwhelming kind of din. Seeming not to notice it, Sunshine read her book. Ryan hunched over his phone and a tablet, thumbs flying on both. He occasionally laughed in response to something on one of the screens. The dog looked up, yawning and licking her chops nervously. In the back, Christopher fell asleep.
Feeling an ache building at the base of my skull, I slipped my earbuds out of my purse, scrolled to my own musical selection, and leaned my head back. The city rolled past. Glass skyscrapers rose like ice sculptures into the cold, blue sky.
Seven years ago, I drove an old friend here from North Dakota. Ninety-year-old Frieda had been lured to Denver by her daughter, Sandy, who said Jessie was visiting with the new baby, and wouldn’t it be nice for Frieda to come and see them. Four generations in the same house, and the chance for Frieda to hold her great-grandchild.
Too bad it was all a lie.
When Frieda found out Jessie and Sunshine were nowhere near Denver, she insisted on getting back on the road with me. We left Sandy crying on the curb, and Frieda never saw any of her family again.
I took a deep breath, to leave the pain behind.
We passed suburbs and barrios, shopping malls and industrial districts until we left the city proper and turned west toward Strawberry Hills. Vance switched off the sound system, and I removed my earbuds.
Ryan and Vance talked about work, and I listened in. Ryan was a digital-age savant who had hit it big by inventing apps. As they talked, he went back and forth from his phone to his tablet, still carrying on a conversation with Vance. When we hit a red light, he held up his tablet. “Check it out, dude.”
Vance took a quick look. “We have a buyer?”
“We have a buyer.” They high-fived each other, finishing off with some elaborate secret-knuckle-bump/handshake thing.
Vance tapped the steering wheel. “We’re gonna be rich, dude.”
“We already are.” They laughed like ten-year-olds. Vance hit the gas, and we headed for the countryside, rolling bucolic fields interspersed with low-density housing, all custom-designed and pricey. Each home was fronted by a long wall or fence and protected by a locked gate and long driveway.
We pulled up in front of one. I recognized the address but couldn’t see a house.
Ryan, busy at his tablet, didn’t look up.
“Open it,” said Vance.
“Huh? Oh.” Ryan reached into his satchel and clicked a remote. The gate opened. As we passed through, overgrown branches reached out and grazed our vehicle. The lawn was patchy and unmowed. At the end of the driveway, a sprawling compound came into view, consisting of a main house that looked like a millionaire’s idea of a cabin, a smaller house to the side, and a couple of outbuildings. Dead or overgrown bushes flanked the house’s front entrance on both sides. Trash paper fluttered from dead plants and destroyed flower beds.
“Oh, shit.”
We followed Ryan’s glance. A pack of dogs galloped toward the car. The lead dog had a mouthful of white feathers. The others chased after him, trying to get the prize.
Sunshine saw them. “What does he have?” Her voice rose in a frantic upward curve. “Daddy, the chickens!”
“Holy effin’ you-know-what.” Vance accelerated to the front door, where he slammed the car into park. Ryan jumped out of the car, grasped the big dog’s muzzle and extracted the bird, but it was too late. He tossed it into the bushes, and the pack followed.
I looked over at Sunshine. She was staring in the direction of the bushes.
“No more chicken?” said Christopher from the back seat.
“Somebody left the hen house open,” said Ryan. He turned to look at me. “We can get out. The dogs are friendly.”
I cast a skeptical glance at him.
“Really. It’s okay.”
I loved dogs, but I didn’t like getting jumped on or smoojed with dog saliva, especially when I didn’t know them. Even less if they’d been killing the family chickens.
Sunshine reached down, gathered up Princess, and opened her door, kicking at the tongue-lolling dogs who greeted her. “Let. Me. OUT,” she yelled, and they backed away.
A thin, young man appeared from around the side of the house. He wore baggy jeans and a hoodie.
“Jared,” shouted Ryan, “can you get the dogs in?”
Jared whistled, and the dogs galloped straight over to him. He jogged out of sight, leading the pack. Feathers swirled in their wake.
“That’s nasty, man.” Vance reached into the console for hand sanitizer and gave it to Ryan. “Jared’s nuts. You’re gonna have to do something about him.”
“I know.” Ryan scrubbed his hands together and waved them in the air to dry. “Okay kids, let’s go.”
Vance and I followed Ryan, who carried Christopher to the front door.
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Ryan. He put Christopher down next to me.
The door stood open, the entrance littered with feathers and blood. As we eased inside, a couple of dogs shot past us on their way out. Chicken parts and muddy paw prints littered the floor.
From the other end of the house came the sound of a curse, a yelp, and a heavy object hitting the wall. A hound came galloping toward us, its eyes wild. Christopher hid behind me. The dog raced past us and out the door.
“I hope that’s the last of them,” said Vance.
“That was Freddy. He’s the last at everything.” Ryan brought my bags in from the SUV and leaned them against the wall, just as we heard Jessie holler his name from the other end of the house. She sounded absolutely pissed.
Vance touched two fingers to his temple in a mock-salute. “Later, Dude.”
“Yeah, thanks for the ride.” Ryan turned to Sunshine. “You kids go to your rooms.”
“We’re afraid to.” Sunshine still held Princess.
I felt Christopher’s hand close on a couple of my fingers. I put my other arm around Sunshine’s shoulders. “I’ll take the kids,” I said.
“RYAN!”
Ryan looked at me, then in the direction of the voice, then back at me. “That’d be so great. Thank you.” He turned and jogged down the hallway.
“You guys hungry?”
“We are STARVING,” said Sunshine. Holding the little boy’s hand, I led them toward the kitchen based on Sunshine’s barely-audible directions. We saw nothing more gruesome than feathers and muddy paw prints. One lamp was lying sideways on the floor, but it looked intact.
Luckily, the pack had missed the kitchen. I helped Christopher and Sunshine wash their hands. I got them seated and poured cups of apple juice. Before I was able to hand out string cheese, Christopher had spilled his juice, so I cleaned that up. I found a can of ready-to-eat spaghetti, heated it a little, and served it to them.
It was barely noon, and I was already exhausted.
While the children ate, I rooted around in the fridge, looking for something for myself.
Ryan came in for cleaning supplies and apologized for the lack of groceries. “We have a housekeeper who did all the shopping, but she quit,” he said.
“That’s okay. I f
ound bread and lunchmeat. How’s Jessie?”
“She’s in a lot of pain, but the dog thing really freaked her out. I need to clean this up—” he gestured toward the living room—“before she sees it.”
I wondered how bad her headache could be if she could bellow as she had, but whatever.
With a wad of paper towels in one hand and a wastebasket in the other, Ryan headed back to the living room.
The vacuum cleaner roared while the kids and I ate. After lunch, Sunshine and Christopher went to their rooms. I cleaned up the kitchen, wondering where I would be staying. The family had only moved in a year ago, and I’d only seen bits of it in our video calls, so I was unfamiliar with the layout.
I found a clean place to sit in the living room and distracted myself with a novel.
A while later, Jessie padded into the room and sat down beside me. I looked up, astonished. She was in a tee shirt and pajama pants. Her hair was banded in a ponytail, looking as if she’d slept with it that way. Her eyes were bleary.
“Hey.” I gave her a nice long hug. “How’s your headache?”
She bent her head, rubbed her face with both hands. “I don’t have a headache.”
“So why—”
“I couldn’t face it again. Not one more day of it.”
“Whoa, back up. Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”
“Is it too early for wine?”
“Never.” I went to the kitchen, found a bottle, and poured us both a glass. When I returned to the living room, Jessie had switched on the gas fireplace. She tucked her feet up underneath her and took the wine from me.
“So, we’re just really busy,” she said. Since she and Ryan had settled in Denver, they’d worked hard, building their respective businesses while trying to make a good home for the kids. But it was tough.
Six years ago, when Jessie took refuge in my trailer in Key Largo, she borrowed my sewing machine and did mending and alterations for the community. She also had a keen eye for finding consignment clothing that could be refurbished and sold. This became the basis for her online business, now successful enough to have gained national attention.
Ryan started out as a software developer. He was a creative genius, and some of his ideas took off. Individually, he and Jessie had done well. Together, it was a fortune. Now they were in their early thirties, both runaway successes, and totally in over their heads.
Jessie was depressed. The kids were suffering. Her marriage was suffering. Her health was suffering. And she didn’t know what to do.
“I’m really worried about Christopher,” she said, her eyes brimming. “It’s like he’s getting wilder every day, and just uncontrollable, you know? And the wilder he gets, the quieter Sunshine gets. I’m a terrible mother, but I can’t do it all, and it’s killing me.”
“Hire help,” I said. “You can afford it.”
“They don’t stay. We’ve had housekeepers, nannies, butlers, even a chief of staff. That one was the worst,” she said. “I had to fire her, too. But it gets easier after a while—the firing. Sometimes they just walk off the job, which saves me the trouble.” She gave me a sardonic smile.
After a lifetime in human resources, I knew what she was going through. Every failure made you question yourself.
“Ah, well.” Jessie squared her shoulders. “Don’t listen to me. I’ll figure things out.”
I hoped she did. I didn’t think she or her family could take much more.
That night, we ate take-out pizza together in the living room. The box was sliding around on the coffee table, and at least one slice of pie landed on the rug upside down. Ryan picked at his dinner, not seeming to notice the food as he double-thumbed his smartphone, probably working or perhaps escaping into a fantasy sports game. Jessie sat cross-legged on the double recliner with a laptop, a slice of pizza and a glass of wine—her third or fourth. Sunshine, sitting at a distant chair near a window, had her nose in an ebook. Christopher ran around the room while eating, and he got yelled at a few times, but neither parent followed through.
I could hear the distant booming of a bass track coming from the nearby casita, where Jared apparently lived with friends, a couple of whom I’d seen sitting by the covered pool, smoking pot and drinking beer in the cold Colorado afternoon. When I had asked Jessie about them, she said they were part of Ryan’s “creative team,” but from the look on her face, I gathered she was as unhappy about them being there as I was. Between the dog pack and the man pack, I wondered aloud if the kids were ever allowed outside, unsupervised.
“Not really,” Jessie had said. “But we have a basement with a bowling alley.”
I was curious about Ryan. He was a loving daddy, I could tell, but distracted. Although he’d jumped like a servant when she hollered to him earlier.
So I’d asked about that, too.
“He’s really good with the kids,” she said. And nothing more.
I dropped it.
So we ate, and the kids made noise, and then there were baths, and then Jessie said she was beat and asked if we could visit in the morning.
I went to my room, a nice private suite in the front of the house.
Lying on the bed, I called Curt’s number, not really thinking he had reception. But to my delight, he answered. The ship was docked in Galveston. I didn’t want to complain but hearing his voice, so comforting and reassuring, it just came tumbling out, how upsetting it was to see Jessie’s family like this, and how uncomfortable I was. And we hadn’t even gotten into the Sandy problem. With everything else going on, I’d forgotten to ask Jessie for an update on her mother.
“I came to help but almost wish I’d told her I was busy.”
“But she’d be out there in Colorado, falling apart alone,” he said.
How well he knew me. Seeing Jessie like this, I had to try to help. I didn’t want her to have a nervous breakdown. As soon as I thought it, I remembered that was exactly what happened to her mom.
I changed the subject. “Tell me about your day,” I said, hoping his answer would lift my mood.
He was all excited, having spent the day cruising around in the Gulf of Mexico on the client’s ship, checking on various sites, plots, and installations owned by the company. There was a possibility the company would want him to sign on for longer.
I wondered how that would work, him having a wife and all. But I was too tired to say it.
“There might be a problem with me getting home when I thought I would,” he said.
“More than three or four days?”
“My client wants to go farther out, almost to South America,” he said.
“What fun,” I said with fake enthusiasm. “It’ll be like a little cruise.”
We said our I love yous and goodbye, and I hung up and stared at the ceiling for a long, long time before falling asleep.
Chapter 19
THE NEXT MORNING, I was dying for a cup of coffee, but in the kitchen, the pot was unplugged and dusty. I poked around in the cupboards for any kind of caffeine product but came up empty.
It was early. The house was quiet. I wandered back to my room, past the kids’ rooms which were still dark, thank God. Jessie’s room, too.
But farther down the wing, past my bedroom, I spotted a light behind a door that was slightly ajar. I retied my robe and went to investigate.
Peering in, I saw Jessie in what looked like her office. Her back was to me. She sat at a desk, one leg tucked underneath her, a bottle of cola at her elbow. I tapped softly on the doorjamb and pushed the door open.
“Good morning.” Her smile was tired but genuine. “Hang on for a sec, Karen. I’m on the phone.”
While she handled her phone call, I looked around the office. The walls were covered with cork board, to which were pinned swatches of fabric, buttons and ribbons, and colored sticky notes. Photographs of models and photo shoot locations bore witness to the many other decisions Jessie had to deal with each day.
She hung up. “I have a shipmen
t coming to the warehouse in three hours. It wasn’t due until tomorrow, so that’s good, but it’s short notice. I’ll need to get my crew to come in a day early.”
Crew, shipment, warehouse. Despite my concerns, I was proud of her. Jessie had been penniless a few years ago when she and Sunshine found me in an RV park in Key Largo. “Can you take a few minutes for a coffee break? I have so much to tell you.”
“I would love to, but I can’t,” she said without looking up from her keyboard and screen. “Today’s going to be insane. I need to get as much done as possible, early.”
At least I understood that part, having been an early-bird all my life, as well as a workaholic. But I wasn’t going to let her off the hook. “Promise me lunch?”
“You got it,” she mumbled, already falling down the rabbit hole of business.
“One last thing, and I’ll leave you alone,” I said. “Where are the coffee fixings? I’ll make it, but I can’t find anything.”
“That’s because we’re out. We have been for a while. I usually just go to the coffee place in the village. Here, take my car.” She reached for her purse and fished out her keys. “I’ll tell the housekeeper—oops, gotta call the agency about that. Except. Shit.”
“What?”
“The last time I called them, they told me they didn’t have anybody. I knew what they meant. They don’t want to help me anymore.” She dropped her head into her hands.
“What about all the guys you have running around here? Ryan’s friends? Surely you could hand one of them a list and a couple hundred bucks and have them run down the hill to the grocery store.”
“I tried that. Never saw the guy again. Shit, shit, shit.”
She sat up. Turned around and looked at me. “You could help me.”
“Grocery shopping?”
“No, finding me some workers! Find me some people who won’t leave the first time they see a pack of dogs murder a chicken in the living room.” Her laugh didn’t sound funny. “Seriously.” Jessie sat forward. “Do you think you can find me some help?”
I took a deep breath. I knew I could do the job. My entire career had been spent finding staff for every kind of job from custodian to brain surgeon. But this was different. It was much more intimate—I’d be hiring people to come into the very world of Jessie’s family—and I didn’t want to screw it up. Or worse.
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