by Nancy Adams
Soon they made it to Jose’s street and stopped outside his little one-story house with chain-link fence.
“Well, I’ll see you on Monday, Jules my man,” Jose said as he got out.
“See you then, kid. Be safe.”
“I will.”
With that, Jules watched him go to his front door. Jose’s wife, Gabriella, opened it the moment his feet stepped onto the pathway, taking him in her arms and kissing him as soon as he reached her at the door. Jules loved to watch this scene. Gabriella would sit in the house all day, and around the time Jose was due home, her ears would begin to listen out for the telltale sound of Jules’s old Toyota bumbling down the street. She never failed to meet Jose at the door, and Jules found it an exceptionally pure sign of love.
As she hugged her love, Gabriella looked over Jose’s shoulder and saw Jules in the truck. She smiled and waved at him and the old man returned the compliment with relish. He always waited to see this little scene, to get a glimpse of the tenderness that existed between the two. Jose was often acting the hard-ass, but inside, the kid was a very caring person.
Having waited, Jules put the truck in gear and rolled out of there.
A half hour later, he was driving under the big archway sign of Miller’s Trailer Park, driving down the driveway and toward No.56. When he reached it, he parked up outside, took his empty lunchbox from the truck and let himself into the trailer. The moment he was inside, he could hear the joyful sounds of Juliette bathing David.
“Hey, guys,” Jules called out as he took his shoes off at the door.
“Hey, Pa,” came David’s voice.
“Hey, love,” Juliette’s followed.
Having removed his boots, Jules walked to the bathroom and found a mess inside. Everywhere was covered in paint, much of it now soaked into the water of the bathtub, but most of it on David’s bundle of little clothes that sat stacked up at the far end of the cramped bathroom. Kneeling down beside the tub, and looking pretty messy herself, was Juliette.
The moment Jules walked in, she smiled up at him and he bent down, kissing her delicately on the lips. David suddenly stood his little frame up in the bath, splashing water everywhere as he did, and came rushing over to them, placing his arms around Jules and embracing him, making the old man very wet in the process.
“Hey, you little scamp,” Jules let out, before placing his arm around the naked boy.
When he’d said his hellos, Jules took a seat on the toilet while Juliette bathed David.
“So you been painting?” he inquired playfully.
“How’d you guess!?” Juliette replied.
“We been painting and doing maths, Pa,” David said as he swished the water around while Juliette attempted to wash the paint out of his hair.
“Painting by numbers, huh?”
“No,” the boy let out, screwing his face up at his father’s stupidity.
“So did Mrs. Smyth pay you?” Juliette asked Jules.
Turning a warm face to her, he said, “Yeah. But not all of it. She claims that they’re broke until next month.”
“My word, Jules,” Juliette exclaimed, turning from the boy and facing her husband with a wrathful look, “you’re too soft. Those people live in a four-bedroom mansion and we in a four-room trailer. You did the work, didn’t you? Did they like it?”
“Yeah, Mrs. Smyth is gonna get me some more work in the neighborhood.”
“So she liked it, but she couldn’t pay it all?”
“No. They’ve had a bad week.”
“It’s always a bad week for us, Jules. I wanted to buy David some new clothes for the summer and make it an okay week. So how much did you get?”
“I got half—one thousand five hundred dollars.”
“So I take it you only paid Jose half and we got a thousand left?”
“No,” Jules said, taking his eyes away from her. “I didn’t tell Jose about Mrs. Smyth only giving me half and I gave him his full cut.”
Juliette opened her eyes wide.
“You’re telling me,” she began with barely restrained fury, “that we have five hundred dollars to last us nearly a month?”
“Look, Mrs. Smyth’ll pay me in two weeks, so we only gotta last until—”
“Last until when?” she interrupted, David looking at her with a worried expression on his tiny face. “How long will we last like this? You’re too soft, Jules Lee. You’re a starving man yourself and yet you see another starving man and cut off your legs to feed him!”
David looked at his mother in confusion.
“I’m sorry, love,” Jules softly mumbled, a hangdog expression across his chops.
She sat in silence gazing at him for a moment and, seeing his forlorn expression, gradually softened and felt her fury abate.
“You make me soft too,” she grumbled. “I suppose in a world as evil as this, I shouldn’t chastise someone for being good in his heart. Even if he is a silly old fool!”
“I’m sorry, love.”
“You don’t need to be sorry, Jules. It’s okay. I’ll buy David some summer clothes in two weeks when that tight bi…” She stopped herself and glanced at David, before turning back to Jules and continuing, “That tight woman pays up.”
Jules gave her a withered smile and the two sat there facing each other for a moment.
“Momma,” David suddenly said, “why is Papa gonna feed himself to other people?”
Juliette turned to the boy with a smile and said, “Momma was being a silly old woman. No one’s gonna eat Papa—only Momma and David get to eat Papa. Isn’t that right?”
Smiling all over, she took the little boy in her arms and squeezed him tight, making him giggle. Jules came over and kissed them both on the top of the head, before leaving.
He went out into the kitchen and sat himself down at the table, his head heavy with thought.
In the past five years, Jules and Juliette had received their fair share of ills and misfortune. There was a reason that they were living in a trailer and not in Venice Beach anymore. When Margot and Claude had died, Jules and Juliette became David’s legal guardians, just as it had been drawn out. It was supposed to mean that Margot’s money would be available for the boy’s upbringing. However, Margot never got that far with the planning of what would happen in case she and Claude died. She’d made the couple the legal guardians in case of their deaths, but she’d never thought enough about her death to go as far as sorting out financial aid for the boy in such a case. She very likely would’ve, but she didn’t have much time before that fateful night when she saved a deer and condemned herself and Claude. If she had looked into her finances, Margot would have discovered something odd about them. She would have realized that she actually owned nothing by law. Not even her bank accounts were legally hers. As previously mentioned, a long time ago Margot left all her financial dealings to her brothers, and the dubious pair had tied it all up so that no one could get to it when she died. When Margot had first introduced them to Claude, they had immediately decided that their sister was liable to lose everything to this man—whom they hated the instant they met him—and had gone about locking all of her money away.
That meant that when Jules and Juliette took over care of David, there was nothing of Margot’s linked to him and all the aging couple got was another mouth to feed. When the news of Margot’s beastly brothers’ dealings first emerged, they had deliberated for several days as to what to do with the boy, whether to place him into the care of the state. But in the end, they found themselves unable to give him up, and so Jules had immediately gotten a job.
If it wasn’t enough to find themselves with a child to care for with no means of support, it was equally bad when Juliette lost the apartment in Venice Beach. Like everything else of Margot’s, it was owned by the family, and they wasted no time in evicting Jules and Juliette. This was, of course, what brought them to Miller’s Trailer Park and its eclectic rabble of listless creatures and families on the edge. They were sixty now
, and the pair worried how they would see David through until college when he was eighteen. They would be seventy-three by then, and Jules would still be working hard to make sure that David had enough money for school. It was a terrible place to be in at their age.
It did all, however, carry a silver lining. A silver lining that cast all the rest of the dark clouds away.
They had the boy.
They had David.
CHAPTER FOUR
Claire, Paul, June and Kyle were at Bloomingdales Department Store. They’d just been to Liberty Island to visit the famous statue there and were now in full shopping mode. Well, Claire and June were, anyway. Paul and Kyle merely found themselves anywhere they could to sit with the bags while the women scanned the store with their laser-sharp shopping eyes, their restless minds pushing them on relentlessly as they went from aisle to aisle, shop to shop, one merging into the other for the despairing men.
“Your mom and sister are machines,” Paul remarked to Kyle as they sat on a ledge in front of some mannequins.
“Man, you’ve only been putting up with this for five years,” Kyle put back to him. “Some of my earliest memories are of watching those two from a pushchair while they shop for hours. Almost a fifth of my life has been spent following Ma or Claire around a store.”
This made Paul laugh out loud.
“Man, even after a ten-hour shift at the hospital,” he giggled, “Claire’s running around with your Ma, nothing but shopping in her mind.”
“They’re animals when it comes to shopping!”
“Anyway, I forgot to ask,” Paul began once he’d controlled his mirth, “how’s college going?”
“Real good. Finals went really well and I await my results with confidence rather than hope.”
“That’s awesome, Kyle. Keep your mom proud and happy.”
“Yeah—and off my back with her worry!”
Paul nodded and smiled at this. He knew all about June and her worries. She had so much love inside of her that she couldn’t live unless the people around her were happy. Not just pretend happy, but real happy. It couldn’t be faked. She lived her life vicariously through her family and had a nose for unhappiness in her children, able to sense the slightest note of sadness in their voices. She had detected something was up with her daughter while Claire had been pregnant and she hadn’t been wrong. Of course she never knew outright—June Prior remained outside the greatest secret her daughter ever kept—but she was right that something was up, even if it was never proven.
Only in the aftermath was June able to truly relax, when she could finally sense happiness in her daughter’s voice after so long. That happiness had now thankfully become habit, and for these past five years June had been inundated with pleasure via her daughter. The mother was riding on a cloud. To add to this, Kyle had gotten into college and was now one step closer to becoming a lawyer: something both she and his father had always wished for him. And her husband Joe, although still sullen, had been better these past years as his business had grown into a multi-state organization and his political career for the RNC had begun. At this current point in her life, June Prior was as content as any person could be.
“Anyway,” Kyle began after a brief pause between the two, “how’s being a doctor?”
Paul had to think about this for a moment.
“I guess the first thing to say is that I’m not a doctor yet: I simply follow one around and take notes on what they do. I only ever perform small stuff like taking blood, administering medication and simple diagnosis. But all of that is with someone watching.”
“You screwed up yet?”
“Not in any big sense, but I did struggle to find a vein in a six-year-old boy I had to take blood from.”
“Did you hurt the kid?”
“A little. I missed a vein and made his arm bleed a bit. I just panicked slightly because it was a kid. I’d done the same thing dozens of times with older patients, but this boy’s arm was so small in my grasp. I panicked and began shaking. In the end I messed it up and a nurse had to take over.”
“Were the kid’s parents upset?”
Paul gave a half smile and said, “Not really. It made the kid cry. That was the worst thing. He’d been so good up until that point and I’d messed it up. He was likely to never trust a doctor again. I felt real bad for him because I owed it to him to be calm and administer the care that he needed. But I failed because I lost my nerve.”
“I guess it’s not that bad.”
“No, not at all. I know some people who have messed up much worse.”
“Yeah, like what?” Kyle inquired with widened eyes.
“Do you know what a colonoscopy is?”
“Something to do with your butt?”
“Bingo! It’s when a doctor shoves a camera up there to investigate your large intestine.”
“Ouch!”
“Anyway, one of the residents at St. Pancras was told to administer one. However, the doctor that was supervising him wasn’t paying attention, so he didn’t notice that the resident hadn’t placed any lubricant on the end of it!”
“No way!?”
“Yes way! The guy struggled for ten minutes to get this dry length of tubing up the patient’s ass, while the poor guy lay on his front gritting his teeth together. The doctor finally paid attention when the patient screamed out loud after a pretty hefty push and noticed there was no lube. Suffice to say the patient was pissed off and wanted retribution. Especially after he couldn’t sit down comfortably for three days!”
Kyle began laughing and remarked, “What a pain in the ass!”
This made Paul giggle along with him and the two fell into laughter.
Once he’d controlled his sniggering, Kyle turned to Paul and inquired, “So has Claire messed up yet?”
Paul smiled dreamily at the thought of his love, before replying, “No. Your sister could work the wards for another hundred years and she wouldn’t screw up. She’s the closest thing to perfection, Kyle. She’s so focused on what she needs to be. You know I watch your sister sometimes and I’m in awe of her, of how she does it.”
Paul stopped himself, not wanting to reveal too much to Kyle. So he simply sat there in a daydream.
“My gosh, Paul,” Kyle exclaimed after a moment, “could you be any more in love with her? I feel like I could get diabetes if I spent too long listening to you talk about her.”
Paul grinned at this and remarked, “You’ll know what I mean if you’re ever lucky enough to meet someone like your sister.”
“Well, I’ve known Claire my whole life and I wouldn’t refer to it as luck!”
Paul smiled at Kyle’s wit and the two continued to stare out at the endless aisles of clothing, waiting for Claire and June to come and fetch them.
CHAPTER FIVE
While Paul and Kyle chatted, June stood outside the changing rooms awaiting the emergence of her daughter. Just as her anticipation reached fever pitch, the door to Claire’s cubicle swung open, revealing the girl in a very pretty cocktail dress made of a cream material with red roses printed on it. June’s smile threatened to lift her cheekbones all the way off of her face as she beheld her beautiful daughter in all her glory. Her tall figure, long slender legs, pert little hips, long neck and pretty, oval face, made June so overjoyed that Claire had come from her. She was mighty proud of her daughter’s beauty as it reflected her own.
“How do I look, ma?” Claire asked, giving June a little twirl as she did.
The mother beamed with an inner glory that made Claire smile to see.
“You look beautiful, honey. Would you like me to get Paul?”
“It’s okay, Ma. I wanna surprise him with it later.”
“Oh! Well, I’m sure he’ll be speechless!”
Claire returned to the changing room and got dressed. After that they paid for the goods and went to fetch the boys. When they reached them, they found Kyle and Paul giggling together. On seeing this, June and Claire stopped and gazed up at th
em.
“Can we eat now?” Kyle asked.
“We were gonna visit one more store,” Claire put to her brother.
This made Kyle groan and drop his head despondently between his shoulders.
“Come on!” he uttered. “I haven’t eaten for five hours, I’m dying here.”
“Can’t we eat first and then visit the store?” Paul offered the women.
Claire and June looked instantly disappointed at this news, groaned a little and then gave into the boys’ wishes.
Ten minutes later they were all seated around a table at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse in mid-town Manhattan, just around the corner from Times Square. June couldn’t help twisting herself around in her seat as she glanced about at the opulence of the tall-ceilinged restaurant. When the waiter came over, Paul ordered wine and there was the usual hassle when he asked for four glasses.
“Oh no! Only three,” June protested.
“Ma!” Kyle let out.
Turning sharply on her son, June whispered, “You’re not twenty-one yet.”
“Come on, June,” Paul put in. “A small glass of wine with his lunch won’t hurt.”
In the end, as she always did, June relented and allowed her son to drink. It was always the same when they dined out. A few minutes later the wine arrived, with four glasses, and they were all ready to order. Kyle got a sixteen-ounce prime ribeye steak with chateau mashed potatoes and green beans. Paul also went for the ribeye. June ordered the sesame-seared tuna steak and Claire went for the crab cakes with a potato gratin. The food arrived and they began eating heartily.
“I nearly forgot to say,” Claire said as she paused her eating, “Annabel—I mean, Dr. Kline—asked me to go to some exhibition tomorrow night.”
“An exhibition?” Paul let out. “What’s it about?”
Claire frowned slightly and then answered, “You know what, I’m not sure. It’s one of our corporate sponsors and they’re throwing some show here in New York on pharmaceutical technologies.”
“No way!” Kyle interjected. “You’re going to the T7!?”
