by Judy Baer
“I should think so. I’m going to make you explain all those broken pencils to Harry. That will make you feel absolutely ridiculous.”
I left the office at five, hoping that Kim would feel better now that she’d destroyed a little office equipment, but I forgot my concern when I heard my stomach growl. Well, maybe not growl, but I did hear a faint purr coming from the direction of my waistband.
Being budget-conscious, hungry and in need of groceries is a triple threat. My logic went like this:
I really hate to spend anymore money on groceries this week. Why I thought it was a smart idea to spend an entire week’s grocery money on surf and turf for dinner last Saturday night, I’ll never know.
Because I’ve been feeling guilty about overspending my budget, I’ve been serving Chase beans ever since to make up for it. Not only is that a gastric disaster, but there are only so many ways to cook beans before one’s recipes, one’s creativity or one’s husband runs out.
But we still need to eat. And I’m starving right now. If I don’t put something in my stomach soon, I’ll…I’ll… I’ll what?
I have never been truly, dangerously hungry, not the kind of hungry that demands I eat or risk fainting dead away. I’m usually just mouth hungry. It’s my taste buds that are starving, not my body, and they’re usually starving for chocolate, chips and dip, pretzels, ice cream, cheesecake, cookies or coconut cream pie.
I will just buy things that are on sale…fruit…vegetables…Beano…whole grains…healthy foods…
Money spent on reasonably priced food that’s good for me is a balm and a benefit to my budget and my conscience.
Almost without knowing how I got there, I found myself in the parking lot of one of those huge warehouse stores.
I’m always amazed by these warehouse clubs. They sell everything from ink to olive oil, tires to croissants, and rice in sacks large enough to feed small cities.
I don’t know why I go anywhere else, I thought as I pushed a cart as large as a horse trailer down the aisle. I can buy my underwear, my sheets and towels, my beauty products and a garlic-roasted chicken right here, all conveniently under one roof. If I need caviar or a water cooler, here it is.
Well, maybe if I go somewhere else, it’s because they don’t force you to buy eggs three dozen per carton, orange juice in jugs larger than our water heater and enough blue cheese to depress an entire therapy group.
But it’s so sensible! So good for the budget! So cheap!
And I, to make matters worse, was so hungry.
I tripped down the aisles filling my cart and feeling virtuous. Why, not only was I saving money, but I was on my way to ensuring that Chase had a healthy heart. After all, I had ten pounds of carrots and a sack of flaxseed in my cart. That had to count for something. And we would never again spread germs to our family and friends once I purchased four gallons of antiseptic hand soap and a tank of bleach. And trail mix. Trail mix is definitely nutritious. Can’t pass that up!
Then, happily, the little ladies who do the food demonstrations began to set up shop. Samples of pork loin and blue corn chips with pineapple salsa provided sustenance and enough energy to push the cart, which was getting heavier and heavier. And who knew how delicious a combination of carrot and pineapple juice could be? Two bottles for the price of one! Sample sausage rolls. Yum. Baby éclairs. Mangoes straight from the tropics. My mouth was in ecstasy. Caught up in a veritable cyclone of flavors and bargains, I tossed food into my cart the way a farmer loads bales of hay.
By the time I reached the checkout line, my cart was almost as full as that of the woman ahead of me, who told me she had a family of twelve.
Once the checker had scanned all my healthy bargains, told me the amount I owed and called for a paramedic to revive me from sticker shock, they sent me on my way, gamely pushing a flatbed full of food to my car.
Now why, I ask myself, didn’t I just acknowledge that a snack would be good, stop at the Dairy Queen, get myself a small cone and save myself four hundred dollars? Not counting, of course, the cost of the 15,000 minutes on the phone cards I grabbed just before I passed out.
Fortunately, Chase had stopped for a pizza. I was too tired to cook and too full from all those samples.
“How many get-togethers did you say we had to have to get rid of this stuff?”
“Two large brunches, a sit-down dinner and a Super Bowl party should do it.”
“I’ll take some of it to the site while we do those house renovations. Men with hammers tend to get hungry.”
I kissed him gratefully. He’d helped me unload the car without comment—okay, without much comment—and sat down, rather than fainted, when I showed him the bill.
“You are my dream man, do you know that, Chase?”
“Bad dream?” he teased, tucking me beneath his arm, where I could feel his heart beating.
“You know better than that. Besides, if I’m going to have a nightmare, it’s going to come from the office.”
Chase whistled when I was done telling him about my morning among the hormonal, hysterical females at Innova.
“And to top it off, Bryan went home sick. I didn’t think he could get any paler than he’s been recently, but he did.”
Bryan’s been acting very strangely lately. That’s saying a lot, because he’s always strange. I’m sure it takes effort to be even more so. Besides Bryan leaping out of closets trying to catch someone stealing his pierogi, and Harry’s recurring hairdo, which resembles a series of punctuation marks floating over his head—not a bad visual for his state of mind, really—Betty has been selling Mitzi’s shoes on eBay during her lunch hour. Mitzi runs off to take her temperature every half hour, even though the only time it counts is in the morning, and Kim pores over information about adoption. I am the only one holding the office together, and I am running out of masking tape.
Chase, thankfully, is my glue. I’d be completely undone without him.
He massaged my neck, brought me hot chocolate and warm blankets and rubbed my feet. Bliss. Then he held me in his arms and kissed me like there was no tomorrow.
Now if only Mr. Tibble and Scram had not shredded the lovely artificial ficus tree I’d purchased at the warehouse club, life would be perfect.
Chapter Eleven
Thursday, April 15
“I forgive Mitzi for everything,” Kim said as she handed me a sheet of paper. “Well, maybe not everything, but for a lot.”
I put down a spreadsheet that was making my eyes cross and picked up the paper. With Mitzi, there’s always plenty to forgive.
“She noticed I was upset yesterday about the adoption paperwork. She handed this to me this morning and suggested that someone should start asking the kids for their list of parental qualifications, instead of the other way around.”
So whatever Mitzi was typing yesterday had nothing whatsoever to do with Innova. Business as usual.
WHAT A CHILD WANTS IN
AN ADOPTIVE PARENT
Personal and family background:
Children prefer parents who are:
toy store owners
circus clowns
golden retrievers
Required parental abilities:
Parents must be able to:
fingerpaint
play with blocks and dolls for hours on end
reread the same book five thousand times without complaining
show willingness to eat mud pies on demand.
Motivation to adopt:
wants entire house decorated with crayon drawings
prefers stained carpets to clean ones
desires less sleep, fewer adult conversations and more cuddling
Family environment:
no furniture or flooring that can be ruined by grapejuice
bottom drawers in kitchen filled with Tupperware, wooden spoons and small, lightweight pans for banging
dog(s) available to clean child’s face so that child may avoid trauma of washcloth
; Physical and health history for adoptive parents:
squishy enough for cuddling
fast enough to keep up
energetic enough to spend entire nights walking floor
Education:
trained and certified in both Dr
Spock and Dr. Seuss
Employment:
Parents preferably employed at
pet store
Toys “R” Us
amusement park
I was unable to stop a smile from spreading across my face. “Good for Mitzi.”
“There’s more to her than you might first think,” Kim marveled. “She surprises me all the time.”
“It’s her unique combination of intelligence, cunning, flightiness, idiocy and fashion savvy. One sees that so seldom these days.”
“Do you think she will be able to get pregnant, Whitney? It would be dreadful if she couldn’t. I, at least, have Wesley.”
Friday, April 16
I watched Mitzi breeze into the office in her usual flurry. She wore her hair piled high on her head. Three-inch-long earrings dangled from her lobes, and fake eyelashes that looked like tarantulas flapped against her cheeks. Something big must have happened for her to go all out like that. I glanced at my watch to time her. Usually, Mitzi can’t keep information to herself for more than two minutes—three, tops.
She sat at her desk looking coy and immediately busied herself with the files I’d left for her.
Something’s up. Mitzi never gets right to work. In fact, Mitzi rarely gets to work at all—and never before 10:00 a.m. There’s funny business going on.
I sauntered toward her desk to investigate her aberrant behavior. She was humming to herself and happily tending to the files, just like a normal employee. Scary. I’d never seen her act like that before. Normal, I mean.
Kim noticed the same thing and headed for Mitzi’s desk from the opposite side of the room.
“Mitzi,” I began. “You aren’t complaining about anything and you got right to work. Is something wrong? What’s—” I sniffed the air “—that smell?”
Kim put her hand over her nose and grimaced. “Wherever you got that perfume, you should take it back. It’s nasty.”
“It’s not perfume. It’s aromatherapy. There’s a difference.”
“That’s probably true,” I admitted. “If I have to smell that aroma all day, I probably am going to need therapy.”
“What is it?” Kim looked curiously at the source of the odor.
“Betty found some recipes on the Internet. I combined a couple of them, just to make sure I got the full effect. It is cinnamon, clove, onion, garlic, camphor, lavender and lemon.”
“The question is, why?”
Mitzi is a master of the pitying look. “Whitney, don’t you know anything? It’s an alternative therapy. A woman in the adjoining pedicure bay at my salon told me it really helped her. She got pregnant almost immediately after she began aromatherapy.”
So this woman did have qualifications for dispensing medical advice…smooth feet.
Lest I become too superior-acting, I have to remember that there may be something to that. Mary washed Jesus’s feet with nard as an unsparing tribute. When I was a child, the pastor of my church brought a tiny vial of nard back from his travels in the Himalayas. To this day, I can remember the warm, fragrant muskiness and imagine its scent filling the room Christ and his followers inhabited.
“Mitzi, do you actually think this is going to help?” Kim wondered. “Smelling like either a perfumery or a fertilizer factory isn’t going to…”
To our amazement, Mitzi’s eyes filled with tears. “I have to try everything, don’t I?” she said fiercely. “Everything.”
“Have you prayed, Mitzi?” I asked softly, but she didn’t seem to hear me. Her aroma was so thick it had probably clogged her ears as it had my olfactory glands.
Harry called me into his office after lunch. His ever-growing forehead was creased in a series of deep furrows. He gestured me into a chair, leaned forward with his elbows on his desk and wove his fingers together to make a single fist. His gaze burned into my eyes. “Whitney, you have got to do something about your staff!”
My staff?
“Excuse me?” Should I be getting excited? Had Harry just handed Innova to me on a silver platter? Or have we unintentionally developed one of those parenting/management styles in which when the children are good they belong to him and when they’re bad they belong to me?
My parents used to play that game. “Why is your daughter making mud pies on my tool bench?” vs. “That’s my daughter who hit that home run. She obviously takes after me when I was a boy.”
“I know how they are, Harry, but it’s not any worse than usual, is it?”
“Mitzi smells like a compost heap, Bryan is weirder than usual, Betty uses every break and her lunch hour to sell shoes on eBay, Kim stares dreamily into space, and you…” He searched for something to say. “Well, you’re okay, but that’s only one out of five.”
There’s no use arguing. He’s right. The monkeys have taken over the zoo.
“What do you suggest?”
“Tell Mitzi that she has to keep her ‘alternative therapies’ at home. Yesterday I caught her ‘meditating’ in my office because it was quiet in here. And make Bryan go to a doctor or something. And talk to Betty and Kim. Tell them you want them to pay attention here at work.”
“Right.” As if anything I said would help!
But Harry, who thinks I can do anything, looked relieved. “Take care of it, Whitney.”
A question burned on the tip of my tongue. “Why do you put up with us, Harry?”
He considered the question a moment before answering. “Because, somehow, in spite of everyone, this office is productive. Flaky as this place looks from the outside, we all know how to come through in a pinch.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “And you know how to protect me from most of the lunacy, that’s why.”
In a painfully honest admission, Harry added, “Because I like them. I like you. We work well together.” Then he scowled. “But feel free to fire them all if you have to.”
“I’ll take care of it, Harry. Don’t worry. Just go back to work.”
His sigh of relief filled the room, and before I reached the door, he’d tuned me out completely.
Now what? I wondered. Where to start?
Why couldn’t Harry have asked me to do something simple, like make us a Fortune 500 company overnight?
I love my job.
Chapter Twelve
Saturday, April 17
“Tell me again whose brilliant idea this was?” Kim growled as she flung herself into the backseat of our car, wearing old jeans and a red-and-black buffalo plaid jacket, a stocking cap and a scowl.
Kurt slid in behind her, wearing a matching jacket and a huge grin. “Don’t mind Kim, she’ll be fine when she wakes up.” He handed her a thermos. “Here, have some more coffee.”
I looked at Chase, who, even after a night in the emergency room with patients, looked incredibly handsome in a fleece-lined denim jacket, black jeans and a blue turtleneck that made his eyes look an inky blue. I could have used a few more hours of shut-eye, myself.
We had snapped at each other this morning as we tripped over one another to get ready. Chase has been short-tempered the last couple days. It’s stress, I know, but sometimes I lose my patience. He tells his patients how to avoid stress. Doesn’t he hear himself talking?
How we got talked into coming with the guys on the first day of their renovation project is beyond me, other than the fact that Mitzi had announced that she’d be helping, too. Kim and I were just too curious to stay home. Besides, it’s for a first-rate cause.
“The family who lives in this home has five children,” Kurt said. “The father had surgery recently and hasn’t been able to keep up with the house. It’s so leaky that they were warming more air outside the building than in. We’ve committed to sealing the leaks,
repairing the holes in the walls and making the home warm and cozy again.”
Chase has always taken James 1:27 seriously. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress.” Sometimes donating money to a cause isn’t enough. He’s thrilled about an opportunity to put his hand to a hammer and actually see the difference he’s making.
Still, I couldn’t imagine what good Kim, Mitzi and I would do. I can learn how to install flashing on a door, seal a draft or insulate a pipe, but Mitzi? Unless the techniques for applying plaster and nail polish are the same, we’re in for an interesting time.
“I see the problem,” Kim said as we arrived at our destination.
The house, an old white two-story built in the 1940s, was showing its age. Badly hung shutters matched the green roof. The enclosed front porch drooped low on one corner, making the front door hang kittywampus. The house looked sad. It was, just like its family, crying out for some tender loving care.
Arch and several others were standing on the sidewalk, talking to a man on crutches with his foot swathed in bandages. Mitzi was nowhere in sight.
A woman carrying a child on her hip exited the house, followed by four more children, all under the age of ten. Her gaze scanned the crowd and settled on me.
“Are you the wife of one of these doctors?” she asked, awe in her voice. “This is the most wonderful thing you’re doing….”
I laid my hand on her arm. “Thanks for accepting their offer to help. My husband is delighted to be doing something tangible and concrete. It’s one thing to talk about helping someone, it’s quite another to do it.”
To my surprise, tears filled her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. “I didn’t know anything like this could happen to us. When my husband lost his job, he didn’t expect to have such a hard time finding another. Then, when he had to have surgery…” She looked at me as if she weren’t sure she should say what was coming next.
“I finally tried praying, even though I didn’t think it would do any good. And now…” She looked at the activity around her in wonderment. A truck had arrived with new storm windows and doors that Chase and Kurt were helping to unload. “Maybe there is a God after all.”
