by Lila Monroe
The kids have a tough night, one crisis after another: First Ezra has a nightmare, then Lottie gets a stomach ache, then Ezra catches the stomach ache—which might or might not be real, I can’t tell—from his sister. I could let Cal deal with it—and I almost do—but instead I find myself throwing back the covers and meeting him in the hallway each time someone calls out, grateful that neither one of the kids seems to wonder why we’re sleeping on opposite sides of the house.
The rough night makes for an even rougher morning. I’m dragging ass from the moment the alarm goes off. I find Cal sitting on the edge of his mattress in his pajamas, staring blankly at a single sock in his hand. This house has a normal, workable coffeemaker instead of the spaceship model from Cal’s ice palace, thank goodness. Still, there isn’t enough caffeine in the world.
“I don’t want to go in today,” Lottie announces, sprawling dramatically in a kitchen chair and leaning her head back, her long hair almost touching the hardwood floor.
I raise my eyebrows, looking at her carefully. She’s still wearing her nightgown, though we need to leave in—I check the clock on the microwave—seven minutes if we don’t want to be late. “Does your stomach still hurt?” I ask.
“Um,” she says—considering that, like the idea is just occurring to her. “. . . maybe?”
“Lottie, kiddo,” Cal says, coming into the kitchen and taking the cup of coffee I hold out in his direction with a grateful look. “You’ve got to go to school.”
She crosses her arms in front of her, sets her jaw. “Why?”
“Why?” Cal repeats. “Because . . .” He trails off. “I mean, because . . .”
Oh, for God’s sake. I’m about to jump in with a legal argument worthy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg when the doorbell rings. “Who the hell is here this early?” Cal mutters, setting the coffee cup down on the counter and heading into the living room. I follow as he peers out the window.
“Shit!” He whirls to face me, his handsome face gone ghost-white. “It’s the social worker,” Cal says, and the panic in his eyes is real.
“Fuck,” I breathe. The court warned us that the welfare visits might be unannounced, but it’s different to actually find her randomly standing there on the doorstep like a Bible salesman. I glance around the living room with a grimace: the rug is stained with grape juice. A pair of Ezra’s underwear, which he was using as a slingshot last night, is nestled in the fronds of a potted plant. And Cal’s menagerie of condom balloon animals, which migrated with us from the apartment, sit on the coffee table in half-deflated disgrace.
I take a deep breath, clicking into action mode. “Hey,” I say, putting my hands on his arms and squeezing. “It’s gonna be fine. You got this. We got this, okay?”
Cal stares at me for another moment; then he nods. “Okay,” he says, visibly pulling himself together. “You’re right.”
“I’m always right,” I say firmly, then paste a smile on my face and swing the door open. “Hi there!” I chirp, ushering her in like a deranged Martha Stewart on speed. “Come on in. Can I get you any coffee? I think we’ve got some crumb cake, too.”
“Oh, that’s fine, thanks,” the social worker says, smiling pleasantly. “I’ll just take a quick peek around.”
“No problem,” I say. She’s an older woman in what looks like a hand-knit sweater, grandmotherly even, but there’s a distinct air of don’t fuck with me about her that’s got me edging out of her way. “I’ll tell the kids you’re here. They’re just getting ready for school. Cal,” I say with a nudge, “why don’t you two get started in the kitchen, yeah?”
Once they’re gone I careen through the rest of the downstairs, picking up assorted detritus and shoving the balloon animals down my shirt for safekeeping. The kids have decamped upstairs to Lottie’s room—both of them still in their pajamas and Ezra catapulting himself onto Lottie’ bed over and over, the mattress springs groaning in protest. “Jules, look,” he calls when he sees me in the doorway. “I’m a flying robot. And flying robot fighters are coming and blasting me to smithere—”
“Dude,” I say, scooping him up mid-jump and staring at him with horror: his whole face is covered with paint, blues and greens and three bright red circles along his tiny jawline that look for all the world like bullet holes. “What happened?”
Ezra shrugs as I set him back down on the carpet. “Lottie made me a robot,” he says happily.
I whirl on her. “You did what?”
“He asked,” she says with a dismissive shrug.
“I just—why would you—” I break off. “What are these?” I ask, pointing at the red marks.
Lottie shoots me a withering look. “Uh, dials?”
I bury my face in my hands, taking a deep breath. “Listen, robots,” I tell them. “This is a big deal. I know you’re not in the mood for anything this morning, and I don’t blame you, but the social worker is here and I need you to shine it on for the next fifteen minutes, okay? For Cal.”
There must be something urgent in my voice, because both of them nod without argument. “Sure,” Lottie says, her face scrubbed of all the defiance from a few minutes ago. “Okay.”
They scramble into their clothes and I manage to get most of the paint off, then we head downstairs into the great room, where I park them—and Howard—with books and bowls of granola while the social worker does her thing. I try not to hover, but I can’t help but watch with curiosity—and a little annoyance—as she opens cupboards and inspects the kids’ closets. She even peers into the bathroom trash. I know she’s looking out for the kids’ best interest, but there’s something invasive—even a bit humiliating—about it. I can only imagine how it must feel for families who don’t have the kind of fuck-you money Cal does.
“Can I ask you something?” I begin, as she looks over the contents of the medicine cabinet in Cal’s bathroom. “There’s no way the judge is actually going to take these kids from Cal, is there? I mean, really.”
I’m smiling at her, just between us girls, but the social worker doesn’t smile back. “I’ll submit my report and make my recommendation,” she says, shutting the mirrored door with a final-sounding click. “What the judge decides is entirely up to her.”
Well, that is certainly not the comforting reassurance I was hoping for. “Gotcha,” I say brightly. “Thanks.”
I slink back downstairs with my tail between my legs and join the rest of them on the sofa, slinging an arm around Ezra’s shoulders as he and Howard page through a book about narwhals. Lottie reads Wonder Women. Cal stares at the rug. Finally, she comes back down onto the main level, notebook in hand. “I’d like to speak to the children in private,” she announces, so Cal promises them we’ll be right back, and we sit outside on the front stoop for a few minutes, both of us clutching our coffee cups like security blankets and watching birds go crazy at the feeder. Before I know I’m going to do it I nudge Cal’s knee with mine, gentle. After a moment he nudges mine in return.
It feels like a full year before the social worker opens the front door and announces she’s finished. We thank her for her time and all but mow her down in our mad dash to get back inside. “You guys did great,” Cal tells them, scooping one kid up in either arm and flipping them upside down until they’re shrieking. I feel like some beleaguered northern queen whose castle just barely survived a raid.
“You guys gotta get going if you want to make it to school on time—which I know you don’t, particularly,” I remind them once Cal’s set them down again, holding a finger up before Lottie can interrupt me. “But you’ve still got to go.”
The two of them trot upstairs to retrieve their backpacks and I turn to Cal, laying a cautious hand on his shoulder—he’s still rattled, I realize, his face pale and his dark eyes anxious and watchful. “You did great too,” I promise. “We went to Target, remember? We’ve got everything we could possibly need.”
Cal nods. “You’re right,” he says, bucking up a little, “I’m getting worked up over nothing.”
He pauses. “Thanks for everything, Jules. In all honesty, I couldn’t be doing this without you.”
That surprises me. I’m trying to figure out how to respond when all at once the kids thunder back down the steps, bookbags in hand. Just like that Cal is Mr. Fun Confident Guy all over again, his grin wide and easy. “All right, monsters,” he says, shepherding them out the front door and down the walk, “you ready to go?”
He turns back at the last second and hugs me goodbye, rough and sudden. I wrap my arms around his neck and squeeze back like a reflex, my heart turning over once inside my chest.
It’s just a job, I tell myself firmly.
Nothing real about this at all.
I spend the day drinking coffee and cruising job postings, fussing with the formatting of my CV while Grey’s Anatomy reruns play on TV. Olivia calls around lunchtime to check in.
“I heard you all had quite the eventful morning,” she says warmly. Sometimes I imagine Olivia like Charlie from Charlie’s Angels, sitting in her office petting that mangy cat and waiting on real-time updates from clients all over the world. I don’t actually think it’s that far from the truth. “Everything all right over there?”
“Everything’s fine,” I report, filling her in on the social worker’s visit and how the kids have been doing. I leave out the part where Cal and I fooled around like a couple of horny teenagers and it’s all I’ve been able to think about since it happened, that I have to stop myself from tearing all his clothes off and ravishing him on the rug. “Totally under control.”
If there’s anything sweaty in my voice, Olivia doesn’t seem to notice. “Glad to hear it,” she says, then promises to check in again soon and leaves me to my own devices. I’m peering into the fridge trying to decide what to do for lunch when my cell phone rings one more time.
“Ms. Robinson,” says the official-sounding voice on the other end, “this is Doreen Clay, Dean of Students at the Henderson School. We tried Mr. McAdams, but were unable to reach him. We need someone to come in and pick Carlotta up as soon as possible.”
“Pick her—oh no, is she okay?” I think of how Lottie didn’t want to go into school this morning. I’m going to feel like a huge asshole if she wasn’t faking that stomachache after all. “Is she sick?”
“No, no, she’s fine.” The secretary hesitates. “But she’s had a bit of an altercation with another student here.”
“An altercation?” I cringe at the woman’s all-too-familiar choice of words. “What happened?”
“It’s unclear to us what exactly started it,” the dean tells me. “Neither child has been particularly forthcoming, to be honest. But we have a zero-tolerance policy for violence here at Henderson.”
My eyes widen. “What kind of violence?”
“She shoved another student during recess.”
I relax a little. Not that I want Lottie to go around shoving other kids, obviously, but from the tone in this woman’s voice I was imagining her stabbing somebody through the eye with a pencil or tossing them down a flight of stairs, horror-movie style. Shoving, I feel reasonably equipped to deal with.
“Okay,” I say brightly. “Well, in that case, I’ll be right there.”
I jump into some grownup clothes and call an Uber; twenty minutes later I find Lottie slouched in an armchair outside the principal’s office, nose buried in Wonder Women. Her uniform knee socks are slipping down toward her ankles. In the moment before she notices me she looks very, very young. My heart aches for her.
“How’s the book?” I ask.
Lottie looks up at the sound of my voice, frowning. “Fine.”
I nod. “What’s the deal, huh?” I ask, sitting down in the chair beside her. “You shoved another kid in your class?”
“He deserved it,” Lottie says immediately, dropping the book into her lap.
I think of Tommy Milstein, of the frustration of trying to explain myself to an HR team who seemed way more concerned with getting both sides of the story than the fact that the creep had me cornered to begin with. “Want to tell me what happened?”
She shrugs. “Not really.”
I wouldn’t either, if I were her. “Lottie,” I try, “tell you what. I’m a lawyer, right? And there’s a thing in law called attorney-client privilege, which means I can’t tell anybody what my clients say to me unless they tell me I’m allowed to.” I raise my eyebrows. “You want to be my client?”
Lottie looks at me for a long, skeptical moment. Finally she sighs. “He called me Little Orphan Annie.”
My jaw drops. “That little shit,” I say, before I can think better of it. Lottie cracks a smile. “Okay,” I say, pushing a hand through my hair. “First of all, don’t tell anybody I called him that, even if it is true. Second of all, wait here, okay? I’m going to go talk to your principal.”
Lottie’s eyes widen. “But you said—”
“And I meant it,” I tell her, laying a hand on her arm and squeezing. “I’m not going to tell her anything. You can trust me, all right?”
I promise Dean Clay and the principal we’ll handle the matter at home, turning up the lawyer volume just enough to somehow wheedle Lottie out of a full-on suspension so long as I take her out of school for the rest of the day. “What happened?’ she asks, standing up as I come back out into the hallway. “Are we going home?”
I think for a minute. “Actually,” I tell her, “I think I’ve got a better idea.”
A quiet midday T ride later, we’re at an arcade nearby, standing in front of an old mechanical game I remember playing in Virginia Beach as a kid—a variation on whack-a-mole with talking alligators who come out of their bogs at faster and faster intervals, looking to get smacked on the head.
“Umm, what are we doing here?” Lottie looks at me suspiciously.
“Think of it as a lesson in anger management,” I announce. “Have at ’em,” I tell her, gesturing grandly. “Pretend they’re your crummy little classmate.”
Lottie grins.
I buy twenty bucks worth of tokens and feed them into the machine one after the other while she goes to town on those little critters with a foam-covered mallet, ponytail flying and her round cheeks going pink with exertion. It’s surprisingly satisfying just to watch her, and I kind of wish I’d thought of this coping strategy for myself when I was newly unemployed.
Take that, Tommy Milstein.
“Well done,” I crow, once I’m finally out of tokens. “Feeling better?” I’m pretty pleased with myself for this stroke of cathartic genius, frankly, but when Lottie finally turns and looks at me I suddenly realize she’s close to tears.
“Hey hey hey,” I say—taking a step toward her, then hesitating, wanting to hold her and give her space in equal amounts. “Lottie, sweetheart. What’s going on?”
“I don’t want to go stay with Vivian tomorrow,” she says, blinking back furious tears. “She doesn’t even like us. And I’m sick of bouncing around all the time. I just want to be home, but I don’t even know where home is anymore!”
“Oh, Lottie.” Suddenly the whole day starts to make a lot more sense. “I know you are. I’m so sorry. I wish there was a way for us to make it so you didn’t have to go, and I know Cal does too. But we have to listen to what the court says, and they think this is the best way.”
“I hate the stupid court,” she retorts, voice breaking. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”
I open my mouth to contradict her, close it again. “You’re right,” I agree, leaning back against a Ninja Turtles pinball machine. “It isn’t fair.”
Lottie keeps looking at me for a moment, expectant. When I don’t follow it up with anything else she narrows her eyes. “Is that it?” she asks suspiciously. “Aren’t you going to tell me that life isn’t fair, or that it’ll get better, or something?”
I consider that for a minute. “I mean, all those things are true,” I say eventually, “but I also think you’ve been through the kind of crap that no kid should have to go through, and I respec
t you enough to say so. I wouldn’t want to haul all my stuff from place to place and be stuck in the middle of all this sadness and uncertainty either, if I were you. And I’m really sorry that you guys have to.”
She gazes at me for another beat, searching for the trick. Then, seeming to decide there isn’t one, she shrugs violently. “Okay.”
“Okay.” I hide a smile. “I can promise you that it won’t be long, at Vivian’s. And I can promise you that Cal is moving every single mountain he can to make sure you guys get to stay with him forever. He loves the crap out of you guys, do you know that?”
She swipes savagely at her face. “Yeah,” she says, snuffling a bit. “I know.”
I dig a Kleenex out of my purse, hand it over. “And I care about you too, even though I know I’m just some random old lady you just met.”
Lottie sighs loudly as she takes it. “You’re not that old,” she says, and blows her nose.
That makes me smile for real. “Well, thanks,” I say, chancing a quick squeeze of her shoulders. “You want to get out of here? We can pick up some dinner for the boys on the way home?”
“Yeah,” Lottie says. Then, hopefully, “Sushi?”
“You’re a girl after my own heart,” I tell her.
We hop on the T and find a couple of seats near the window. I settle Lottie’s bright-purple backpack into my lap. “Cal’s gonna be mad at me,” she says with deep resignation, leaning back against the seat.
I shake my head. “He’s not,” I promise. “A little worried about you, maybe. But I’ll help you explain.” I nudge her gently in the elbow. “You’re my client, remember?”
Lottie nods. “Thanks.”
The train rumbles along the tracks, the motion of it weirdly soothing. Lottie rests her head on my shoulder. I slide an arm around her, staring out the window at the darkened tunnel.
I’m going to miss her when this is all over. Ezra and Cal, as well. It’s only been a few days, but we were all thrown into this “fake family” setup so fast, it’s hard to keep track of where the job ends and real feelings begin.
