Minders

by Michele Jaffe

  Mason nodded.

  “Keep your farmers’ market, why not, but what we need are supermarkets. All we have are convenience stores and liquor stores.” Ford drew the store where he’d envisioned it on that first morning Sadie went to work with him, and another at the intersection of five major roads, where, Sadie saw from his memory, a vacant record store stood as though auditioning for a makeover.

  He kept drawing as he spoke, the images coming into his mind a moment before communicating with his hand, turning themselves or adjusting slightly as he put pen to paper but clearly working from the ideas he’d been forming for years. “Put in bike paths, since most people around here can’t afford gas even if they have cars. A skate park. An indoor pool. Playgrounds that aren’t asphalt. Make this mixed use, roller skating in summer, ice skating in winter, maybe concerts. Get some food vendors too, but good ones, not the ones that make the air smell bad.” This, Sadie thought, from the guy she’d seen eat Bits O’Beef straight out of the can. “Take these old tracks and turn them into a park. That would change everything, give people a place to walk that’s not the street.”

  Mason had been rubbing his hand over his head, and now his hair stuck up even more assertively. “You have a lot of ideas.”

  “Sure.” Ford dropped the pen and leaned back into the cushions, and Sadie felt the warm, excited sensation fizzle into the sticky gumminess of humiliation. As though he’d shown too much of himself, revealed how deeply it mattered. The stickiness drew a plume of anger toward it. He pushed the map away and Sadie heard Ford think, Don’t pretend like you care. You’re just another rich kid coming down here to play games with us puppies before running back up to your penthouse condo.

  Mason looked at the plan, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay, how about three?”

  Ford was still lost in a part of his brain where three meant half the number of texts Plum had not responded to. “Three what?” he asked.

  “Three thousand a month.”

  Sadie heard bells ring and a kettledrum start harrumphing and over them Ford thinking, Be cool. He’s bluffing. Be cool. But another part of his mind was already imagining what that money could do, the images spinning around: Lulu on a tire swing behind a newly painted house, his mother on the front porch painting at an easel, coming home with bags of groceries, Lulu poking her head into the kitchen and wrinkling up her nose and saying, “Steak again.”

  Warmth filled Sadie at the last image, and she wasn’t sure if it was hers alone or also Ford’s. She heard him repeating stay cool to himself then heard him say in a voice that sounded almost right, “Three thousand dollars? To do what exactly?”

  “Be my consultant. Scout properties, look over plans.” Mason sounded a little like he was making it up as he went along. He scratched behind Copernicus’s other ear, buying some time. “Find owls hidden under the drop ceiling at the library, dumbwaiters from the 1930s. You’re good at it, better than anyone, Frank says.”

  “Frank?” Ford asked, his mind still on the money, now imagining taking Lulu and his mother to the mall and being able to say, “Pick what you want.” The thought of it made his chest feel too small, unable to accommodate the way his heart was swelling.

  “Frank, your ex-boss,” Mason said. “He tells me you’ve got the eye. Something about you being passionate and outspoken. Although the way he put it was more like stubborn and not knowing when to shut up.”

  Ford surprised Sadie by laughing. “Sounds like Frank.” He eyed Mason. “Will you do what I say?”

  Mason shook his head. “No way, not all the time. I’m passionate and outspoken too. But I’ll listen to your suggestions seriously.” He took a deep breath. “I should tell you that I’m not always easy to work with. I want someone I can argue with. Someone who has different opinions. Someone I can yell at, and get yelled at by during the day, but still get a burger with at night because we respect each other.”

  If someone had purposely composed a script with all the right words to say to Ford—respect, passion, argue, burger—it could not have been more effective than Mason’s speech, Sadie thought. Even she couldn’t have done better, and she knew him… well.

  Mason had managed to touch Ford not only in his thoughts and his emotions but also, she sensed, at some deeper level. A guy who was around the same age as James offering him not just a job but a friendship. It made Sadie happy for Ford, but also a little nervous. It seemed like a lot for Mason to live up to.

  Ford looked not at Mason’s face but at his hands, which were loose over the knees of his pants. “Five.”

  It’s like he’s playing poker, Sadie realized, watching Mason’s hands. The way he’d watched the hands of the other players that day at the Castle.

  Mason’s hair seemed to stand up a little more on its own. “Five thousand a month?”

  “You’d go to seven, but I’m taking it easy on you,” Ford told him.

  Mason said, “You play poker. Fine, five.”

  Ford nodded. “Let me think about it.”

  Mason laughed so hard his face turned bright red, and Sadie felt a tiny glimmer of the happy, warm-tomato-soup-after-a-snowball-fight feeling in Ford’s chest. “You think about it,” Mason said, getting up, but he didn’t escape until after he’d petted Copernicus one last time and given Lulu his phone number so she could sleep with it under her pillow, “like a real princess.”

  • • •

  Sunday was gusty, the clouds skidding across the sky. It was James’s birthday, and at Lulu’s request they’d gone to the planetarium to look for the star she was certain James had turned into when he died, but they weren’t able to find it. “I knew it was a long shot,” she told Ford, as though she needed to console him. “Four months is not very long for someone to become a star.”

  “No, it’s not,” Ford agreed.

  There was clearly something on Lulu’s mind during the bus ride home, and Sadie was fascinated watching Ford’s internal landscape expand and contract, as though calibrated by a very precise machine that constantly measured the exact right arm’s length to keep Lulu feeling safe but not smothered. Concern was the best name Sadie could come up with for it, although she thought it might be mostly love.

  Sadie felt lucky to witness it, and a little jealous. She loved being an only child, but a part of her couldn’t help wondering how different her life would have been if she’d had a little sister like Lulu.

  They were four stops from home when Lulu turned to Ford and blurted, “Do you miss him? Every day?”

  A hundred jagged shards of grief sliced ribbons in him, and he fell into an abyss of pure pain. He wanted to cry out, crawl from his skin, and beg for mercy until the pain was gone.

  Why didn’t it get any easier? she heard him think, aching for him, with him. This grief was as potent as the grief after he left Plum’s, only now there was Lulu watching him. Needing him.

  His eyes locked on her, and Sadie heard him say to himself, You must not let her see this. By sheer force of will he yanked all the threads and shards and sinews together, gathering them up into an untidy ball and pushing them deep into his mind to be sorted later. He was left with the smooth everyday grief.

  “I do,” he said.

  “How come we don’t talk about him?”

  “It’s hard to know what to say.”

  “You could say, ‘Remember the time we went bowling?’ or ‘Remember the time we made cookies?’ See? It’s easy. You do one.”

  Sadie saw Ford’s effort, but his mind was a frozen block of stone, unyielding. “Um, remember—”

  “Forget it!” Lulu stomped her foot against the rubber floor of the bus. “I knew it. I knew it!” Her voice rose, and people began to turn and stare. Sadie felt mortified for Ford, felt his own mortification, and saw him ignore it to listen to Lulu. “You’re trying to erase him. You want to make it like he was never there. You wear his clothes. You’ve even tried to steal his girlfriend—yes, I heard you talking to Mom, saying you were going to see her. But you
can never be him. Never.”

  “I know, and I don’t want to be.” Sadie knew that might not always have been true, but it was true now. And it felt good to Ford. “I don’t want to be,” he repeated.

  Lulu glared at him defiantly then burst into tears, burrowing into his chest, crumpling handfuls of his shirt against her face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  Ford held her. “It’s okay even if you did.”

  “It just hurts so much sometimes.”

  “I know.”

  Her cheek was against his chest. “He wasn’t supposed to die,” she said, her lip trembling, and Ford hugged her even tighter. “We were going to have adventures and be rich.” She started to cry again, but softer, not hysterical.

  “We still can be,” Ford said, and Sadie felt how heavy the lie sat on his chest.

  They were quiet as they got off the bus and walked home, but by the time their building was in sight Lulu was back to her regular self, declaring, “We’ll be rich when I marry Mason. In ten years.”

  “Does he know about that?” Ford asked.

  Lulu stood in the middle of their front walk in her khaki flight suit and spun around, fluffing up her hair. “Really, darling, who’s going to say no to me?”

  “Who indeed,” Linc said, stepping out of the shadows around the door and catching Lulu in his arms. Lulu shrieked and giggled, but the gaze Linc leveled on Ford was steely cold.

  “Linc. Please put my sister down,” Ford said. His mind was focused on Linc with such intensity that it was like being pulled by centripetal force.

  Linc put Lulu down. “You messed up my hair, you big lug,” she told him, and he gave her a smile, letting it dissolve slowly as his eyes held Ford’s.

  “Lulu, go upstairs and wait for me, please,” Ford said.

  Lulu frowned. “Isn’t Uncle Linc coming up?”

  “No,” Ford said, speaking to her but watching Linc, as if daring him to disagree. “Not tonight.”

  When she was gone Linc said, “I hear you’ve been trying to get my attention.”

  Ford’s mind hummed with nervous anticipation. “Not that I know—” The words stopped in Ford’s throat as Linc held up a photo of Ford standing just down the block from 345 EvergreenLawn, then another of him taking off after Linc.

  “Talk. How did you end up here?” Linc rattled the paper.

  “I followed you.”

  “Not possible.” Linc’s hand snapped out, and he grabbed Ford around the neck. “Tell me how you found me.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Ford squeezed out. Sadie’s vision went spotty as he gasped for air. “I followed a pizza delivery truck, and it went to your house.”

  “Why weren’t you at work?”

  “We got out early… storm.”

  Linc’s eyes flickered with something that looked like surprise, and he let go of Ford’s throat. “You have either the worst luck or the best of anyone I’ve ever met.”

  Somehow those words, coming from Linc, weren’t heartening, Sadie thought.

  Ford massaged his neck. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m going to tell you one last time to stay away from me and anything concerning me and beat you senseless to make sure you get the message.”

  “Is that the good luck or the bad luck?”

  Linc said, “That depends on your perspective. I came here today to kill you.”

  It would have been funny in its baldness, Sadie thought, if Linc hadn’t been so very cold and serious.

  “Did you kill James?” Ford asked.

  Linc’s eyes hardened. “You need to stop asking questions like that. Soon I won’t have any control over my actions. Don’t do it again.”

  “Or else?”

  “You’ve used up your or elses,” Linc said. “How many choices do you think you have right now? Your choices are: one, do what I say and stay away from me, or two, pay with your life.” He held up two fingers. “And when you’re gone, who’s going to take care of your mother?” He folded the two fingers down into a fist. “Your sister?”

  Ford’s astonishment made his mind buck like a room in an earthquake, overriding his anger. “Did you just—are you threatening my little sister?”

  “I’m educating you about your choices.” Linc’s eyes burned into Ford’s with the intensity of the insane. “What would you do for Little Lu’s well-being? What kind of choices do you have with that in the balance?”

  Plants were falling off shelves in Ford’s mind, pictures skewed, the floor still rolling, and he was speechless. “At least tell me who ordered you to do this. Was it the Pharmacist?”

  Linc looked angry. “If I tell you the Pharmacist is responsible will you listen and take it seriously? Then yes. The Pharmacist sent me.”

  “Who is it? The Pharmacist?”

  “The Pharmacist has many forms, almost all of them too good to be true, at least at the beginning.”

  “That’s not an answer. Why won’t you just tell me?”

  “You know why no one answers that question?” Linc asked. “Because the only people who know wind up dead.”

  “You’re not dead.”

  Linc’s face twisted into a sardonic smile. “Something to think about.” He pointed a finger at Ford’s chest. “I tried to keep you out of this. I figured I owed James that. But no matter how clear I make myself, you still keep turning up. So this is your last warning. Take it. I won’t enjoy killing you.”

  Sadie watched Ford prepare to fight in his mind, but he said, “It doesn’t have to be this way, Linc,”

  Linc’s eyes flashed over Ford’s shoulder. Slowly, like he was thinking something through, his hand came up to rub his chin, and he said, “You’re right, maybe I should kill you now—”

  Ford’s fist plunged into Linc’s unprotected abdomen. Are you kidding? Sadie said. There’s no way you can—

  Linc staggered backward and fell to the ground.

  From behind Ford came the low clack of Kevlar boots. Swinging around he was confronted by two Serenity Services Counselors in full matte black body armor and helmets. A computer-modulated voice said, “Citizen Ford Winter, you are in violation of Part 445-W of the Good Neighbor Initiative. Place your hands out and state your intention to accompany us, or risk serious injury.”

  Thank god, Sadie thought, seeing the Serenity Services uniforms. Tell them that he was going to kill you, Sadie urged Ford. Tell them you were just defending yourself.

  “He was going to—”

  “Citizen Ford Winter, comply with our order or we will fire on three,” the same voice said, and both Counselors leveled their tasers.

  Ford put out his wrists. “I agree to accompany you.”

  • • •

  Ford’s processing at the Serenity Services Compliance Center happened in a kind of fog. They asked him almost no questions, and when he tried to explain that Linc had been about to beat him up, the Counselor gave him a weak smile and said, “That guy had, what, ninety pounds on you? If he’d been trying to beat you up, you would have been beaten. As it is, you’re lucky we came around when we did. He wouldn’t have stayed down for long.”

  After forty minutes, another Serenity Services Counselor came in and announced, “Your brother posted your bail. You’re free to go.”

  If only, Ford thought. His last thought before punching Linc, Sadie knew, had been how disappointed his mother would be.

  Ford braced himself, but when he walked into the waiting room the only person there was Mason.

  “You?” Ford looked behind him. “For me? Why?” Then, getting it, “That’s why they said brother.”

  “I told them we had a family emergency, Mom was sick, that’s why you’d flown off the handle, contrition all around, and they sped things up.” That was slick, Sadie thought, and was conscious of a twinge of unease. Too slick? Too easy?

  Ford was impressed. “Nice work.” Mason pried himself out of a chair made for someone half his size, and they headed for the exit.
“You’re taller than my brother.”

  Mason chuckled. “I’m taller than everyone’s brother.”

  “Why’d you do it?” Ford asked, looking up at him.

  Mason jammed his hands in his pockets. “Wedding present for Lulu.”

  Ford laughed outright, and so did Sadie, momentarily shelving her apprehensions to share Ford’s openness toward Mason.

  “No, I figured this way you’d owe me, I could knock your salary down.”

  Ford shook his head. “You must be a really bad poker player. This way I know what I’m worth to you and can ask for a raise.”

  “Don’t push your luck,” Mason cautioned.

  Sadie felt Ford reaching into a part of him he didn’t share with everyone, a rich, warm place. Gratitude, she thought. And also friendship. “Thanks,” he said, offering both. “Was it expensive?”

  “No. Couple hundred. He’s not pressing charges.” Mason seemed impressed. “Pretty bold, though. He’s a big guy. I don’t think I could have knocked him out.”

  “You just have to know where to punch,” Ford said, but he was distracted inside, thinking, That was too easy. As if Linc had somehow orchestrated the whole thing on purpose.

  Sadie had the same idea, but it didn’t make sense.

  “So, you’ll take the job?” Mason prodded.

  Ford’s insides still felt warm like melted caramel. “I guess. But it has to be a real job. No charity. I want to work hard. I’m useless otherwise.”

  Mason said seriously, “I’m counting on it,” and Sadie felt Ford’s warm contentment increase. He trusted Mason, she realized, trusted that Mason’s professions of respect were real.

  Don’t let him down, Sadie cautioned Mason in her mind.

  Mason dropped Ford off. When Ford got upstairs Lulu was standing in the open door. She put a finger to her lips and whispered, “I thought you’d never get home. I’m starving.”

  Ford glanced behind her and saw their mother’s door was closed. “Did you call Mason?” he whispered.

  “You mean Mr. Lulu? No, he called me. Really he called you to ask about his offer, but I had your phone so I answered. I told him I’d seen those people from Serenity Services take you away, and he said he’d take care of it. Isn’t he just lovely to look at?”