by Amy Simone
“Hand it over.” She had her hand on the door handle and pulled Cassie’s door open. Annie’s eyes had that strange glint again.
Cassie tried to start her car to leave. She threw the laptop onto the floorboard on the passenger’s side. Annie ran to the other door to snag the thing. The engine wouldn’t turn over. The two women tugged at the laptop.
“Think about your son,” Annie told her breathlessly with half her body plunged into Cassie’s car. Finally, Annie won out and left Cassie hunched over the steering wheel, crying.
What had just happened? Cassie saw Annie lock the front door of her shop and scurry deeper inside. Cassie had lost the fight. How would she know if Caleb would be all right? She waited for to see if Greg would show up. Perhaps she could trick them into giving it back, although she doubted even that.
Ten minutes later he arrived. Cassie approached him as he walked to the front door.
“Greg, I want my computer back.”
He scoffed. “Out of the way,” he told her and elbowed her back. “You’ve made us lose a lot of time.”
Cassie grabbed his jacket, but he wrestled free and left her standing there holding it. Like his wife, he locked the door and scowled at her.
The only consolation was that hopefully they’d honor their promise that Caleb’s tumor would disappear. Cassie decided she would take her son to a doctor to confirm his throat was okay. Her car started just fine by now. It was as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
She rushed back to pick up her Josh and pretended that all was normal while at her mother’s. Then she went home and used Ralph’s desktop to track where her laptop was. She saw that the couple brought it over to their own house next to her sister’s. She figured that would happen. An hour later it showed up on the other side of town probably at the airport.
In vain she tried to communicate with the Coach or Bruce. Nothing happened.
Things took a turn for the worse when her sister called that evening.
“Cassie, did you see the news?”
“No.”
“They arrested my neighbors at the airport.”
“Why?”
“For trying to carry a bomb on the plane,” Catherine told her. “Then it self destructed in the security office down to ashes! Thank God the plane didn’t go down.”
Catherine’s voice dropped until Cassie could barely hear her. “Their attorney is good friends with my husband. What I heard is your name kept coming up. They insisted you gave them the machine. How did this happen, Cassie? Why are you involved?”
Chills racked Cassie’s spine.
“How odd. Annie must have gotten confused about the software…”
“I think the authorities will need to talk to you,” Catherine warned her. “All this came on the QT. I’m just glad you weren’t there.”
28
Denial is Not a River in Egypt
The next morning a sheriff’s deputy rapped on Cassie’s front door. “No sir, I did not know about what they did,” Cassie told him.
“Could you tell me your whereabouts yesterday,” the officer asked.
Cassie stepped out onto the small landing outside, shutting the front door behind her. She didn’t want Josh to hear any of this.
After she explained her travels, making sure to not include her forced trip to Annie’s shop, she breathed a sigh of relief. The man appeared to believe her. Since the laptop was pure ashes and melted, nobody could tell what had been inside. From what she learned, the thing had gotten so hot it burned a hole through the table it was on and into the floor—just as hot as molten lava.
She agreed to be available should they want to question her further. She vainly hoped that no street or security cameras caught her and Annie wrestling in front of the Lazie Daizie the day before.
Now Cassie silently prayed as she returned inside her house. Her next step was to call Caleb’s pediatrician. She’d claim it had worried her about his cough, anything, just to get the doctor to scope his throat. Trusting her former client and devious husband was not something she thought she should depend on at this point. They were still being held in custody.
“Bruce, Coach, please help,” she thought to herself as she made the doctor’s appointment. Nobody responded.
Ralph called after she’d made an appointment and hung up. He explained he had formalized his agreement with a realtor and she had to be fully out of the house in the next three weeks.
“Fine, Ralph, just fine,” Cassie agreed hurriedly. “It looks like I got a job. I should hear later today. Mother tells me I can stay in her place until she finishes moving to Frank’s in Colorado.”
“Colorado! Lucky lady!” he said. He sounded so happy that it bugged Cassie.
“Which reminds me, I would like the boys to spend time with all their grandparents this summer. Your dad offered, too.”
“Sounds good,” he agreed.
“Thought so. You and your honey are building a new nest…” Cassie gripped her cell phone so hard that it hurt her hand.
There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Since we’ve got that nasty comment out of the way,” he said, “I wanted to let you know I booked a riding lesson for Caleb this Saturday. Can you take him or should I?”
“I thought you had office hours on Saturday mornings.”
“My new partner is doing them,” Ralph explained. “I’m still on call for emergencies.”
“Then that won’t do us much good, will it?” Cassie observed. She changed hands and shook out her tensed muscles.
She sighed. “Okay, tell me when it starts. I’ll take him. It’ll be good to be around horses. Good for Caleb, too.”
She was glad the next day to discover that Caleb’s throat checked out. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. In fact, the doctor looked at her curiously as she got ready to leave the examining room.
“I guess it worried me for nothing,” Cassie said vaguely. She clutched Caleb and Josh, quickly prodding them towards the office manager’s nook so she could settle up.
She called her sister that evening.
“Have you, um, heard anything about Annie and Greg?” she asked.
“No.”
“What a shame,” Cassie said. Then she piled it on, “they seemed like such nice people.”
Catherine sighed. “You just never know about people. I’m glad they don’t have a pet over there or somebody would have to feed it. That person probably would be me.”
“Speaking of pets, Ralph signed Caleb up for riding lessons. It’s been ages since I’ve been around horses,” Cassie told her sister.
“You always were the horse girl,” Catherine agreed. “If my kids weren’t into so many other sports, I’d think about that too.”
“I will move into mom’s house while she has it on the market. Ralph and his realtor want me out of his place so they can show it easier.”
“Won’t that be the same case over at mom’s though?”
“Yes, and no. I’m putting a lot of our stuff in storage. I have no idea where we will end up living after mom sells her house. I suppose we’ll be gypsies.”
“Ugh,” Catherine said.
“Yes, ugh.”
“What’s she like, anyway? This girlfriend of his?”
“Younger. Hipper. He finds her more fun to talk to, I think.”
“Odd. Then to kick you out to boot!”
“You know how kids change marriage,” Cassie said. “Just didn’t make the glue stronger in our case. I mean Ralph loves the boys but I could tell his work wiped him out. It was too late before I could do much about it.”
“You mean you can’t just slap some makeup on and win him back.”
“His girlfriend used to be a model. She’s got way too many tattoos today for you to tell it nowadays… but at one point she was.”
“How is she with the kids?”
“She’s a kid herself,” Cassie said.
Catherine snorted. “Figures.” She paused. “Doesn’t it piss you off?
”
“I can’t change him. It‘s beyond over.”
“If my husband did that—left us, I mean—I’d kill him first, ask questions later,” Catherine said.
Cassie turned around in the kitchen and saw a reflection in the microwave. She was frowning. “I’ve thought of all that but that was making me crazy so I stopped.”
“You’re stronger than I thought you were. Just keep me in the loop, sis. I’ll help when I can.”
29
Work
Cassie packed up the entire house by herself. She took loads over daily to a storage facility. It was depressing to do this, but she attempted to be upbeat about it. After all the organizing she’d done with her inventory for online selling, boxing her own stuff came naturally.
Bit by bit she took essentials over to Hayworth’s house. Her mother was bouncing back and forth from Colorado to Lafayette as she made her own preparations to move fully up north. Cassie could tell this all made her mother feel alive and young again. Hayworth was no longer just treading water and staying in the same spot. Frank sometimes accompanied her but he was still working off shore so his time in Lafayette was sporadic.
At least her kids didn’t seem as worried since they were so familiar with their grandmother’s house already. To them, it was like one big party. Hayworth enjoyed taking them places—swimming, out for snow cones, over to the mall.
In Cassie’s opinion the boys seemed more wired after they had visits with their dad and his girlfriend. Susan must have allowed them to lead a more undisciplined, less structured schedule when they stayed with her and Ralph. Cassie had to argue more about bedtime and do more negotiating with Josh in particular over things like brushing teeth once they returned from visits with their dad. In the grand scheme of things, though, it was all manageable. Ralph gave her money towards bills, still maintaining that they could well by not getting lawyers involved. He’d owned the house before he had met her so she had no real claim there.
She finally got the call she’d been waiting for. Her first day of work would be middle of the week.
She reported to a woman named Sharla who was a large black no-nonsense type with luminous dark eyes and wore deep purple red-brown lipstick. As Cassie eventually found out, Sharla had an array of fancy hair ribbons she wore to work, contrary to company policy. Whenever Sharla saw a supervisor approaching, she’d clip the bow to her collar, as if it was an adornment of whatever outfit she was wearing. Most of the time, since they worked around moving carousels and robotic pallet carriers, the distribution facility rules frowned on jewelry or large hair ornaments because they didn’t want it getting caught up in any machinery.
The warehouse was several football fields long and several stories tall inside. They sensitized half of the facility‘s floor, making it easy for the robotized carousels moved about and brought summoned packages to various stations. They advised folks to wear rubber-soled shoes and to be careful where they walked.
Throughout the day Cassie heard soft horns beeping as workers shuffled the pallets about. Sharla took her to her station and showed her how to sign onto the system. Cassie would work as a picker at first.
“Now, Miss Cassie, you here’s your call sheet. You see those aisles down there?”
Cassie nodded.
“These letters show you exactly where you need to go to find your item. After you’re done gathering every out of that aisle, you can stick them on the nearest cart as long as you’ve logged everything in, then go on to the next thing you have to find. I’ll walk you through a few,” Sharla told her. “Make sense?”
“Yes.”
“Now don’t waste any time,” Sharla warned her. “They monitor everything around here—your footsteps. Your breaks.” She handed her a device to clip onto her belt. “If you need to wear it on this neck strap, that’s okay too. It’s GPS.”
“I know about the breaks.”
The evening went quickly. Cassie felt tired in the middle of her time there but she got to eat her sandwich and run, literally, to the bathroom at the far end of the plant. She figured she’d get used to it.
At the end of her shift, Sharla looked up from her clipboard and grinned. “You did fine, white girl.”
“Thank you. I was worried.”
“See you tomorrow,” Sharla told her.
That was it. Cassie walked out to the parking lot numb. It was 11:30 at night. Her mother had kept the boys. Cassie fell into bed and woke up just in time to bring Caleb to school.
“Mom was it fun?” her son asked her when he was in the car.
“You mean work?”
“Yeah.”
“Not really but they sure kept me busy. One day I can buy you and Josh more toys.”
“Really?” His face brightened up.
“Well, sure. Your dad pays his part and I’ll be able to add to the pile and before you know your birthday will be bigger and better than last year.”
“Cool. I already know what games I want.”
“Maybe we’ll send you on an educational trip.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. They have camps for kids your age. You might learn a lot if we sent you on a science safari.”
Caleb wrinkled up his nose. “Yeech. I want sports.”
She pulled up in front of the school. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Just remember to take the school bus to your dad’s tonight. It’s his turn tonight.”
“Okay.” He leaned over and kissed her. She watched him all the way until he made it into the main door. He walked with such resoluteness, shouldering his backpack and high-fiving two other boys.
Cassie showed up for her shift and checked in. She clipped her time marker to her belt and scanned in items on a cart that automatically drove to her station. Suddenly she heard a slight din that started off as a small, dull undercurrent of a roar. Within minutes it grew louder. She checked over to see if Sharla heardit but Sharla wore ear jacks and was oblivious. To locate the source, Cassie stepped away briefly away from her bay towards one of the mammoth shelves.
“Let me out, let me out,” she heard a tiny voice crying from the inside of a box on the shelf before her. The label said it was a Barbie doll.
“Not again,” she thought to herself. “I’m hearing things.” She turned and walked across the aisle to the other tall shelf. There she detected another voice and a thumping of something large and solid against the inside of the box.
“Damn it, it’s dark in here!” that voice yelled from inside an air fryer box.
Cassie retreated to her station. She did not want to touch anything she wasn’t supposed to. If they caught her prying open a box, she’d be questioned. The entire facility was under video surveillance. She looked again to see if Sharla had noticed her walking off course. Thankfully, her supervisor remained focused on her own tasks.
The voices were all calling out. It would be a long night.
30
Lesson
Ralph had come by and retrieved the last of his things from the house. He’d left behind only the mower (great) and the old truck and horse trailer. Since he’d taken his computer, she was left with just her cell phone. Cassie missed her laptop and vowed to buy a new one as soon as her paycheck allowed.
She and Ralph had agreed that he would pick up the boys from the Western riding class on Saturday at noon once the lesson was over. He wanted to meet Bob Breaux anyway he said and if he could watch some of Caleb’s lesson he’d try to do so.
Cassie arrived early with her kids. She’d even attached a harness to Josh just to make sure he didn’t wander off and get into trouble. She feared she’d get too preoccupied herself at the barn as once she entered her old world of horses, she sometimes lost track of time and feared she’d lose track of Josh.
There were some other parents there. The group lesson started around ten. She’d filled out all the paperwork and left Caleb with Bob. Then she walked along the stall fronts and held up Josh so he could see the horses i
nside.
“Look, Josh, here’s a baby horse.” Puck and his mother were calmly standing in the stall's corner. The mare was eating her hay while her baby suckled.
“Mommy, can I pet the baby?” Josh asked.
“Maybe later. They need to eat in peace, son.” She continued down the earthen track to the small grandstand and joined a small group of parents.
On the other side of the arena, Bob had five kids brushing off a variety of mounts. Caleb’s pony, Nimble, was a light chestnut with a blondish mane and tail. Bob required everybody to wear a helmet. In the tack room, Bob pulled out one from the big box of spares he kept in the tack room and fitted it on Caleb’s head.
“No helmet, no riding,” he told her son.
One of the other mothers leaned over to Cassie and whispered, “They say this man is like the horse whisperer.”
“That’s encouraging,” Cassie responded.
In the middle of the indoor arena were six white poles set up, all in a line, in the center. Before Bob had the kids mount, he made them walk in single file, leading their mounts and weaving back and forth through the poles.
Some parents watched avidly; others checked their phones and texts. Once in a while a parent snapped a picture or took a partial video of their kid taking the lesson. Cassie had to admit she found the entire atmosphere laid back and relaxing, All the kids paid close attention to their teacher which was unusual, she thought.
She looked at him more closely, thinking of how he resembled the same Bob that the Coach introduced her to in the library months ago. She wondered what the Coach was up to these days and found she missed him. He’d gotten her out of so many scrapes, yet also had put her in some too. If only she hadn’t gotten mixed up with that darn neighbor of her sisters…
