Kids & Co.
Autor
Muriel Jensen
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13
HarlequinChapter One
MALIA: Well, here we are—doing time again. I told you flushing Chelsea’s blankie wasn’t a good idea. Now she’s stroking out and we’re in the slammer till our moms get here. Good going, Foster.
GARRETT: Relax. Amy will call a plumber, Chelsea’ll get her blankie back, and we’ll get to go outside ’cause Amy’ll think we need to work off steam.
MALIA: You’re such a bozo. It’s raining. We never go outside when it’s raining.
GARRETT: Well, I’d had about all I could take of that animal-sounds book. I thought a little action would perk up the afternoon till the big kids get here. I like that Truman dude. He can spit Cheerios all the way to the fireplace!
MALIA: I know. That’s cool, but he’s always getting time-outs in the big chair. Here comes Kate with Chelsea. Tell her you’re sorry. Give her your bear.
GARRETT: No way.
MALIA: Okay, but she’s gonna scream till it’s bye-bye.
GARRETT: Geez. Women! It was just a dweebie blanket, Chelsea. You got to get rid of the thing before you go to school, anyway. Here, you want my bear? Kate? Kate! Take me out, ple-e-e-ease! I don’t care if it’s raining, I want to go out on the slide. How about the sandbox? I won’t put sand in the air conditioner this time, I promise. Kate? Chelsea, what are you doing with my bear? Ow!
CHELSEA: Take that, you macho piglet! That was my blanket. My mom says I can carry it around until I’m forty if I want to and this is what I think of your bear!
MALIA: Not on his head, Chels. It’s his weak spot. Come on, you two. Amy’s trying to run a respectable day care here. How will it look if some mom comes by to look it over and you’re duking it out in the playpen? Hey, look. The bus is here! It’s the big kids!
* * *
“AMY! THE BUS IS HERE,” Kate Murray called out. “But don’t worry. I’ll get them their snacks, and I’ll put on Babe for the babies!”
Amy Brown, armed with a plunger and a wire coat hanger she’d pulled apart to serve as a probing tool, sat on her knees in front of the toilet. She was surrounded by wet towels she’d put down to sop up the water. She groaned at her assistant’s announcement.
Great. Now Truman, the crime boss, Darcy, the investments queen, and Rodney, who owed the cuss box 112.75, had arrived to round out the lineup of felons at Kids & Co.
“Thank you!” Amy shouted back, not because she was grateful for the news, but because setting an example with the “magic” words had become a habit for her after six months as a family day-care provider.
She forced the extended coat hanger down the toilet, hoping against hope that the blanket hadn’t gone very far, that she wouldn’t have to hire a backhoe and dig up the yard to find it—as she had to do three weeks ago when Garrett flushed a twelve-inch stuffed Keiko the Whale to freedom.
The coat hanger refused to go any farther and she drew it back, praying there would be a ten-inch square rag of blanket attached. There wasn’t.
From the living room she could hear Chelsea Jeffries screaming over her loss.
“No, no, Chelsea!” Kate was saying to the accompaniment of the sound of something that squeaked hitting something that screamed. “Beating Garrett with his bear, while very satisfying personally, will not bring your blanket back. Here. Give me the bear. Ouch! Chelsea!”
Above that was the sound of two eight-year-olds and a nine-year-old running to the kitchen. She could hear the sounds of the refrigerator door being opened and closed and cupboard doors slamming while Kate was probably preoccupied with the screaming toddlers.
Amy closed the lid on the john, propped her elbows on it and dropped her head in her hands. She didn’t know whether to laugh at Kate’s textbook-psychology-catchphrase approach to child care, or cry over the chaos that she knew reigned in her living room.
It was a good thing the parents of the toddlers were all friends of hers from her days as promotion and public relations director at Riverview Hospital. Otherwise any stranger walking into this facility this afternoon would probably have her license pulled.
The older children hadn’t fit in elsewhere, so she was in no serious danger of losing them, but that was not necessarily a comfort at the moment.
She had two other children enrolled who were blessedly normal—Pete and Eddy Nicholas, nine and twelve, Malia Nicholas’s brothers, but they came only two afternoons a week when there was no football practice after school.
But she was getting inquiries all the time, and she needed more space if she was to provide the kind of day care she really wanted to offer. Remodeling the barn behind the house had seemed like the ideal solution.
The building had been wired and plumbed by the previous owner, but it needed many inside amenities before it could be inhabited by children. And she had visions of cupboard and closet space, a second kitchen, a roomy bathroom.
The playground equipment between the house and the barn was perfectly placed for the summer, but in Heron Point, Oregon, it began raining in late September and didn’t stop until May. She imagined converting one half of the barn into a kind of indoor playground.
But that would only happen if she could find a builder she could afford. So far the bids were outrageous, and if she had to keep hiring backhoes and plumbers because of The Mad Flusher, her dreams of expansion would be pushed farther and farther out of reach.
Her family might help her if she asked, but she’d come to Heron Point and taken the job her uncle had found for her at the hospital to escape the look of disappointment in her parents’ faces.
Her father had inherited a textile factory from his father, and though, as far as Amy recollected, he’d never contributed much to running or improving it, he’d had a competent staff, and so the company had been a success and their family comfortable.
Her mother, a society maven and a beautiful woman, had groomed her three daughters to marry up, as though their home on Long Island was some country place in Regency England
Jane, Amy’s older sister, was beautiful, petite and brilliant, and had claimed the attention of the scion of a wealthy Boston family in her second year at Yale.
Peggy, Amy’s younger sister, was beautiful and very tall, and had caught the eye of a photographer at a Junior League charity function. Before she knew it, she was working as a professional model.
The last Amy heard in a birthday card from her mother in April, Peggy was working in Paris through the summer.
Amy had been her mother’s only failure. She had no interest in her looks, in social contacts, or in the young men who ignored her for those very reasons. She was happy enough with her degree in education and a position in a school library, but her mother kept shaking her head over her and murmuring “poor Amy.”
So she’d come to Heron Point to take control of her life. But the illusion of starting over had lasted only long enough for her to launch the Model Mommy campaign for the hospital’s birthing rooms opening, fall in love, then have love walk out on her as though she’d been just any old affaire.
So she’d decided to do something for herself—not to meet the family’s expectations of her, and not to comply with some societal rule that expected her to find a man whose idea of a wife was a tall, slightly gawky blonde who really wanted to belong but couldn’t quite make it happen.
She’d left the hospital and with a small inheritance from her uncle put a down payment on this big old house at the edge of Ethan’s Woods. She had to make this work. She would not fail.
She didn’t want to hear another “poor Amy.”
She groaned and lifted the lid on the john, feeding the hanger slowly down, knowing the future wasn’t going to brighten for her until she had the present in order.
“Right,” she thought as the sound of dishware crashing to the floor came from the kitchen. “Like that’s going to happen.”
* * *
TOM NICHOLAS HEARD the persistent doorbell and tried to make his way toward it. But with a blinding headache and the remnants of sleep clouding his brain, he wasn’t doing very well. He bounced off of the back of a chair, crashed into the coffee table and limped toward the annoyingly cheerful sound while his shin throbbed painfully.
Before he could reach the door, he heard a key turn in the lock and the door flew open, launching two figures into the room. He squinted against the glare to identify them. Oh, God. Just what he didn’t need. His brother and his best friend.
He put one hand over his eyes and held the other hand out, hoping to stop them from moving farther into the room. “I know, I know. I should have told you I was back. But I got in late last night and…”
“Oh, shut up.” Jave, his brother, walked right past Tom’s halting hand and into the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,” he called over his shoulder. “You’ve been wandering the countryside for almost two years with nothing but a card or a call every couple of months to let us know you’re alive, and Mom and Nancy and the kids worried about you. Why would I expect to be informed that you’ve moved back into town? I’m the one remaining person in your circle of family and friends who’s still talking to you, but, hey… Haven’t you even made coffee yet? It’s almost three o’clock.”
Nate Foster, Tom’s friend, looked him up and down and fell into the chair that faced the television. “A word of advice,” he said. “If you’re going to try to sneak into town, you should park your truck in the garage instead of the driveway. Nice one, incidentally. You must have made big bucks with Healey Construction.”
Tom sank into a corner of the sofa, resigned to accepting Jave and Nate’s loving but brutal concern. But he was not in an accepting mood. He’d been awakened this morning shortly before eight by the sounds of the sanitation truck, and he’d gone to the window and looked out on residential Heron Point and wondered what in the hell he was doing here.
He’d just finished working on a hotel in Tucson four days ago when he’d looked around at the hot, dry landscape and had the very same thought. What in the hell am I doing here? With sweat pouring down him and nothing but mesquite and tumbleweed for miles, he’d longed for the four-mile-wide river, for the evergreens, the coastal breeze, the moist and fragrant air that made even the deepest summer day feel like he was rafting on a lake. For Heron Point.
He’d been so homesick for Oregon that he’d quit Healey on the spot, turned down a considerable raise and a plea to stay with the crew as it moved south to Tempe, packed his truck and headed north.
It had been long enough, he told himself. He’d put the specters of his past behind him before he’d even left Heron Point, but he’d still had to get away to learn to live without them. Guilt had governed him for so long, it had pushed him from the fire-fighting career he’d loved, driven him into an aimless isolation that had kept his entire loving family frantic with worry. Just before he left, Nate, who had been treating a homeless woman,
proved to him that he hadn’t been hearing things the night he and Davey stormed into the burning hotel, that a woman had been screaming, even though he hadn’t been able to find her. At the time, he’d felt as if he’d sacrificed Davey for a woman who didn’t exist. Davey had died while waiting for him.
No one had understood his need to get away. They’d insisted the issue was resolved. He wasn’t to blame for anything. Why did he have to go away now?
It had been hard to explain that guilt had become his identity, and that without it, he had to rediscover himself. His mother had told him he’d always overanalyzed everything. Nate told him he was nuts. Jave told him he was running away.
Amy had closed her door in his face. So much for the love and devotion she’d pledged just two nights earlier.
Angry and confused, he’d left town and kept just a minimum of contact, knowing if he was ever going to find himself again, he had to do it without the family and friends who were always so quick to support and defend him.
He’d had to learn to depend upon himself again, to learn that he was worthy of his own trust, that he was whole once more.
He’d thought he had, until he’d looked out the window that morning and felt the impact of all that was familiar in his hometown It was one thing to feel heroic in foreign surroundings, but quite another to come back and face the demons that had wrestled you down.
“You look like you ought to start a grunge band,” Jave said, two steaming mugs hooked in the fingers of one hand, one in the other. He was wearing a suit. He and Nate, Tom guessed, must have just left the hospital.
“How’d you do that so fast?” Tom asked, sniffing suspiciously at the light brew in the cup.
“It’s a powdered instant Jo ordered for Mom,” Jave replied, sitting on the other end of the sofa. “I made it in the microwave.”
Jo Jeffries owned Coffee Country downtown, a coffee bar patronized by everyone in Heron Point.
Tom took a careful sip and found that it was sweet and tasted of almond. He held back a grimace. Construction site coffee often doubled as mortar, but he’d grown used to it.
This stuff tasted like melted candy, but at least it was hot.
“You heard from Mom?” he asked, trying to sustain the mood of civility as long as possible. “She wrote me that you and Nancy and the kids gave her a trip to Europe for her birthday.”
Jave leaned an elbow on the back of the sofa and turned sideways to look at him. “Yeah. She’s with a tour in Scotland. She’s having a great time. She’s not due home until Thanksgiving.” He looked around at the bag Tom had propped against the coffee table, the tool boxes he’d brought in to clean up, the jacket over the back of a dining room chair, the sandwich plate and empty potato chip bag from the meal he’d made himself when he’d arrived last night. “That’ll give us time to bulldoze this place and start over.”
Tom drank more coffee, tuning out the sweetness and concentrating on the heat and the caffeine. “Don’t nag, all right? I just got here. I’ll get organized.”
Jave ignored his reassurances. “How are you?” he asked, and waited for an answer with that analytical, older-brother concentration that had always annoyed Tom yet somehow sustained him.
“I’m fine,” he said, almost surprised that in some deep-down, elemental way he really was. All he had to do was figure out what to do about his life now that he was.
“You look like the last stages of swamp fever,” Nate observed.
Tom ran his hand over several days’ growth of beard on his chin and through hair that hadn’t been cut in seven weeks, and laughed. “Yeah, well, I’m not a doctor, so I don’t have to look like a George Clooney wanna-be like you guys.”
“You don’t even look as good as the Unabomber.”
Tom laughed again. “I know. But the last few days on the job were a real squeeze, then it was a three-day drive home, so don’t hassle me. I’ll clean up, then you’ll be sorry because Karma will be wondering why she married you instead of me.”
Nate shook his head slowly. “You are in the last stages of swamp fever.”
“So, you want to come over for dinner,” Jave asked, “and join Nate and Ryan and me for handball tonight?”
That sounded like a lot of effort at the moment, but he was looking forward to seeing Nancy and the kids. And a homecooked meal—even Nancy’s cooking—would be a nice change from the last three days of fast food on the road.
“Yeah. Thanks.” He pointed to the suitcase propped against the coffee table. “Somewhere in there I’ve got some things for the kids.”
Nate frowned. “Nothing for us?”
“I’ve brought you my sublime skill,” Tom said grandly. “I’m sure you must have some project on the old A-frame that needs remodeling or repair. How’s the deck holding up?”
“Great,” Nate replied. “We spent a lot of time out there. You know…” He dug into the pocket of his jacket with a casualness that was almost theatrical.
Tom knew immediately that something was up. Jave took a magazine from the coffee table and perused it, as though detaching himself from what was about to unfold.
They’d used this trick on him before. They plotted something together, purportedly for his own good, then one or the other of them presented it in a way that would not suggest collusion. It was a device they’d employed many times when he’d been trying to put his life back together after the fire.
He waited while Nate made a production of exploring his pockets. Jave appeared to be completely absorbed in Needlework Quarterly.
“Ah, here it is!” Nate handed him a newspaper clipping. “If you’re back in business in Heron Point, you’ll need work. I just happened to notice this when I was having lunch.”
“I thought you just noticed my car on your way home?”
“No. Karma noticed your truck when she drove past to go to the Scupper. She called the hospital to ask me if I knew you were back.”
Tom blinked. “Karma…was going to the Scupper Tavern?”
Nate rolled his eyes. “She does their books, amoeba brain. Read the ad.”
It was a small ad from the classifieds. Accepting Bids On Barn Remodel. Call Kids & Co. Day Care.
Tom looked up. The ad seemed simply to be a good lead on a job. He’d made and saved a lot of money during his two years in Arizona, but he’d stashed it in savings to build his own place one day, and he was eager to get back to the variety of work offered in general carpentry.
And work done at a day care would mean a lot of parents would see it, and that could mean more work.
Had he misjudged his brother and his friend?
He doubted it. Nate was drinking his coffee with studied calm, and Jave appeared to be memorizing a knitting pattern.
“I suppose the day-care provider is a gorgeous single woman,” Tom guessed, pocketing the ad.
Nate and Jave exchanged a look. “As it happens, she is,” Nate replied. “This could get your business and your social life off to a good start.”
“You two are so transparent. Just because you were involved in a wedding frenzy and a baby boom two years ago, don’t think you’re getting me involved.”
Nate gave him an affronted look. “Did anybody say anything about weddings and babies?”
“Not me,” Jave replied from behind the magazine.
Tom snatched it from him and slapped it on the table. Then he caught Jave’s arm and pulled him to his feet. With his other hand, he caught Nate and dragged him along as he headed for the door.
He backed them up to it and caught each collar in a fist.
“Now, you two listen to me,” he said with quiet sincerity. “I’m back in town less than twenty-four hours and you’re already working my life like a piece in a chess game. I do not belong to you!” His voice rose despite his efforts to remain calm. He swallowed and began again. “I am no longer your burned-out little brother—” he focused on Jave, then turned to Nate “—or your needy friend. I’ve got it together, and I’m back. I want to be a part of your lives, but don’t try to find me women or create work for me or otherwise manage my life, or you’ll need an orthopedist! Do I make myself clear?”
“Very.”
“Sure.”
“Good.” Tom pulled them away from the door, pushed them aside, then opened it. He smiled amiably at his brother. “Then I’ll see you at dinner, and you—” he slapped Nate’s shoulder “—at the gym.”
“So you don’t want help of any kind,” Jave said, stopping at the porch stairs, “but you don’t mind being fed.”
“Food is always above the rules. Pleasure to see you both.”
Tom closed the door, then peered through the small square of window in the top to make sure they left.
They walked side by side down the steps, two men in dapper suits who looked like an ad for Armani. When they reached the bottom of the steps they turned to each other, exchanged a high five, then laughed as they walked to Nate’s car.
Tom didn’t like the looks of that at all.
Just to prove to himself that he was impervious to their machinations, he called the number in the ad.
A young woman’s voice answered. Children’s raucous voices and crying babies were audible in the background.
“This is Tom Nicholas Carpentry and Construction,” he said. “I’d like to make an appointment to see the barn you’d like remodeled and offer a bid.”
“Oh. Hold on, please.”
He waited. She was back in a moment. “Come by anytime,” she said. “The barn is in the back. You have the address?”
“Yes, thank you. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Tom showered and shaved and wished fervently that he’d done laundry. He went to the closet in his room and found a pair of casual beige slacks he hadn’t bothered to pack when he’d left two years ago. He pulled them on and found them snug. He’d acquired glutes in the intervening time.
In the bottom drawer of his dresser was a long-sleeved green knit sweater he’d never liked because it made him look like a dandy. He pulled it on, thinking that if he was going to wander around a day-care facility, he’d better look as little like a reprobate as possible.
Tom rapped on the front door of a big, turn-of-the-century farmhouse about a quarter of a mile from Nate’s place at the edge of Ethan’s Woods, and introduced himself to an attractive but very serious-looking young woman. He told her he was going back to the barn.
Behind her he could see an empty playpen, a little girl sitting in a big chair watching television, and two boys on the carpet, playing with cars and trucks.
“That’s fine,” she said with a stiff smile.
Jave and Nate had really lost it, he thought as he made his way across a neatly trimmed back lawn to a red barn the same vintage as the house. The young woman was practically a child herself, and looked as though she wouldn’t know how to laugh if she were given directions.
He pulled the barn’s big double doors open and turned his attention to the project. He turned on a light switch on the wall, and could see the plumbing and wiring had been brought in, and that there was a deep laundry tub on the far side.
Cheap paneling had warped on the walls, and the floor squeaked. The windows were rotten, and a flimsy partition apparently intended to separate the large space into two rooms was falling down.
The structure, however, looked sound. He climbed up into the loft to check the beams and found them dry and free of rot. The floor of the loft was sound and would allow that space to be made into an interesting room or office, depending on what the owner wanted to do with it.
He climbed down again, pulled a small piece of paneling away and found that the walls, too, were dry. The leaking window frames had probably been responsible for the condition of the paneling.
He sat on a rough wooden bench and made a few calculations. He put together a bid in three parts. The first, a deluxe remodel, included a dropped ceiling, a stairway to the loft on a second floor, a new floor downstairs, new windows and a wall dividing the space into two rooms.
A moderate job included all the features of the deluxe job, except for the dropped ceiling.
If the client was operating on a really small budget, he could do just windows and floor and whatever cosmetic work was preferred.
He copied the figures legibly onto a piece of letterhead on his clipboard and headed back to the house.
He was intercepted halfway across the lawn by one of the boys he’d seen in the house. He was towheaded, freckled and scrawny in the way of little boys whose metabolism outdistanced even their great consumption of food.
And this one seemed to be made of sheer energy. He sprang along beside him as though his shocks were bad.
“Hi! Are you gonna fix the barn?”
“Maybe,” Tom replied. “I’m going to bid on the job.”
“We’re gonna play in there in the winter. You’re the fourth bidder. The other three were too high.”
That was good. He’d put together a conservative bid, hoping it would help reestablish him in Heron Point. After that, the quality of his work would build his reputation. When he’d left the fire department and gone into business for himself four years ago, he’d had more work than he could handle within three months.
“I’m Truman,” the boy said, still hopping along beside him.
Tom detoured to go around to the front of the house. “Weren’t you president once?” he teased.
The boy punched him in the arm. “Everybody tries that joke. That was Harry Truman. I’m Truman Fuller.”
Tom stopped at the bottom of the porch steps to offer his hand. “Hi, Truman. I’m Tom Nicholas.”
The boy had a good grip—dirty, but good. “I’ve got friends named Nicholas. Pete and Eddy. And Malia. She’s a girl, though, and a baby.”
“I’m their uncle.” Tom walked up the steps and Truman followed.
“Cool! The hero from the fire?”
Tom felt the beginnings of the old familiar wrenching in his gut. But he could stop it now. He bore no guilt for it. That was over. Resolved. This was now.
“Not a hero,” he corrected the boy gently, rapping on the door. “I went to try to save somebody, but she was already gone.”
“But if she’d been there youda saved her!”
The boy’s eagerness to invest him with heroic qualities touched him.
The door was opened by the grave young woman. She invited him into a large living room. There were toys everywhere, an empty playpen, and rocking horses on springs, rockers and wheels. The girl still occupied the chair, but the other boy was now stretched on his stomach on the sofa, engrossed in the television.
Something apparently happened in the action that the boy didn’t like and he said emphatically, “S—-!”
“Rodney!” the young woman said. “You owe the cuss box another quarter. And I’ll have to tell your father you’re slipping again.”
“Well the Gargoyles just got attacked!”
“`Darn it’ would have been just as effective a response. I understand your need to express distress, but you’re in the presence of a lady.”
Rodney frowned. “Where?”
The girl, clutching a fairly large box that seemed to be wrapped in plastic, replied, “Me, stupid,” without even looking away from the television.
The woman put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes.
“I can just leave this with you,” Tom said quickly, afraid the woman was about to have a breakdown. “If you’re interested, we can talk about it when it’s convenient for you.”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “I’m not the director. She does want to talk to you. She’s in the bathroom. We’re having a plumbing crisis.”
“Garrett Foster flushed Chelsea Jeffries’s blankie down the john!” Truman seemed to find it exciting.
Tom grinned. “No kidding.” When he’d left Heron Point, his niece, Malia, and Garrett and Chelsea had been a little over three months old. Now they were two years old.
It had been a curious twist of fate that the babies had all been born at Riverview Hospital on the same day, and that their parents had become the best of friends thanks in part to Amy Brown.
First he’d felt lucky to be part of their warm and riotous group. Then, after the holidays, when they’d all settled into their contented routines, he’d been unable to find his own contentment. So he’d left.
But he was back. And getting work was going to be an important part of his readjustment process. So he put the past out of his mind and followed the young woman across the living room and down a corridor that deposited them in the partially open doorway of a bathroom, with Truman still at his heels.
The woman knocked twice on the door, announced, “He’s here!” then turned Truman bodily around and led him away with her.
“Hello?” Tom pushed the door open the rest of the way.
The sight that greeted him drew a quick smile and a gusty sigh of masculine appreciation from him.
A woman was bent over the john with a plunger, her shapely derriere in jeans swaying with her efforts.
“Just a…minute,” she said, yanking hard with the plunger. She planted both feet more firmly, affording him an even more delectable view.
Then the little rug under her left foot slipped, the plunger went flying, and she fell backward with a little scream of alarm and a wild flailing of arms.
Tom caught her without even having to move. He extended both arms and she fell into them, hers clutching at his as her head and shoulders crashed into his chest, slapping silky silver blond hair against his mouth and chin.
With his arms full of her, he was overpowered suddenly by several alarming familiarities. The shapely tush, the scent of jasmine, the soft breast around which his right hand was shaped—and the fact that he was here at Nate’s and Jave’s suggestion.
He put the woman on her feet none too gently, spun her around—and found himself looking into Amy Brown’s startled gray eyes.
