Missing five days of school the way we had originally planned would have been bad enough, but a nine-day absence made me question whether catching up was even possible. In one class after another, I sat catatonic, staring blindly at the whiteboards and listening to teachers who might as well have been speaking in Quechua for all that I understood. Somewhere along the day, I’d crossed over from feeling stupefied with jet lag to feeling just plain stupid. Thankfully, word about the mudslide had traveled far and fast, which won me sympathy points with the teachers, and I got extensions in every class and promises for private tutoring sessions.
Even with all the homework I needed to do, I collected Mrs. Harris after school for our inaugural Friday Walkers, West Coast edition. A stroll around the block might as well have been a treacherous marathon when done on crutches and with an out-of-shape neighbor who had rarely left home for the past few years. I wasn’t sure which of us was breathing harder or sweating more, but both of us were grateful when we returned home. As we reached the lawn, Auggie bounded out of Aunt Margie’s station wagon and nearly flattened me. Her joyous bark had the strength of a porcine opera diva behind it.
“Okay, Auggie!” I laughed as I wiped my cheeks dry of her slobbery kisses.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” said Mrs. Harris, mopping her forehead before she lumbered to her cottage. “I’m exhausted!”
Just a few weeks ago, I had been irritated that my mornings were given over to leading Auggie through her training exercises. This afternoon I was overflowing with appreciation that our brilliant bedbug sniffer didn’t bark when I brought her inside, which meant that Auggie didn’t detect so much as a single bedbug hitchhiker from Peru. That was hallelujah relief.
Above her wide grin, the circles under Aunt Margie’s eyes were so deep and dark, she could have been the one caught in a mudslide with no rescue helicopter in sight. She flopped onto the couch as if her bones had liquefied, then kicked off her wide orthopedic shoes and wiggled her freed toes. “Wow, talk about exhausted! Try running the business and taking care of Auggie.”
At forty, Aunt Margie was the baby of the family. Handling Auggie on top of her regular routine was a shock to her highly regimented, never-married, no-kids system. I grabbed one of Auggie’s favorite toys—a once-plush hedgehog, its pelt chewed into rawhide—and lowered myself carefully onto the rug to play tug-of-war. Despite my waving the stuffed animal like a tantalizing matador’s cape, Auggie had no interest. Zero. Instead, she circled around me as though I were a lost sheep that needed herding.
“Don’t worry, I’m staying,” I soothed her. She rested her head on my thigh to anchor that promise. I shot a grateful smile up at Aunt Margie. “Thanks for taking care of Auggie.”
“Your dad needs to send me to a spa.” Her eyes fluttered closed, as though keeping them open required too much energy.
I literally couldn’t recall Dad ever asking any of his siblings for anything while he ran the family business year after year. In fact, I couldn’t remember a single time when Dad even complained about giving up college while his brothers and Aunt Margie got their degrees.
“To be honest,” I said, stroking Auggie’s head, “Dad’s worried about what he’s going to do now to take care of Mom and us.”
“Well, you kids will be fine on your own, so he doesn’t have to worry about you. I mean, the twins are already so successful,” said Aunt Margie. With a careless wave of her hand, she brushed off that concern like it was a pesky little aphid. “And your mom works.”
“It’s not like he can hunt for bugs if he can’t see them.”
“He can handle the office work. We’ll just have to figure out some new systems.” Her face brightened. “And he can learn braille.”
“But, Aunt Margie,” I said gently and firmly, “he never wanted to go into pest control in the first place.”
She shoved her swollen feet back into her shoes, averted her eyes with the same painful, plastic expression that strangers wore whenever Dad mentioned Paradise, like it was some kind of rancid odor. Yet all of our family—myself included—had been eager enough to accept whatever profits Dad had shared with them.
No one other than Aunt Margie and a cousin or two over summer break ever pitched in to support the so-called family business. Though I had never sensed any pressure from my parents, there’d always been the unspoken expectation from Dad’s family that my brothers or I would run Paradise one day. It was family heritage, after all.
Before I could say another word, Aunt Margie bustled out the door, citing errands upon errands to run before the stores closed. I’d never really looked at Paradise through Dad’s eyes, and clearly none of his siblings had either. Somehow, I had to let the entire family know that everyone was going to have to step up if they wanted to keep Paradise going. It wasn’t Dad’s responsibility to bear alone. But how did I plan a military coup within my own family? My eyes landed on the computer I had brought downstairs this morning.
Another story awaited. This time, my father’s as seen through my eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Nine