“My friend Selena offered to share her nanny with us, which was very generous. The nanny is wonderful. It would be such a nice place for Hope to go to every day. But they live in Addison, so you’d have to drive more than a half hour each way before and after school.”
Which means I wouldn’t make it to soccer on time. A half hour there after school, another half hour back to Alan’s, then back to school. I’d be almost an hour and a half late to practice every day. Yeah, Coach would stand for that for, oh, about four seconds. And then I’d be gone. Off the team. Sayonara, UCLA.
“And we’d have to contribute to the cost,” Mom continues, “because the nanny’s rates would go up since she’d be taking care of another child. Selena said two hundred a week should be fine.”
So my choice is between handing over my entire paycheck so Hope can go to an overcrowded, budget day care where she would get ignored and probably catch some nasty ass infectious disease, or quitting soccer and spending a lot more time in the car for $75 less a week and for Hope to get a much higher quality of care.
I bang my head on the table. “My brain hurts.”
Mom takes a deep breath, clearly about to say something, but the doorbell rings. I look at her. “I’ll get it?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” She hands Hope back and gets up to start clearing the table.
I open the door. It’s Mabel.
My heart suddenly feels like it’s on a bike flying down a hill in tenth gear.
She smiles when she sees Hope. “I tried calling you. It kept going to voice mail.”
“Phone’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“Did you find something?”
“Can I come in?”
I shake my head and step out onto the stoop, closing the door behind me. I don’t want Mom to know about the Great Journal Caper. She’ll just give me some line about focusing my attention on all the wrong things. Mabel and I sit on the steps, and I hand her Hope without asking. She takes her happily.
“So?” I ask. “What you got?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s too preoccupied with the baby in her lap, awake this time.
We sit there, Mabel talking baby talk right up in Hope’s face and tapping Hope’s little baby nose and putting her pinkie in Hope’s fist and laughing when she grasps on.
Get to the point, Mabel.
Finally she looks at me, surprised, like she actually forgot I was sitting here. She reaches into the pocket of her shorts and pulls out a key with a yellow Stor-Fast tag attached to it. The tag reads #1017.
“You found it,” I whisper, staring at the key like it’s that blue diamond from the Titanic movie. Meg loved that movie. I never really understood why both of them couldn’t fit on the door at the end. There was plenty of room. All they would have needed to do was take off the life vest Kate Winslet was wearing and strap it to the bottom of the door to reinforce the door’s buoyancy. Surely they could have found something to use—there was plenty of stuff floating around in the water. Then they wait for an hour, get rescued, and live happily ever after.
I tried to explain that to Meg, and she said that while she admired my mad physics smarts and critical thinking, that wasn’t the point. The point was that it was beautiful and romantic that Leonardo DiCaprio would sacrifice himself for Kate Winslet rather than worry about his own fate. She said it was an “epic love story.”
I should have known right then and there that she would also try to go down in a blaze of unnecessary, misguided glory.
“It was in the glove compartment of my mom’s car,” Mabel says. “Took me forever to find.”
“Let’s go,” I say, standing up. But then I remember Mom. If I bail now, without finishing our conversation, she’ll lose whatever scrap of faith in me she has left. “Wait.” I sit. “Shit, I can’t. Tomorrow? Can you do early? I have practice at nine.”
“Yeah, whenever. But it might take a long time to go through all the boxes. There’s a lot of stuff in there.”
I nod, thinking. “Well, we’ll start tomorrow morning and see how far we get. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
? ? ?
I take the night to think about the day care options, to show my mom I’m taking this seriously, but come on, there’s no question of which one I’m going with. If I go with the nanny, I give up soccer, my scholarship, college, my chances at playing professionally. Which will affect Hope’s future too. If I go pro, I’ll have all kinds of money to send her to the best schools and all that. But if I don’t, I won’t. And it’s not like the day care downtown is run by knife-wielding Nazis with open wounds on their faces. I’m sure the people there know what they’re doing. It will be fine. And anyway, it’s only for a year.
Mom’s still asleep when I leave early the next morning to go pick up Mabel, so I write her a note.
Had to take care of a few things before practice. See you tonight. Love you. PS—let’s go with the day care downtown. Let me know what I need to do.
Chapter 15
“Morning,” Mabel says as she gets in the car. The curtains at her living room window move a little, then are pulled tightly closed.
“Do your parents know about any of this?” I ask, backing out of the driveway.