Dad turned down our street and nodded as if she’d just told him everything he needed to know.
“Good. That works.”
Mom and my sister, Susan, waited on the porch with a passel of grandkids. We weren’t even all the way up the drive before they were banging on the car. Worse than paparazzi. Nicole freaked out, hiding in Cara’s armpit.
Once she got out and saw Grandma, she laughed and clapped. Dad picked her up and swung her around. Susan shook Cara’s hand. My brother slapped my back. Aunt Janie pinched my cheek and told me I was skinny. My old Uncle Walter, who was six three and 160 if he was an ounce, agreed with her, grabbing at my waist to feel the love handles that weren’t there. Nicole ran to the porch with her cousins, holding up her stack of pony trading cards. Cara tried to catch her, waving twinkling sneakers.
“Nicole! Put your shoes on!”
I grabbed her arm. “Leave her. If she doesn’t get dirty, we’re doing it wrong.”
“We?”
I didn’t have a chance to make up an explanation for a slip of the tongue. Buddy from next door, who ate his boogers every day at lunch until third grade, who knocked up and married Vicki Sommer before he left high school, tackled me. He smelled like motorcycle grease and sweat.
“You didn’t bring Paula?” he asked.
“Nah, I’m not here to work.”
In third grade, when Buddy worked on the seven and eight times tables he got a look on his face that was half twisted out and half relaxed fugue. It had meant things weren’t computing, and rather than work it out he usually just accepted a D and moved on. He got that look when I mentioned Paula’s absence, then shrugged and took his D.
“You have to see Margie.” He punched my arm. “Man, she’s gorgeous!”
Margie was his Harley. He’d been fixing her since he was seventeen. He never looked twisted and fugued with his hands in an engine.
“You been fucking it?” I waved my hand in front of my nose. “You stink, bro!”
“Bradley James Sinclair!” Mom shouted. “You got a mouth like a cesspool.”
Buddy threw his arm around Mom. “I’m glad you’re back. Now she can get off my case. Come check Margie out. She roars and purrs.”
I didn’t look to my parents or my siblings, but to Cara, who was talking to my sister about I-didn’t-even-know-what.
“Hey,” I said, and she turned. “I’m going to go next door for a minute. You’ll be all right?”
“We’ll be fine. Have fun.”
I trotted over to Buddy’s garage to see his bike and glanced back at Cara talking with my sister on the way to the house I grew up in. I didn’t feel anything. Nothing.
Just at home.
CHAPTER 52
CARA
So. Many. People.
The oldest person I met looked as though she wasn’t a minute under 150, and the youngest had just been born a few weeks earlier. I caught as many names as I could and tried to keep an eye on Nicole, but I got pulled in a dozen different directions before being placed in front of a pile of carrots and a cutting board.
“Nanny?” his sister asked. I repeated her name to myself. Susan. An uncle or two came in for beers, but the uncles were indistinguishable from cousins. The gender rules seemed set in stone. All the women got dinner on the table, all the men sat outside. Everyone helped with the children.
“Nanny,” I replied.
“What kind of word is that?” She cleaved an onion, and it opened into two rocking half-spheres.
“Shorter than caretaker?”
“Leave her alone, Suze.” Brad’s mom, Erma, was in constant motion.
“I’m being interested.” Susan had her brother’s jawline, which was both disconcerting and striking on a woman.
“You’re talking without saying anything.”
Susan rolled her eyes and sliced a thin crescent of onion. “Seems all right’s all I’m saying. Taking care of kids? I don’t get paid.” She bit the edge off the onion slice, then munched it down to her fingertips.
“It’s great,” I said. “I have the best job in the world.”
Because my boss has the dick of a god.
“Is Paula still around?” Susan tried to look casual as she cut the rest of the onion.
“Yeah.” I was conspicuously silent. Not another word would pass my lips.
“She and Brad still doing it?” Susan ate another sliver of onion and looked at me intensely with her gray eyes.
“Susan.” Erma punctuated the name by slapping a slab of raw meat on the island. “Why are you poking this woman?” She put her clean hand on my shoulder. “Ignore her. Paula gave her grief when she went to visit. Acted like the queen and someone’s looking to take her down a peg.”
“She treated me like a servant. Then she told me not to bother my brother when they were working and don’t ask questions. Like I don’t know his ‘big secret.’” She froze with air quotes suspended and the onion hanging from her mouth half-eaten. She glanced at her mother, who shook her head and put her attention back on tying the meat.
“She cares about him is all,” Erma lilted. “Bless her heart.”
Aunt Rochelle, who didn’t express anything beyond nonverbal reactions, snorted derisively as she measured out two cups of rice.
“Sure does,” I said, cutting my carrot. More words about Paula were going to pass my lips despite my best intentions. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Not technically. Not outwardly. Not to me. “And bless her heart for it.”
Brad had his mother’s smirk. She didn’t look at me when she tried to hide it, but I saw. He looked just like her.
Susan was less circumspect. She laughed and clapped. It sounded just like him.
She stopped abruptly when the windows started shaking. LA earthquakes shook the windows. If it was strong and you were in the hills, you could hear an unnerving rumble. The blubbering engine fart that rattled the side windows was much louder than that.
“Buddy!” Susan shouted with an offhandedness that could only come from issuing the same warning hundreds of times. “Get that thing off our property!”
Brad’s mother opened the window over the sink.
“Bradley! You know better!”
“Where’s Cara?” he shouted over the rumble. “I can’t find her.”
I abandoned my carrots and leaned over the sink, knife still in my hand. Brad sat on a Harley that barely fit in the driveway. In the night dark and the flood of the headlight, he looked like James Dean, but sexier, sweeter. With sneakers instead of boots and hair unweighted by grease. I didn’t realize I was biting my lower lip until it hurt.
“Let me take you for a ride,” he shouted.
I loved the feel of his attention, and I let myself enjoy it before I answered. I was the nanny. The staff. Not the first person he should be thinking of when he wanted company on a motorcycle ride.
“Nicole would love it,” I called out the window, deflecting the attention.
“Oh no!” Erma shouted. “You are not putting that little girl on that monster.” She plucked the knife from my hand. “Go. Please. Before he gets exhaust in the roast.” She shooed me away exactly like her son shooed.