“Do you have any gum for us, Uncle Jesse?” the girls cried, patting down the pockets of his brown suede jacket.
Jesse had long been a favorite of my stepnieces due to his habit of carrying bubble gum with him. He was the one who’d taught them how to blow bubbles. It was a skill I’d shown him one day while waiting in an endless line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. While he’d declared gum chewing a disgusting habit in adults (bubble gum had not yet been invented the first time he’d been around), he now found it beneficial in entertaining his younger patients while they were receiving painful medical procedures.
“I don’t know,” Jesse said, pretending to extract a stick from behind Flopsy’s ear. “Do I?”
The girls shrieked with appreciation. The insides of their mouths had been stained red from whatever they’d extracted from the vending machines.
“Hey.” Their father strolled up behind them, looking sheepish. “The nurse said you guys were out here. Sorry it took me so long. Thanks for looking after them, especially after what happened. Is Father D going to be all right?”
I rose from the bench and crossed to Brad’s side so we could speak without the girls overhearing.
“We don’t know,” I said. “Jesse said if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, he should be okay. Where were you?”
“Oh, you know.” Brad looked down at the sidewalk, his hands in the trouser pockets of his ill-fitting suit. He kicked a fallen bud of bright pink bougainvillea into the grass. “Debbie’s dad wouldn’t let me leave, even though I told him about the kids. He made me inventory all the new SUVs we got in at the lot today. It was his way of getting back at me, I guess, for fighting with Deb. But of course all it did was make your life hell. I’m really sorry. Debbie couldn’t come pick them up because she and Kelly have Pilates or yoga or some goddamn thing on Thursday nights.”
I winced. It didn’t help that the only job Brad had ever been able to keep was with his father-in-law, Debbie Mancuso’s dad, the Mercedes King of Carmel. Trying to keep up with the mortgage payments on the overpriced home on the golf course Debbie insisted they had to have in Carmel Valley Ranch (because that’s where all her friends who couldn’t afford houses in Pebble Beach lived), plus pay the fees for the girls’ private school education wasn’t easy. My mom and Andy helped out where they could, and both Jake and I had given Brad a few loans, too.
But I didn’t know how long the two of them were going to be able to keep it together, especially since Debbie insisted on being a stay-at-home mom, even with the girls gone all day (the mission believed a full-day kindergarten program improved cognitive development. It also improved the mission’s tuition coffers).
Debbie said she needed the “me” time to be the best mom she could be. A lot of her “me” time seemed to be spent working out at the gym with a personal trainer, buying clothes, and going to lunch with the likes of Kelly Prescott Walters.
Of course, Brad took a lot of “me” time for himself, playing golf and partying at Snail Crossing.
I totally understood their need for so much “me” time, since being the parents of rambunctious triplets (and the spouses of one another) had to be really exhausting.
“Brad, you’ve got to find a new job. One where you aren’t dependent on your father-in-law for your income.”
“I know.” He kicked at another dried bougainvillea bud. “But who’d want to hire me? I don’t have a college degree. I barely managed to graduate high school. I know I screwed up. At least I have them.” His gaze rested tenderly on his three daughters, who were now having a contest to see who could stretch their gum into the longest strand.
My own gaze rested on Brad—not exactly tenderly, but with more affection than in the past. He’d driven me crazy the entire time we’d been forced by our parents to live together—so much so that I’d given him the private nickname Dopey, and often wished for his premature death.
But his love for his daughters—and the fact that I rarely, if ever, had to watch him drink directly from a milk carton anymore—mostly made up for that.
“Hey!” he yelled at the girls, startling me. “What have I told you before? Gum stays in your mouth!”
That’s when I noticed something sitting beside Jesse on the bench, something I hadn’t seen earlier because it hadn’t been there earlier. It was white and fuzzy, with brown spots on it. It was shaped like a stuffed horse.
Lucia’s stuffed horse.
Jesse noticed the direction of my stare. He’d never seen Lucia’s horse, and had no way of knowing it belonged to her. But he knew it didn’t belong to the girls, because it was gleaming with the faint otherworldly glow all paranormal objects give off when they’ve recently made the journey from their dimension to ours.
That was why Jesse reached out instinctively to knock it from the bench, even though it could not hurt the girls. Not being mediators, they couldn’t see it. Still, his hypervigilance was not something he could turn on and off like a switch.