No Place I'd Rather Be

  None of us believed him.

  “We all need raises.”

  He blustered, we walked, he came up with an offer. We accepted and walked back in.

  I hated him. I hated working for him. When he lumbered back into the kitchen finally appearing cowed I said, “Get out. Now.” He left.

  I put my hands heavily on the counter. I could not do this for much longer. Justin, Earl, and Dinah came up and linked their arms around my shoulders.

  “He sucks,” Dinah said.

  “Yes, he does,” I said.

  “I’m happy to hit him for you, Olivia,” Earl said. “Say the word. I enjoyed it last time. My mother told me to tell you hello. She’s hoping you’ll get back together with Jace. Hey! Then you could cook with him again out at the ranch.”

  * * *

  I saw Jace outside Larry’s restaurant after work. He was waiting for me. Black jacket, jeans, cowboy boots.

  “Hi, Jace.” Utter relief. That’s how I felt. I had dealt with a classless, disgusting, misogynistic gargoyle, and here was Jace. Total opposite. Classy. Smart. Polite. Caring.

  “Hello, Olivia.” He smiled, towering over me. His black hair was thick and windblown. His face was adorable and scarred. When he wasn’t smiling, he looked like he would enjoy knocking people apart. I knew he was tough but he had a huge heart. “Coffee?”

  I was sweaty. I had lemon cheesecake on my boob. I had vinaigrette sauce on my sleeve. I needed a shower. “Sure. Want to come to my house, though? I’m a mess.”

  I didn’t miss the way his face lit up at the invitation.

  “You’re a pretty mess.”

  “Thanks. I don’t feel pretty.”

  He stepped in close, cowboy boots to cowgirl boots. “You are always gorgeous, Olivia.”

  He followed me home. It was comforting to have him behind me.

  I was so glad to see the red door, the wagon wheel, the sun weather vane, and my grandparents’ cowboy hats on the log cabin. Safety. Warmth. Joy. Jace followed me in, and I smiled at him. He smiled back.

  He is my sun.

  * * *

  He slid an envelope across the scratches and dents of our dining room table to me.

  “What’s this?” I had had a shower and washed my hair with a mango-pineapple-scented shampoo. I used vanilla lotion to smell extra tasty. I pulled on jeans and a red sweater with a deep neckline that maybe, perhaps, was a tad low over my lacy red bra. I dried my hair, put on makeup, and smiled at Jace, waiting for me in the family room in front of the fire. I could tell he liked my cleavage.

  I made the coffee while we chatted, then put out sugar cookies the girls and I decorated. I gave him two cats. One cat had three eyes, the other appeared to have a penis. He thanked me, smiled, and said, “I’m eating a cat,” and we laughed.

  “Open it.”

  The envelope was decorated with pictures of hearts and flowers and dogs. The dogs might have been stoned, but they were cute. I recognized Stephi’s and Lucy’s art. It was a one-page letter, also decorated with hearts, flowers, dogs, and one huge cat that resembled a cat vampire.

  Deer Mr. Giant,

  Hi! This is Lucy and Stephi. Thank you for picking us up at school when we were very very very bad sick. We liked playing Candy Land next time you might not lose.

  We no you are not a giant.

  Right?

  Charlie told us on the bus that you are Aunt Olivias husband. So we think you should come and live with us in the log house please bring the doggys Snickers and Garmin and K. C. the kitty cat.

  We like animals.

  Can you come tommorrrow? Will you play Candy Land with us again?

  Love Stephi and Lucy

  “Oh, Jace.” I didn’t even know what to do. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” He grinned. “I thought it was a nice letter.”

  “They told me that they were going to write you a letter. I didn’t know they had. They probably got your address from my mother.” I knew it was her. The traitor.

  “What did you tell them about us?”

  “I told them that we are married but that we live apart because we have problems.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said that we should hug and say sorry like they do when they have a fight.”

  “Smart. Let’s hug and say sorry.”

  “Jace.” I smiled at him. I can’t help it. He was my best friend for a long time. Best in bed, too. He stood up and that giant man reached down and pulled me up and wrapped me in a hug and his mouth came down on mine, and I reacted instinctively because every time I see him I want to get naked with him.

  I kissed him right back and soon, with zero thought at all, as my brain was awash in lust, off came my red sweater and that pretty, lacy red bra and I unbuttoned his shirt and I was lost. I unbuckled his belt and pulled down his jeans. My jeans and underwear were already down, his hands on all that nakedness making me groan . . . and then I heard the girls as my grandma dropped them off.

  “Oh no, oh my, oh no . . .” I pulled away and yanked up my underwear and jeans, then frantically tried to find my sweater. “Where is my bra? Where is my sweater?”

  Jace looked around, totally unruffled, as he pulled up his pants and buckled his belt. My sweater was on the other side of the couch. He leaned over. “Here, baby.” I was panicked the girls would come in on a half-naked mother. I pulled it over my head in the nick of time. My bra was on the floor, and I threw it down the hallway. Jace was pulling on his shirt when the girls burst in.

  “Hi, Mr. Giant!” Stephi said, smiling.

  “Hi, Mr. Giant!” Lucy said. She pointed her finger in the air. “Are you here to play Candy Land?”

  “Yes. That’s why I came.”

  “Yay! You want to have cookies first? I found new rocks.” Stephi held out her rocks.

  “Excellent finds, Stephi. I do want to have cookies. What kind did you and your aunt Olivia make?” He finished buttoning his shirt, calm and collected.

  “We made sugar cookies with love,” Lucy said. “I made my cookies in the shapes of dogs and cats like Garmin and Snickers and K.C. And I did Show-and-Share today and I showed everyone an oxygen mask, a shot, a catheter, that’s a hard word, I told them where it goes, and I put on the blue gloves so you don’t get blood on your hands. Grandma gave them to me to show. I’m going to be a doctor that slices people up and takes out the bad stuff.”

  Oh, Lord.

  “And I made a picture!” Stephi said. She held it up. It was all four of us. Jace was huge, filling up most of the page and smiling in a cowboy hat. The girls were wearing tutus and crowns and carrying swords. There was a pile of gold rocks by Stephi’s feet. I had a ton of brown wavy hair and green eyes that took up half my face and a smile that took up the other half. There were two dogs. Lucy held the leash of one, Stephi the other. Both dogs had purple bows and pink smiles. A yellow cat with red stripes was sitting on Lucy’s shoulder.

  “Wow,” Jace said, taking the picture. “You’re an artist. Can I have it?”

  “Yep, you can.”

  “Wait. Hold on. Wait.” Lucy stopped bopping about, confused. “Why was your shirt off, Mr. Giant, when we came in?”

  “I was showing your mom my muscles.”

  “Oh,” Stephi said. “Because you’re a giant and your muscles grow quick.”

  “Exactly. She likes to see them sometimes.”

  “You’ve got some black hair on your muscles,” Stephi said.

  “It’s because I eat broccoli.”

  “I eat broccoli and I don’t get black hair on my muscles,” Stephi said.

  “But you’re not a giant,” Jace said.

  “That’s true! You’re right! Okay! Let’s have cookies and play”—she paused for dramatic effect—“Candy Land!”

  Jace was even more adorable playing Candy Land. He winked at me. I tried not to pant at him over the gumdrops.

  * * *

  Lucy and Stephi went to a daycare when Annabelle worked in the neo
natal intensive care unit. I worked Wednesday through Sunday at Carter’s. Annabelle and I and the girls started having dinner together on Mondays. The girls were nervous, skittish, jumping at any noise and reaching for the other’s hand. They would hardly talk and were often unsmiling and withdrawn. If there was a man in the hallway, they hid behind me or Annabelle. Scarred on the inside, scarred on the outside.

  But cooking together ended up being healing for us. I showed them how to make manicotti with ricotta cheese, seafood pasta with scallops and shrimp, and homemade peppermint ice cream.

  They drew me pictures and I put them on my refrigerator. In one, my brown hair is down to my ankles and I’m wearing a crown. There are butterflies and smiles flying around. In another I’m in a white chef’s jacket with red high heels holding a turkey with orange and red feathers in one hand and a cat by the neck in another. (They wanted a cat.)

  When Stephi had the flu, she stayed with me on a Monday. Lucy didn’t want to go to school, she wanted to stay with me, too, so by nine o’clock the school called and said Lucy said she was sick. Lucy wasn’t sick. Annabelle knew it, and so did I. We agreed she could have one day off. We had the best time. I cooked for them and we watched Disney movies and sang all the songs together.

  In summer I had the girls every Tuesday, all day. We went to the movies, the zoo, pools, and playgrounds for picnics. Annabelle brought me flowers to thank me. She offered to pay me, but I refused. She knitted me a gorgeous sweater. It is the warmest, comfiest sweater I have. She knitted me a scarf. The girls picked the colors. Best scarf ever. She knitted me socks/booties. Same thing.

  The girls let bits of their past slip. “Daddy’s friend Craig Zee did that.” Lucy pointed to a circular scar on Stephi’s arm. “Cigarettes are bad. I said no no no. He pushed me. See?” She pointed to a scar on her hairline. “I bammed into the table. He told the doctor I fell. I didn’t fall . . . Craig Zee smoked. Now when I smell smoke I throw up.”

  “Craig Zee is scary. You know needles?” Stephi said. “He put needles in his arm for fun and he put needles in Momma’s arm. We saw. She said she liked it. I don’t like it.

  “Mommy yelled at us because we’re bad. One time we got sick but she said she didn’t have time to take us to the doctor so when we were at school the school called an ambulance and me and Lucy got to go to the hospital and have Popsicles in bed. Then we went to another lady’s house with a bunch of kids and didn’t see Mommy for a while.”

  Annabelle had told me that her daughter, Sarah, had behavioral problems from the time she was three. She had been expelled from preschools and three elementary schools, and had dropped out of high school on the fourth suspension. She attacked teachers, kids, the principal. She hit Annabelle. She tried to burn their house down twice. She ran away and worked as a prostitute. She was into drugs at fifteen.

  “My husband and I adored her. She came drunk to her father’s funeral, couldn’t bother to be sober to say good-bye to Karl. I truly believe that Sarah’s problems killed Karl. That’s why he had two heart attacks. Third one did him in. We were up all night, so many nights, worried sick.

  “Over the years Sarah was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. Intermittent explosive disorder. Narcissism. A general personality disorder. Bipolar. The labels soon meant nothing. She refused to take her medications anyhow. She was an addict and alcoholic. We had her in treatment more times than I can tell you, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. She’s been to a house full of psychiatrists. Nothing helped. We went through savings, retirement, and equity in our home. I finally sold the home for one more rehab stint off an island in the south. It didn’t work.

  “She changed her name when she was sixteen to Devlin because it sounded like the devil. She said she liked the devil. She met a real devil. His name was Parker McDaniel and she married him.

  “Every morning,” Annabelle told me, “I wake up and I have this terrible sense of doom. I love Sarah. I’m so afraid that one day I’ll get a call and she’ll be dead. I live with this never-ending fear all the time. I try to funnel it into something positive, with my patients, and with the girls. But it doesn’t always work. Plus, I live with the fear that when Sarah gets out of jail she’ll get the girls back and I won’t be able to find them. I won’t be able to check on Lucy and Stephi, and horrible things will happen again.”

  “I am so sorry, Annabelle. I’m so glad you have the girls now. They adore you.”

  She smiled and we held hands. “You’re an outstanding aunt. Thank you for letting them call you Aunt Olivia. They love you. Wait until you see what the girls are making you for Christmas.”

  The girls and Annabelle made me a Christmas blanket. One side had candy canes on it, the other side had Mrs. Claus.

  “Made with love,” Lucy said, giving me a hug.

  “Like how you cook your food,” Stephi said.

  The girls hugged me. “We love you, Aunt Olivia.”

  * * *

  After work I drove out into the country, past Jace’s white fence, and climbed out of my truck where I usually do. The sky was blue, the puffy clouds floating by, as if they had somewhere to be, and way out there was the snow-covered hill and the magical sunsets.

  I would go there soon.

  * * *

  “Blow my brain cells from here to kingdom come, Kyle is participating in Kalulell’s talent show,” Chloe said. She leaned against the refrigerator in my home. I handed her a glass of wine. The girls were upstairs playing in their tent. Both had cried after school because of “no friends. They think we’re weird. Are we weird? Katie is having a birthday party this weekend and I didn’t get invited.”

  It is so hard to hear your children’s voices filled with loneliness.

  My sister drank the wine in one throw-the-head-back move, her ponytail swinging. She, too, struggled with the pain of raising a kid who was different in a society that is often brutal to “different.”

  “What’s his talent?” I poured myself a glass of wine, too. I needed it. Then I tied an apron around the lime green shirt I’d bought in Portugal. It had turtles on it and a drawstring waist. I like turtles.

  “He doesn’t know. He is, and I quote him, ‘assessing my talents to determine which one, if any, I could present in a social setting with the highest chance of success.’”

  “You’re afraid he’s going to get laughed at.”

  “Yes. Hell, yes.” She poured another glass of wine. “When he told me he was entering, I felt my stomach drop through my big-girl panties. I wanted to put my hand under my crotch to catch it. That’s how it felt. My stomach was going to slide out of my butterfly.”

  “I would not want your stomach to slide out of your butterfly.” We were indulging in Martindale Cake Therapy and making a lemon chiffon cake out of Grandma’s cookbook. It had been written in German. Grandma said it was written by Esther. “She made it when she needed to settle her nerves. She said the sweet tartness always made her happy.”

  I used the Internet to translate the ingredients into English. It was an honor to be making recipes from Grandma’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother.

  The lemon chiffon cake was our “healing cake,” that Chloe and I agreed we would make together. It would be me making the cake. Chloe doesn’t have the same passion I do for baking, but she would “help.”

  “Hey, speaking of my butterfly, let’s put the cake in a butterfly pan.” Chloe started digging through the cupboards. “Ta-da!” She held up our grandma’s two butterfly-shaped cake pans.

  “Let’s do it. A double-layer butterfly lemon chiffon cake with raspberry filling.” For fun I said, “Can you hand me the flour?” Totally distracted by her distress over Kyle, Chloe grabbed a jar of pickles and handed it to me. She took the lid off. “Thank you.”

  She stuck her fingers in the jar and pulled out a long pickle and waved it around. “I feel like bashing heads together already. I tell you, if I’m at that talent show and I see people with cave
man IQ’s making fun of my boy, they will have me and my off-the-leash-temper to deal with.” She pointed the wiggling pickle at me, then took a huge bite.

  “No one is going to make fun of him at the talent show, Chloe. He’ll do something brilliant. Something science-y. An experiment. A model. Or art.”

  “The boy’s odd, like a chicken that thinks in Chinese. Like a bear that tap dances and doesn’t realize all the other bears think he’s a loon. Like a planet that bounces. The other night he talked to me, at length, about nuclear science. I had to tell him to stop after an hour, and he said, ‘Did I speak in an overly lengthy manner?’ and I said, ‘Yes. Dude. Ask people questions about themselves and listen to their answers.’ ”

  “What did he do?”

  “He got out his Questions Notebook and made a notation after asking what kinds of questions he could ask people.”

  “I’m impressed with how hard he constantly tries to understand people and social dynamics.” I couldn’t resist. “Can you pass me two lemons?”

  “Yes.” She passed me a carton of cream. For some reason she shook it up before giving it to me. “He gets so focused on one thing. Right now it’s Michelangelo and drawing and painting people. But when his schedule changes, it sets him off like a hot deer strapped to the rack on top of my truck.”

  I puzzled that one out. A deer on a rack. “Wouldn’t the deer be dead?”

  “I’d hope so. I wouldn’t try to get a live deer on the rack above my car. I only get the dead ones up there. Can’t imagine a live deer would cooperate.” She stirred the flour, baking soda, salt, and sugar in the bowl I pushed over to her. “Asperger’s is a strange-ass problem.”

  I knew my sister didn’t mean it as it sounded. She adored Kyle.

  “By the way, Olivia, I have decided that I want to ask Zane out on a date.” She grabbed another wiggling pickle out of the jar and waved it around. It was rather phallic.