Her eyes sparkled a bit. “Well, I don’t know, Mr. He Who Brags While Flirting. But you could step inside this winner’s circle and see for yourself.”
Jett closed the distance between them.
Bent down.
Just as he watched her take a breath, his pocket began to ring.
As did Cassie’s.
The clash of both jingles worked its magic in removing all magic, and reluctantly, after several seconds of pretending not to hear them, they moved back.
“Just one second,” Jett said and quickly slipped his phone into view.
Sarah.
His jaw clenched, and he forced himself to step away.
“I am so sorry. I have to take this,” he said, but she hadn’t heard him. Her ear was pressed to her own phone, her legs already moving toward the far end of the bleachers.
Jett moved in the opposite direction. “Sarah. Hey.”
There was immediate screaming in the background.
“Jett? I’m so sorry to be calling in the middle of—” She paused, seeming to wait for his revelation. “—your thing, but I think we have a problem with Dakota.”
“What sort of problem?”
“I don’t know how, but I think she got a piece of pickle stuck up her nose. She keeps saying it’s burning. I looked at it with a flashlight and thought I saw something, but I’m not positive.”
Jett stuffed his hand into his jacket. “You think you can get it out?”
“I tried. Sunny’s here too. He gave it a shot. But now he’s pulled out a vacuum and says he wants to suck it out—”
“Don’t let him do that.”
“I know. I’m not an idiot, even if he is.” She paused as Drew’s voice came into the background. “No, Drew. We don’t call people idiots.”
The screaming multiplied, now including the well-known newborn wail from TJ in addition to the frantic, high-pitched shrieks from Dakota.
Jett exhaled, hearing his own exasperation in his breath. The woman refused payment. There was only so far he could infringe upon her goodwill.
“All right, Sarah. I’m on my way.”
He hung up the phone and turned back to Cassie. She was on the opposite end of the room, shoving her phone in her pocket, walking toward him.
How on earth could he avoid explaining himself? A man didn’t just step back from a near first kiss and dash out the door. So sorry, I’ve got to kiss and run. I know we were going to eat dinner, but . . .
But . . . what?
But his niece had a pickle stuck up her nose.
If she ended up asking him about it, he’d just have to tell her.
Fine.
They stepped back toward each other.
“I’m so sorry. I have to head out.”
He couldn’t tell who’d said it first, but somehow they had managed to speak the words at once.
They both smiled, both seeming to be bitterly aware of the broken mood.
“Okay, then.” Cassie rubbed her hands together. “Thanks for the game, Jett. I’ll see you around.”
Jett started nodding. “I’ll call you.”
As they walked to their cars, it was difficult to tell who was walking faster.
11
Cassie
“I don’t know. She shut herself in and locked the door almost—” Cassie’s mother checked her watch, her hand trembling slightly. “—forty-five minutes ago now. I’m so sorry to break up your big date, sweetie. I just didn’t know what to do.”
Her mother crossed her arms tightly over the chest of her Christmas sweater. Her toe nervously tapped the floor as if to wear out the floorboards.
“It’s fine, Mom.” Cassie jiggled the knob. “These things happen.” And of course they happened now, not in the other twenty-three hours of the day when she wasn’t with Jett. Of course they happened just on the tip of a very romantic kiss. What felt at the time like it could’ve been the kiss of a lifetime, she might add.
But, no, thank goodness Deidre and Kennedy hadn’t waited until she was home to lock themselves in a room full of staplers and scissors and thumbtacks—all of which she realized in hindsight weren’t the best things to leave around. Other parents got a year of figuring these rules out before a baby got their feet beneath them and walked into major messes. Even when they were walking, they were only a foot tall and there was time to figure out what to do with dangerous things on higher ground.
But for her? She’d become a parent overnight and all of a sudden was having to think about both parental controls on the computer and hiding bleach. It was incredible how many oversights were possible. Locks? On doors? She couldn’t understand how any house in America had locks on its doors when there were so many millions of children running around just waiting to lock their parents outside.
“Girls?” Cassie bent down to the brass knob, peering inside the lock. The hole was small and round. Basically, if she was going to try to be a lock picker, her observational skills started at ground zero. “Girls? Can you unlock the door?”
Silence fell on the other end, and her mother started worrying with her hands. Cassie looked to Star. She was still wearing the purple, destroyed-at-the-knees jeans Cassie had dropped her off in this morning, her face still carrying the zest of hanging out with friends. “Please tell me you just got here, Star. Please tell me Keely just dropped you off and you haven’t tried getting them out yet.”
Cassie’s mother put a hand on Star’s shoulder. “She tried talking to them—”
“I told them I was going to whoop them to Tuesday morning if they didn’t come out—”
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Cassie’s mother interjected, clearly uncomfortable with teenage words and ways. “The girls weren’t eating dinner, and I was nudging them along, but then . . .” She waved a hand toward the door. “They bolted and sealed themselves inside. I thought I was just giving them a little encouragement, but I believe they felt pushed too hard.”
“It’s okay, Mom. They hardly eat for me either.” Cassie straightened, looking up and down the sides for a hinge. That was a thing, wasn’t it? Slide it out with a screwdriver somehow? The point was moot, however, as the hinge must’ve been on the other side. “Girls? Deidre? Please open the door.”
Cassie pressed her ear to one of the panels. Sure enough, the drawers of the desk on the opposite wall made a sound as though being slid open and closed. Cassie mentally went through all the items they could possibly be touching, all the horrendous things they could possibly be doing. Taking out the scissors. Cutting each other’s hair. Spilling five hundred thumbtacks around them so that every precious step became a real-life game of Don’t Step on the Tack (what on earth was the point of buying those colorful needle puncturers anyway?). Having a sword fight with sharpened pencils. Making paper airplanes out of all her tax returns. Seeing how much lead they could fit up their noses.
Cassie jiggled the doorknob once more. She slid her fingers over the sturdy, beautiful, five-paneled door. “Stand back.”
“Oh, honey, you can’t be serious.” Cassie’s mother held on to Star and pressed them both to the wall. “What about a window?”
“The window’s on the second floor, Mom. And even if I did get a ladder, you think they’d let me in out there? I’d have to break a window.” Cassie moved until her back touched the door to her bedroom.
“Let me call your father,” her mom pleaded, gripping Star, who was now holding her phone up, videoing the whole affair.
“Girls, last call!” Cassie cried out across the hall. “Either you open up or I’m breaking in!”
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
The door stared back in silence.
Summoning all six months of karate training as a child, Cassie ran like a wild boar and threw herself at the door. Just before slamming into it she kicked squarely at the center of the door with all she had.
The door rattled. Slightly. As if laughing at her pathetic attempt.
It was the second time tonight she’d b
een easily defeated.
She bounced back, stumbled, and crumpled on the floor.
“Sweetie!” Immediately her mother was beside her, while Star’s phone hovered over her head.
Star didn’t even try to mask her mile-wide smile. “Miss C? You okay?”
Cassie held onto an aching shoulder, groaning as she rolled over to her right side. “I’ve never felt my age before. You guys are making me feel my age.”
The door made a clicking noise, and two faces appeared cautiously in the two-inch crack.
“Deidre! Kennedy!” Cassie sprang up, pushing her hand through the open space before they could even think of closing it again. The door gave way, revealing faces covered in every Sharpie color in stock. Cassie snatched at the scissors so casually dangling from Kennedy’s hand.
“Well, well,” her mother said. “I misjudged you, dear. Looks like you got it open after all.”
After an hour of bubble baths, of scrubbing faces and arms, her mother gave each girl a hug and headed for her own home. Nobody else in the world would have noticed just how eager she was to get into her nice, peaceful car after such an arduous evening. But after apologizing to Cassie for the fiftieth time and then highlighting each of the wonderful character traits she had witnessed in the girls, she quickly slipped into her driver’s seat and backed out without even looking twice each way. Cassie watched. She understood. There had been more excitement in these three hours than her mother normally had in a month.
With Star’s shower running down the hall, Cassie sat with Deidre on Star’s bed. Kennedy lay beside them on her tummy, turning the pages of the big red dog book, their new favorite series. The room smelled thickly of lavender from the girls’ baths, but there was also a mildly sour smell Cassie couldn’t put her finger on. Minus all the deadly office supplies, the room had been put back in order. The desk sat crammed against the window, and two mismatching antique bedside tables from Cassie’s great grandmother had been placed on either side of the queen-sized mattress. The closet was newly crammed with twenty shades of pink. Tags still hung on most items.
Cassie peeked an eye over at Kennedy’s page—hoping for no more grand ideas like calling the fire department—while she cautiously began to rub a piece of Deidre’s coiling black hair. Like most things these days, Cassie was clueless as to what she was doing.
Her phone sat beside her, open to a blog article on African American hairstyles for little girls. She fumbled with reopening the coconut oil lid with her now oiled hands and looked at the array of bows and large colorful beads that lay across the quilt in front of her. “Did you pick out your favorite bows yet?” She hoped desperately Deidre didn’t choose one of the mysterious beads—another blog post tutorial entirely.
Deidre had been playing with the hem of her Disney-themed pajamas, remarkably patient for being a girl of only six. Silently, she handed over a red bow and a green one.
“Oh, I like that. It’s very festive.” Cassie’s eyes shifted to the Rudolf sweater and matching green corduroys on the hanger for Deidre to wear to school tomorrow.
Deidre picked up a polka-dotted white-and-black bow and handed it to her. Then an orange one.
“All of these?” Cassie asked.
Deidre turned her back to Cassie, hands once more in the pile of bows.
“Well, now that’s a nice arrangement you have there. I wouldn’t have thought to put the orange and green and red and polka-dotted—” Cassie watched Deidre add a purple one to her growing bouquet. “—and purple. Pretty soon you’ll have all the colors of the rainbow.”
Kennedy shut the book and rolled over to the bedside table. She opened it and wedged the book inside.
Cassie’s mouth fell open.
The sour smell was coming from the drawer—the distinct smell of rotting food.
In a blink of an eye, Cassie was jolted back to the reminder of where these kids had come from. In a room thick with lavender, a house of bubble baths and cozy comforters, food for today and someone to tuck them in at night, there were still the small, intruding reminders that everything was not fine. Reminders that shattered her romantic ideals and forced her to keep a spry eye out for pocket-sized clues.
It amazed her that these girls could laugh so loudly, embrace life so merrily twenty-three hours of the day and yet also know fear and hardship in ways she could only imagine.
Struggling for nonchalance, Cassie set the coconut oil down and picked up the detangling spray and comb. “What’s going on in that book, Kennedy? How did that doggie end up in the swimming pool?”
Cassie listened and combed as Kennedy gave her four-year-old summary of each page, throwing in additional bits and pieces totally unrelated to the story. She listened until Deidre’s head was entirely combed and braided in five separate sections—a foolhardy move for which no amount of blog posts could give her adequate talent. When Star came in from her shower, she laughed at Cassie and pointed at Deidre’s head for five minutes. Then she took pictures and sent them to Bailey, Keely, and Cam—who Cassie had heard was now somewhere in Florida. Cam, of course, wrote something cheeky back.
Cassie never once looked at the drawer while sitting on the edge of the bed, watching Star teach by demonstration as she rebraided Deidre’s hair with fingers so nimble she didn’t have to look.
Cassie waited an hour after the girls had been tucked in bed and then found her way back to the room. She cracked open the door, the light of her phone guiding her to the bedside table. Quiet as a mouse, she opened the drawer and set to work. She scraped bowls’ worth of macaroni from the interior wood, three slimy hot dogs, two pieces of quiche, empty yogurt cups, half of one old chicken breast. Dipping her rag in cleaning solution, she scrubbed the interior and dried it with towels. Then, legs going numb from her awkward squat, she restocked the drawer with a box of Triscuits, cheese crackers, animal crackers, and a zipped-up bag of dried fruit. Tomorrow she’d see about finding some pepperoni sticks, which Deidre loved.
As Cassie crawled into bed, she tried to imagine what it would be like to live like them, tried to prepare herself to anticipate issues like this that could come down the road. They were little girls, yes, but they were also little warriors, always looking up to their mighty big sister who, in certain lights, proved still so small herself. Having no answers, only guesses, about the future. Right now, all the three of them knew was that they were here today. But what about tomorrow? They could be stripped from her, from their schools, teachers—everything—tomorrow. And they, she, all of them, were powerless to do anything about it.
Tomorrow.
For their sakes as much as hers, Cassie was going to get some answers tomorrow.
12
Jett
“Hurry up, man. Little Dude is peeing on my chair!”
“I can see that, Sunny, thank you,” Jett said tersely, flapping out what felt like the fifteenth diaper of the morning. The diaper wasn’t unfolding, however, and with his other hand wrapped around TJ’s feet, Jett was powerless to cover the baby’s bottom. TJ wailed, grinding on Jett’s ears—ears that hadn’t touched a pillow for more than four hours at a time in days. This included the night prior when he’d had the joy of dropping five hundred dollars at the ER so some resident doctor could pop a piece of pickle out of Dakota’s nostril. It took a sum total of twenty seconds, with three hours of paperwork and waiting.
This was why family men got fat. It wasn’t that they were lazy—as was made clear by the fact Sunny was lounging, feet up, on the recliner while Jett scrambled on the carpet. The small humans just sucked out all the dad’s energy. Like vampires. It was their lifeblood.
“Dude!” Sunny pointed as TJ wailed and let loose another fountain of urine, this time making a perfect arch onto Sunny’s shoes.
“If it bothers you so much, get up and help!” Jett shook the unyielding diaper.
Dakota came around the corner, one hand clutching a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich. Barefoot in pajamas, her long, blond hair was wound up on
top of her head with a rubber band. She impatiently held out a finger, pushed it to Jett’s face.
“Not now, Dakota.”
“Little man’s making that face!” Sunny lifted his legs up suddenly, as if TJ could reach him. “He’s making the gonna-blow face!”
Sure enough, TJ’s expression had turned beet red and pouty. In seconds the carpet that was already starting to be covered in splotches of juice stains and diaper fails would get another murky addition.
Not this time. With a determined shake, the diaper finally cracked open. Jett dropped TJ’s ankles and pushed it beneath him.
Dakota pushed her finger back in Jett’s face, blocking his view. Despite Jett dodging her digit while trying to get TJ covered, she persisted.
Finally, he gave in and kissed it. “There.” For whatever invisible boo-boo it was. “Better?”
Dakota brought her finger close to her eyes, examining it seriously while Jett strapped on the rest of TJ’s diaper. Once done, Jett wiped his brow, feeling the intensity of the moment lessen.
“Nope. Still poopy,” Dakota announced and pushed her finger back in Jett’s face.
“What?” Jett’s arm shot to the wipes and he then rapidly began wiping at his lips. Sunny started to cackle. Obviously disappointed in Jett’s parenting skills, Dakota disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
Why in the world did people opt to have kids? Seriously.
Of course, that wasn’t a question he was going to be allowed to ask at his meeting with Rachel Henderson, DCS child specialist, this morning. Nor would it be beneficial to express the uncouth tone and choice words currently shouting in his head.
He picked TJ up and stood—just in time to hear a crash in the kitchen. Thankfully, just as he felt his sanity slipping, a mild knock came from the door and Sarah peeked her head in. The smile on her face pulled him back from the ledge. She held up a basket. “Blueberry muffin for the road?”
Jett gave his lips another wipe. “You are a lifesaver, Sarah. Thank you.”
The Dating Charade Page 11