“That’s a pretty full load,” Rachel admitted. “I don’t mean to put pressure on you.”
“But this is really important for Jared, and Remy is a quick study.” Ariel sprang up from the table and pointed toward the door with a flourish. “Everybody in the studio. We need a major brainstorming session.”
“Can I come in my pajamas?” Maisy asked as she popped up from the table.
“Sure. There won’t be any clients coming in today.” Ariel had trained her kids to stay out of the studio unless invited, and if they came in because of an emergency, they needed to be presentable. It was important to her to maintain professionalism in her home studio.
“Off the bat, I’m thinking of some super-romantic duets.” Ariel set out a stack of sheet music for duets and sat at the piano while the others gathered around. The day was overcast but the studio lighting hit the cut-crystal vase on the piano, forming squares of light along with translucent prism shades of red, blue, and purple.
Ariel played a few chords and then began singing the show tune “If I Loved You” from Carousel.
Rachel pressed a hand to her chest and joined in, singing fervently of a love that defied words and description.
When Ariel noticed Trevor rolling his eyes, she stopped singing but continued playing. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s an old fart song,” he said flatly.
Laughing, Ariel hit a sharp chord as Rachel gave a dramatic gasp, saying, “My heart, be still. You dare to defile Rodgers and Hammerstein?”
Ariel pulled out another piece. “If that’s too heavy, how about this?” She launched into “People Will Say We’re in Love.” Rachel sang along, but as soon as they sang the title line, the kids objected.
“No way! No way!” Maisy waved her arms. “It’s too corny.”
“I love that song!” Rachel exclaimed.
“But Jared and I don’t have the chemistry to sing a sappy love song to each other.” Remy twisted her long hair back into a bun, then let it drop on her shoulders. “How about something comedic?”
Ariel pulled out the music from The King and I. “How about this?” she asked, breaking into “Shall We Dance?”
Rachel knew all of the words, and she took Remy and Maisy by the hands and whirled them around in a dance. Soon Trevor was moving in rhythm, an odd mixture of break dancing and calisthenics. At the end of the song Rachel and the kids collapsed on the yellow velvet couch in a cloud of laughter, while Ariel hummed and searched her sheet music for other possibilities.
“You know lots of songs, Aunt Rachel,” Maisy said.
“It’s true,” Remy said, adjusting her hair against the yellow sofa to take a photo. Selfies were such a big part of her life, that girl. She was a natural-born publicist. “Are you a big Broadway musical fan?”
“Sure. Back when I was in high school, I was in the Glee Club. But I guess I learned a lot of music when I went to work in New York City after I graduated college. I worked in some small theaters as a hair stylist.”
“That sounds so glamorous,” Remy said.
“Not really.” Rachel wrinkled her nose, explaining that most of the actors wore wigs. “I spent hours and hours working on mannequin heads that never talked back.”
Ariel revived them with “Singin’ in the Rain,” and Trevor brought an umbrella out from the mudroom to open and close beside Ariel at the piano. At the end of the song, when Remy took the umbrella and performed a little dance with it, Ariel could see that her daughter was getting into it. This was the perfect song for them. If Remy was willing, Ariel would devote herself to making this musical number sparkle.
Everyone was feeling bubbly and giddy and loose when Cassie appeared at the studio door. Weighed down by her duffel bag and backpack and a dour expression, she explained that there was too much noise to study here.
“So I’m going back now.”
The kids went over to give her hugs, but Ariel remained in place, pretending to be engrossed in her search for sheet music. She knew she would get over it, but at the moment she wasn’t feeling particularly affectionate toward Cassie, and she sensed that her eldest daughter felt the same way.
“Drive safe,” Ariel said. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out, she thought as Cassie plodded through the mudroom like a peasant climbing the Matterhorn. Such a martyr.
Inspired by Cassie’s dark exit, she started playing “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” When Remy and Rachel linked arms and attacked the lyrics, Ariel was glad all that batshit-crazy family conflict dissolved away in the music.
Chapter 5
The old Ford whined as Cassie kept it pointed south on I-5, heading back to school. She pressed the gas pedal and the car made a weird scrambling noise. Nothing new; the engine had been doing that a lot lately. She had meant to tell Mom, but once the credit fiasco happened she’d realized the timing was all wrong.
“All right, then,” she said, easing off the gas, coaxing the car into a slower cruising speed. “If you need to be babied, we’ll take it easy. Just keep yourself together.” She needed Old Red to last for two or three more years, until she was done with school and making a salary.
A solid salary, unlike her mother’s dribs and drabs of income. She rubbed her index finger over the cuticle of one thumb, worrying over the sour end to the weekend at home, which had revealed Mom’s monster debt.
Cassie was in the nursing program at Oregon State, and so far she was doing pretty well with her classes, though she was just finishing up her sophomore year. She had wanted to be a doctor, but there was no money for med school, and she knew that a nursing license with a BS guaranteed her a job pretty much anywhere she wanted to live. On her application she had written a pandering essay about her need to help people, but Cassie’s main motivation was money. She needed a big enough salary to gain independence and control her own life away from Ariel.
As she drove, she could hear Oliver over her shoulder, telling her that she would be just fine. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” he used to tell her. “When you get going on something, you’re unstoppable.” Just like a real father, he had recognized her best qualities and encouraged her to utilize her gifts. Oliver had been a good stepfather, kind and steady, just what she’d needed. What everyone had needed.
When he’d died of cancer four years ago, everyone in the family had been heartbroken. The kids had turned to their mother for comfort, but Ariel had retreated into a fragile shell, distant and unresponsive. Just fifteen, Cassie had tamped down her own wobbly emotions and stepped up to take care of everyone else. She had been forced to take over the family duties, getting the little ones to school and day care, helping Remy and Trevor with their homework, cooking and cleaning, even figuring out how to pay bills while Mom wallowed in grief.
At times, like this weekend, Cassie still resented her mother for dumping everything on her during that difficult period. But mostly, Cassie had gotten over it by giving up on her mother. If you had no expectations, you could never be disappointed, right? Well, she still needed some financial help from Ariel, but she was working to break free. And when Cassie left for college, she’d tried to move past her annoyance with Mom and build her own life at Oregon State. At last she had friends of her own and a life that was miles away from the Venus flytrap of Mom and the sibs in Timbergrove.
She pulled into the driveway of the Chick Shack, the little house she shared with five other girls, and cut the engine. The car sputtered and bucked, as if chastising her for pushing it too far. Not good. She tried to start it again, but the engine just coughed and wheezed, refusing to turn over. Crap.
“Fine. Take a rest,” she told the car.
At least Old Red had gotten her home, and now that she was back on campus she wouldn’t need it for a while. She lugged her stuff inside, liking the sound of the dubstep music coming from the little kitchen at the center of the one-story house. Amelie stood at the stove, swaying to the music as she added salt to a pot of water.
“Hey,
how’s it—” Cassie scowled at the mess of pots, pans, and dishes rising like a tower from a pool of brown water in the sink. “What the hell?”
“I know. Maya did it to us again. She made a big breakfast.” Amelie extracted a wooden spoon from the jar of utensils and rapped it against her hand. Tall, trim, and athletic, with a short crop of sandy blond hair, Amelie was a Danish student who had come to Oregon to study agriculture. Her straightforward, cool demeanor made her an awesome housemate, though her visa required her to return to Denmark at the end of the semester.
“Maya said she would come back and clean up after her run,” Amelie reported, “but she’s been gone for hours.”
“Really?”
Amelie tore open a box of macaroni. “I think she ran right over to Jessie’s house.” Maya’s boyfriend, Jessie, lived a few blocks away, and the girl seemed to have trouble breathing when he wasn’t around.
“Probably. And she figures we’ll clean up after her, the way we always do.”
“I had to wash out this pot to make my meal,” Amelie said. “Do you want some pastas?”
“No thanks. I just ate.” Cassie pulled a paper sack of bagels out of her bag, marked her name on it with a Sharpie, and then stored it in the refrigerator for later that week. Her limited budget had taught her how to stretch and utilize leftovers.
After dumping her stuff in the room she shared with Olivia, her friend from Timbergrove who spent Sunday afternoons at the library, Cassie returned to the kitchen, tossed off her jacket, and approached the sink.
“You can’t do it for Maya,” Amelie said, stirring her pasta. “She gets away with killing.” Amelie’s English was fairly well polished, but sometimes she got mixed up on idioms.
“The expression is ‘gets away with murder.’” Cassie winced as she plunged one hand into the cool, murky water. “I’m just going to clear the quagmire.”
She unplugged the sink, removed the two greasy pans, and stacked the dirty dishes on the side as the sink cleared. She waited for Amelie to drain her pasta, then scrubbed the sink with cleanser and set the dishes back in hot, soapy water. She left the two pans to soak on the side.
“That’s the best I can do. I’ve got to get some schoolwork done.” She had an anatomy quiz to study for, and a meeting for a group project in sociology.
“I will do the dishes so the sink can be clear,” Amelie said. “But this is the last time.”
“That’d be great. I wish we could get rid of piggy Maya, but we need her share of the rent.”
“And piggy Maya needs a place to live,” Amelie said as she took a bite of pasta over a fashion magazine stretched out on the kitchen table.
“True dat.” There was no such thing as a perfect housemate, and overall Cassie knew they had a good group of girls. Olivia was caring and fiercely loyal. Keisha, an education major from Coos Bay, was a party girl, always fun to be around. By contrast, Ellie Wong was serious and low-key, so distant that Cassie sometimes wondered what went on behind those big black glasses. But just when she began to think the girl had detached from her housemates, Ellie would make them all dinner or suggest a movie night.
As Cassie unpacked her clean clothes, she quizzed herself from a diagram of the human skeleton on her laptop. Two hundred and six bones in the human body, and she had to memorize every single one. “Tibia, fibula, patella,” she recited as she hung her hoodies on a hook in the closet. “Metatarsal. And then the lateral, intermediate, and medial cuneiform.”
Her cell phone pinged with text messages. She stashed her clean socks in the top drawer and grabbed the phone. Hadley, the other girl in the soc group, was begging for them to carry her weight.
Just put my name on the project this time and I swear I’ll do the whole thing next time.
Nice offer, but this was the last project of the semester. A second group text from Andrew, the painfully quiet guy on the project, told Hadley not to worry, she was covered.
Really? That was nice of him. Was he going to cover for her, too?
The next text was a private message from Andrew. Did Cassie still want to meet at the library?
Well, she didn’t want to, but they had to get this thing done.
Meet you there in 20 minutes.
At the last minute she’d been afraid she wouldn’t recognize him, as he wasn’t the kind of guy to make a strong impression. Thin, freckled, and geeky had stuck in her mind, but today as she had spotted him in the sea of studying students in the main gallery, the angles of his face had seemed sort of regal and, well, even chiseled. The blue plaid flannel brought out the periwinkle of his eyes and gave him a rugged outdoor look. And now that she was sitting beside him, she noticed a sweet fragrance that made her want to draw closer. Either he was wearing kick-ass cologne or else he had found the yummiest-smelling fabric softener in existence.
“I was a little surprised that you let Hadley off the hook so easily,” Cassie said as she placed her laptop on the table. “I mean, she totally blew us off.”
“She said it was an emergency.” He stopped writing and tapped his pen on the notebook. “Here’s the thing. For whatever reason, she was bagging out. I figured that the choices were to A) let her off the hook; B) make a big deal about it and try to shame her into helping; and C) tell her she was out of the group and probably getting a zero. B requires too much energy and C is heartless. So A was really the only choice.”
“I guess you’re right,” Cassie admitted, flipping her long hair out of the collar of her jacket. Although she wouldn’t have minded making Hadley squirm a little before letting her go. “But it’s more work for us, and I wish I had a brilliant idea for this, but I’ve got an anatomy quiz tomorrow.”
“Breitman?” he asked, and she nodded. “You’ll do fine. It’s straight memorization. She doesn’t pull any tricks.”
“Good to know.”
“And I’ve got a few ideas I’ve been tossing around. I was thinking about the culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown, which is still a center for Chinese immigration.”
She thought about it as she noticed the handful of books on the table about Chinatowns and Chinese immigration that he’d already scanned and bookmarked. “That would work well,” she said, picking up one of the books.
As they began to outline their approach, she had to make an effort to keep her eyes on the screen of her computer so that she wouldn’t stare at Andrew. She had always found him a bit socially awkward and silent as a stone, but today, with just the two of them, he talked easily, showing her the research he’d found on Chinatown. She liked the way he’d prepared. The books were marked with sticky notes and he’d written out a sheet of notes outlining the research.
“This is great,” she admitted. It was the first time someone else in a group had done all the work for her. Well, most of it. “You must have put some time into this, culling research. I feel kind of bad. Do you want me to do the PowerPoint presentation?” she offered.
“You don’t have to. I’m fine with doing it together.”
“Okay.” More than okay, she thought as she set up the PowerPoint on her laptop. This was fun. Something about Andrew made her bubble up inside. He was so smart, and not embarrassed about it. That was a weird turn-on.
Her fingers clicked away on her laptop as he talked about the mythical tale of chop suey, the bubonic plague epidemic denied by Governor Gage, and the fire that destroyed much of San Francisco. Andrew had managed to zero in on the details that were pertinent to their project.
Periodically, she paused to show him a PowerPoint page and discuss design or decide on a photo. She liked the way he leaned forward, alert but serious as he studied the text. The screen illuminated his face, highlighting his amazing lashes, his freckles, his thoughtful eyes.
Not as geeky as she’d thought. He was an engineering major. Wow. She couldn’t even imagine the kind of mind-boggling classes he was ticking through. And he was taller than she was, by a few inches. Nice.
As they polished up the presentati
on, they began to laugh over some of the photos that came up in the search. They talked about San Francisco, which she’d visited once on a field trip. Andrew had been there a few times to visit his aunt and uncle. When the conversation turned to world travel, she learned that his father was an air force officer, whose assignments had taken the family to England, Japan, and Germany.
“What’s it like to live in so many foreign countries?” she asked, feeling a bit starstruck.
“Not as exotic as you might think.”
“Well, I’m envious.”
“And I envy you growing up in suburbia, able to have lasting relationships and stay in the same school.”
She closed her laptop. “Not as great as you think. My high school rewarded mediocrity.”
“The American way. We’ll have to compare stories sometime,” he said as they packed up their stuff.
When Andrew offered to walk her home in the dark, she hoped that she was not mistaking a common courtesy for interest. They talked all the way to the Chick Shack, and when she invited him in for coffee, he accepted.
She felt a mixture of pride and awkwardness as she led him into the house. This was a first for her, bringing a guy into the house. She introduced him to Amelie and Keisha, who were watching some reality show on television in the living room.
“You want to hang here?” Keisha, who had been reclining, bundled her blanket onto her lap and swung her feet down to the floor. “We’ll make room.”
“We’re just going to have some coffee,” Cassie explained, leading Andrew into the kitchen. She kind of wanted Olivia to come out of the bedroom to meet Andrew, but otherwise she hoped the other girls would leave them alone for now. It was hard to get something going on with housemates flitting in and out.
“So.” Cassie lifted the lid on the coffeemaker. “We’ve got a machine here. And K-Cups. Regular and hazelnut.” The girls had to put money in the blue jelly jar for coffee: 80 cents for each K-Cup. Cassie would pitch in after Andrew left. “What would you like?”
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