Summer Girl

by Boeshaar, Andrea

  Travis gave her a pointed stare. “Nope. Not a bit.” He quickly changed the subject. “Mandi, Carly. . .let’s show Miss Jena the rest of her new home, shall we?”

  “Okay, but I’ll do it, Daddy,” Mandi said. She jumped off the sofa and took Jena’s hand. “This is where you eat,” the little girl said as they entered the dining room.

  Jena surveyed the soft-pink walls, the same color of the living room. A white dining set and four matching chairs occupied the center of the dining area. Against one wall was a built-in china hutch, and Jena decided that this was nicer than any dining room in any apartment she had lived in since she’d left home.

  Then suddenly, she thought of her family. Jena wished she could phone them and share the news of this blessing—and, yes, she already sensed this job was a Godsend. Unfortunately, her family probably couldn’t care less. They’d never been close, and only Jena claimed Christ as her Savior; the rest of her family members resided in determined unbelief.

  Still, she prayed for them daily and trusted the Lord to change their hearts as only He could. Jena also prayed that she’d have a close-knit family someday—a family that loved each other and enjoyed doing things together, unlike her own parents and brother who had always operated independently of each other. In fact, her family background was why Jena had selected home economics and child development as her fields of study—she longed for a real family someday, and she was determined to do the best job possible in caring for it.

  “And this is where you cook,” Mandi told her, pulling her into the kitchen.

  The room was tiny, but the whitewashed walls and matching mini-blinds made it seem like less of a cracker box. An apartment-sized refrigerator and stove, a standard-sized sink, and a very narrow counter were the kitchen’s only fixtures. Nevertheless, it appeared practical enough.

  “This is your bedroom,” Mandi said, running forward, then sailing headlong onto the bed. Carly followed right behind her, and soon both little girls were jumping on the bare mattress.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Travis told them, lifting each child off the bed. “I have no time to take you to the hospital for stitches today.” He looked at Jena. “My sister had her own bedding and towels which she took with her, so I’ll have to purchase some for you.”

  “That’s not necessary. I own those essentials.”

  Travis shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, okay. But if you need anything else, let me know.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “Here’s the bathroom, Miss Jena!” Mandi cried excitedly. Her dark eyes sparkled, and when she smiled, the entire hallway seemed to light up.

  “I see your front teeth have come in since you had your school picture taken,” Jena remarked, and Mandi smiled even broader to show off her two new pearly whites.

  Jena peered around the pixie and looked into the bathroom. It was more than adequate, and she whispered a prayer of thanks for such a comfortable place in which she could live.

  “You can do your laundry in my washer and dryer,” Travis offered. “Just do it during the day, because I usually wash our clothes at night. My sister would usually throw in a load while the girls were watching TV and while dinner was cooking.”

  “So I’m to make supper?”

  Travis nodded, but then his expression turned to one of concern. “You can cook, can’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jena replied, smiling. “In fact, I love to cook!”

  “Well, that’ll be a nice change,” Travis said on a facetious note. “Glenda’s specialty was macaroni and cheese out of the box.”

  “And peanut butter and jelly,” Carly piped up happily.

  Travis smiled at his youngest, then back at Jena. “I don’t often make it home for dinner, though,” he informed her, “so you don’t have to worry about me. Just feed the girls. . .and yourself, of course.”

  “Sometimes Aunty Glenda let us eat up here with her,” Mandi said.

  Carly nodded. “We had a picklenic.”

  “A picnic,” Mandi corrected.

  Little Carly just nodded.

  “How fun,” Jena said warmly, although she felt a little sorry for Travis. He doesn’t often make it home for dinner with his daughters, she mused. And, sadly, it reminded her of her own upbringing, her parents working constantly with little or no time to spend with their children. Jena and her brother often fended for themselves in between the wide gamut of sitters that came and went.

  “Well?” Travis asked, bringing Jena out of her thoughts. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’ll be very comfortable here,” she replied gratefully. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. When can you move in?”

  Jena chewed her lower lip in contemplation. She had to be out of her apartment by the end of the month, which was just days away, and she didn’t have much to pack. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “Any time, I guess.”

  “Great.” Travis pulled three keys off his ring. “This is for the car,” he said, putting in into Jena’s palm, “this is your apartment key, and this is for my house.”

  Jena looked them over and nodded.

  “Move in whenever you like. Today would be fine with me, and I’m sure the girls would love to help you move.”

  Mandi and Carly both nodded exuberantly.

  “But my apartment. . .it’s in Jefferson County,” Jena said. “Or don’t you mind me taking the girls that distance?”

  “Are you a good driver?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Speeding tickets?”

  “Never!” she exclaimed.

  An amused expression crossed Travis’s face. “Okay, just make sure the girls wear their seatbelts. You can use the station wagon to haul all your stuff over here.”

  “Well, the good news is I’ll only have to make one trip,” Jena informed her new employer. “I don’t have a whole lot.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, but I forgot. . .I’ll have to return my apartment key at my landlord’s house if I move out today.”

  “Where does your landlord live?”

  “Just a few miles from the college I attend, but it’ll take extra time. Next, I’ll have to put in a change of address at the post office. . .”

  “Jena, do whatever you have to do, just take Mandi and Carly with you. Have them help you. It’ll be good for them, and it’ll be great for me,” he added emphatically.

  “Okay, sure.”

  They all walked back through the apartment and out the front door. Travis waited for Jena to lock it before continuing down the stairs.

  “Anything else I should know?” she asked.

  Travis thought it over, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. But here,” he said, pulling out his wallet, “let me give you my business card so you can phone me if something urgent arises. I have an extra cell phone you can use.” He handed her the card, followed by a fifty-dollar bill.

  Jena gave him a quizzical frown. “What’s this for?”

  “Dinner. . .and whatever else you might need to pick up. There’s not a lot of food in the house.” He turned pensive before pressing another twenty-dollar bill into her palm. “Come to think of it, we really don’t have any food in the house.”

  Jena tried not to laugh. “Don’t worry. The girls and I will go grocery shopping right after we get my things and finish my errands.” She turned to the little faces gazing up at her. “Mandi and Carly,” she said with a smile, “we have our work cut out for us today!”

  Three

  Jena dialed the cell phone number of her friend, Mary Star Palmer, to say she didn’t need a ride back to school. When Star heard Jena got the job, she was almost as relieved as Jena.

  “Now we just have to find me a summer job,” Star said. “I’m not getting any bites here at the mall.”

  “Well, let’s keep praying about it. . .and I’ll call you later.”

  After hanging up the Larsons’ phone, which hung on the kitchen wall, Jena scooted the girls into the
car. Taking a few minutes to familiarize herself with the dashboard, she stuck the key into the ignition and backed out of the garage. As she neared her apartment, Jena stopped at a local fast-food restaurant and ordered lunch. A deep fried aroma of cheeseburgers and French fries filled Travis Larson’s Volvo wagon, and Jena promised herself she would eat healthier at dinnertime. After they arrived at the dingy shoebox of a place that Jena called home, she seated Mandi and Carly at the scuffed-up table, then served lunch.

  “Wait, don’t eat yet,” Jena said just as Mandi bit into her burger. “We have to pray.”

  The girls glanced at each other, then looked, wide-eyed, at Jena, who folded her hands and bowed her head. Peeking over her lashes, she watched as Mandi and Carly followed her lead.

  “Thank You, Jesus, for this food. Please use it to make our bodies strong so we can get all our work done this afternoon. In Your name, we pray. . .Amen.” Lifting her gaze, she smiled at the girls. “Okay, now we can eat.”

  They regarded her with curiosity shining in their brown eyes.

  “Do you pray at your house?” Jena asked.

  With mouths full, they both shook their heads.

  “Do you know who Jesus is?”

  Mandi and Carly bobbed their heads and smiled.

  “He’s God,” Mandi said after swallowing her food. “Mrs. Barlow told us about Him.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “And God made this whole world,” Carly declared, spreading her arms with a dramatic flare that caused Jena to grin. “He even made this hamburger!”

  “No, people at the restaurant made the hamburgers,” Mandi retorted.

  “You’re both right,” Jena cut in before a heated debate ensued. “God made the cows, and cows are the beef, and the beef is what the cooks at the restaurant use to make the hamburgers.”

  “See,” Mandi told her little sister.

  The reply was all but lost on Carly who started a new subject about cows that lasted for the remainder of lunchtime. Once they’d finished eating, Jena instructed the girls as to how to clean up.

  “My mom died,” Mandi blurted, as she tossed her hamburger wrapper in the trash.

  “Yes, I know,” Jena said on a rueful note. “Your dad mentioned it. How did she die?”

  “She had cancer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Jena’s heart went out to the little girl.

  Carly, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the conversation as she balanced on her tiptoes and deposited her garbage into the blue, tall plastic bin.

  Mandi didn’t say anymore about her mother, so Jena didn’t push the subject. Instead, she assigned tasks. She pulled out the small canister vacuum cleaner and showed Mandi how to use it. Next, she gave Carly a spray bottle of the organic orange non-poisonous “cleans everything” solution her friend Lisa used to sell and showed the little girl how to wipe down the furniture.

  “Do a good job for me so I’ll get my security deposit back, all right?”

  “What’s a s’curity posit?” Carly asked as she sprayed the liquid onto a table.

  “That’s the money I had to put down on this apartment when I first moved in. If I leave this place nice and clean, my landlord will give me my money back.”

  “Down worry,” Mandi said, “we’re good cleaners. You’ll get your money back.”

  Jena smiled, and with Mandi and Carly now occupied, she began opening drawers and closets, stuffing things into boxes. Since the apartment came furnished, there wasn’t much to pack. Before long, the air smelled like a ripe orange grove. Mandi had finished vacuuming and decided to dust with Carly. The two left no surface untouched.

  A while later, Jena had the Volvo packed with everything she owned. My life in the back of a station wagon, she thought, feeling a bit blue. But then she heard the girls’ giggling as they jumped off the apartment building’s front steps, and she realized that things weren’t all that important in life. What mattered most were people.

  “Mandi. Carly,” she called, opening the door to the backseat. “Let’s go. We’ve got to drop off my keys and stop at the grocery store.”

  Carly pouted. “But that’s going to take twenty weeks!” she said, waving her hands in a theatrical manner.

  Jena laughed. “It better not.”

  “How come?” Mandi wanted to know as she climbed into the deep-green colored car.

  “Because in twenty weeks, I’ll be back in school. My last semester, then I graduate. . .YES!”

  “How come you can’t stay with us forever?” Carly asked as Jena fastened the seatbelt around her.

  “Well, because—” Jena felt her heart constrict. These poor kids! First, their mother dies, then their aunt takes off and gets married, and now I’m counting the days until I’m back in school. “I can’t stay with you forever,” she tried again, “because I’m not part of your family. But we can always be friends, okay?”

  “Okay,” Carly agreed with an easy smile.

  “My Aunty Glenda is part of our family,” Mandi countered with a perception far beyond her six years, “but she can’t stay with us forever because she married Tony.”

  Jena didn’t know what to say. Relationships in her own family unit had been cast off, discarded. Did anything last forever in this throwaway society?

  “Know what? The truth is, only Jesus lasts forever. He’ll stay by you and never leave you for anything. Now that’s a happy thought, isn’t it?”

  The girls nodded, and Mandi turned to gaze out the window. Carly kicked her sandaled feet up and down.

  “Can we go now, Miss Jena?” Carly said. “Twenty weeks is gonna come really fast.”

  “Yes, it is,” Jena agreed with a little laugh. “And you’re right. We can’t sit around chatting all day. There’s lots of work to be done before twenty weeks are up!”

  ❧

  “I’m glad you got your babysitting problems taken care of, Trav.”

  He nodded in reply to Craig Duncan’s comment. As the senior partner of Duncan, Duncan, and Larson, Craig had shouldered the burdens caused by Travis’s many absences since Glenda left.

  “Do you think you’ll be prepared to take the Hamland case tomorrow?”

  “Oh, sure. Not a problem. I’m very familiar with the case.”

  “Good.”

  Craig sat back in his burgundy leather office chair and put his feet up on his paper-laden desk. “So what’s this girl like?”

  “What girl?” Travis asked, preoccupied with the file he held.

  “The one you hired to baby-sit!”

  “Oh. . .sorry, Craig.” Travis looked up and gave the grizzled older man his undivided attention. “She’s great. Her name is Jena. She’s in her mid-twenties, just finishing up college, and she needs a job for the summer.”

  “Interesting. . .”

  “And she’s a home ec major.” Travis gazed back at the contents in the file.

  “Oh, is she?” Craig rubbed his grizzled jaw. “Well, this does sound like a perfect match, doesn’t it? Too bad she can’t earn a couple of college credits while she works for you.”

  Travis shrugged. “That’s her department.”

  Craig chuckled. “You’re all heart, Trav.”

  The quip caused him to grin, and he glanced back at his business partner. Since the day they met, Craig reminded him of a mad scientist. Gray, fluffy hair, keen blue eyes. An intelligent man, but somewhat scatterbrained. Capable, but highly disorganized. Craig’s son, Josh, on the other hand, was the extreme opposite. Stout and blond, Josh threw conniption fits if paperclips in his desk drawer weren’t in their proper place. Most of the time, Travis felt his duty in the office was to serve as some sort of balance between the two men and to encourage Marci, their secretary who threatened to quit every other Friday.

  Then there was Yolanda. The dark-haired beauty was the firm’s intern, and if there ever existed a woman whom Travis would hate to come up against in court, it would be her. She could dig up dirt on Mother Teresa.

  “So
, is she pretty?” Craig asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your summer girl!”

  Travis gave himself a mental shake. “Oh, yeah, she’s okay.” He thought about Jena’s full figure—a little too full for his liking. But she had pretty hair, shoulder-length strawberry-blond. She had an oval, freckled face with a healthy complexion. But her blue eyes said more than her naturally pink lips, and as she sized him up this morning, Travis could tell he didn’t measure up to her standards. He saw it in her expression, as cut and dry as the Hamland’s lawsuit. Of course, he really didn’t care what Jena Calhoun thought of him personally. He’d hired her to take care of his daughters, not him.

  “Okay? Just okay?” Craig chuckled and lifted his feet off the desk. “Well, she must have impressed you if you left your most precious commodities with her, having only made her acquaintance this morning.”

  “Sure, she impressed me. She’s got that wholesome motherly look about her, and she goes to a Bible college, which means she’s probably honest and trustworthy, and my neighbor Mrs. Barlow gave her a glowing recommendation. That pretty much cinched it for me.”

  Craig pursed his thick lips and sniffed. “Look, Trav, I hope it works out for you. You’re a partner in this law firm, and we need you here.”

  “I understand, and things are going to work out great,” he replied, perceiving the comments as something of a threat. If he didn’t pull his weight, Craig and Josh could easily let someone buy him out. Yolanda might be a candidate. She had the ability to sway Craig with amazing ease, and he frequently took her side on the various issues which had emerged in recent weeks. Moreover, Craig owned the deciding shares.

  That’s why he needed Jena, and Travis felt a twinge of desperation at the thought of her quitting her position. He had muddled through the last month while Mandi was in school and Carly in daycare. But now that summer was here, he would much prefer the girls be at home, enjoying the sunshine and less hectic schedule. If they caught a cold, Jena could nurse them back to health, and he wouldn’t have to ask a colleague to cover him in court as he’d done in the past. On the nights he worked until midnight—or beyond—Jena could have the girls fed and tucked into bed by the time he came home so he could pick up where he’d left off at the office.