I grab a pair of jeans and a heavy sweatshirt, and yank the one and only towel I get for the whole week off the hanger where it’s drying from this morning, and head to the bathroom. Fortunately no one is there.
I’ve learned the art of the fast shower and an even faster change of clothes. Three bathrooms, nine kids, two adults means hogging any bathroom facility can lead to major fights and even more major crises.
The bathroom is barely big enough for me, the toilet, the pedestal sink, and the bathtub shower combination. I set my clothes on top of the shelf holding a few more towels (take them at your own peril) and start the shower.
Then I take a deep breath. Tears prickle again.
I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea why I’m here.
I wasn’t lying to Eric; I’m terrified of this new job.
I’m terrified of everything in this place.
And I don’t know how much longer I can keep myself together.
FIVE
DINNER AT THE Johnson Family Manse is one of the few times I feel at home. A crowd, sitting at a giant table, passing food around and laughing. The loud conversation, the fights, the spilled water, the dropped silverware clattering on the floor, the dogs circling, the cats sitting on the benches as if expecting to be fed—all feels like Mount Olympus to me. Whenever my dad’s family got together there, mostly in the summer, we divided up by table and it often got out of control.
Here, we have assigned seats. We go clockwise by age order. Mom sits at the head of the table. Eric sits to her right, followed by Lise, me, and Anna. Karl sits at the foot of the table and tries to keep the dogs under control. (Sometimes he leads a dog outside by its collar, and the dog whimpers the whole way. It knows it’ll be banished from dinner for days if that happens.)
The little kids sit on the other side of the table. Leif sits next to Karl, then Ivan, Ingrid, Hans, and Hilde. Mom mostly deals with Hilde, who is four and so blonde it hurts. She looks like I did at that age. In fact, all of the girls except Lise look like me at various ages. It’s really clear they’re Mom’s daughters.
Hans is six and thinks he’s much older than Hilde. He tries to keep her in line, and she won’t have it. Not a dinner goes by without a Hans and Hilde fight, usually broken up by Mom, with her patented
do I have to make you leave the table?
glare.
Tonight, they’re all focused on the food. Sloppy Joes aren’t just Ivan’s favorite. The entire other side of the table thinks Sloppy Joes are a nectar of the gods. Maybe it’s because we get to dish up our food in the kitchen. Or maybe it’s because the little kids get a meal the same size as everyone else’s (usually, they get kids’ portions).
On the table, full plastic water pitchers with gigantic white lids glisten with humidity. Yellow plastic bowls filled with plain potato chips sit on either side. Green plastic bowls with a mixed salad sit next to the potato chips.
There are food rules here: no chips without salad, but you can have salad without chips. Or you can just have the Sloppy Joe, making the hard rolls that Mom indulges in all soggy.
I eat my Sloppy Joe with a knife and fork and endure all the teasing. But I hate having hot burger and sauce slide down my arm, and I’ve ruined more than one shirt trying to get the stain out of the sleeves from tomato sauce. (We do our own laundry here, and I still haven’t gotten the swing of that.)
I ignore the standard teasing because I can actually predict how it’s going to go. I grin at it though, because it makes me feel welcome. I’m thinking we might make it through dinner without me having to talk at all.
Then Eric raises his right hand, the family sign for quiet.
“Brit has an announcement,” he says.
I sigh and glare at him.
Mom says, “It’s all right, Brit honey. You don’t have to tell us what happened today if you don’t want.”
“Yes, she does,” Eric says with a little too much passion. “Brit?”
I haven’t felt this on the spot since I moved here three months ago and had to introduce myself at the dinner table.
That
was fun. Not.
I take a deep breath and nearly choke on a potato chip I’d swallowed just a moment earlier. I grab the white plastic tumbler in front of me and take a sip of the ice-cold water.
Everything at the dining table in the Johnson Family Manse is made of plastic—
old
plastic. So old that a sip of water tastes like plastic that needs another wash (even when the glass is clean).
The entire family watches my every move. I swallow and the chip stops tickling my throat. Eric has leaned forward so that he can see me around Lise. When my gaze meets his, he tilts his head slightly, as if to say,
Well?
I make myself smile. “I got the job,” I say.
Everyone starts to talk at once. Congratulations,
Way to go, Brit!
combined with
Wow, you’re kidding me, right?
and a ton of other sentences that I missed in the confusion.
Mom adds her congratulations, but her eyes have narrowed. I look just like her too—only instead of a flashback to what I used to look like, she’s what I will look like some day.
She’s thin (which Hera would call amazing, considering that Mom has given birth to seven children). Her wheat-blonde hair has some strands of silver mixed with a few strands of brown. Her mouth is thin and pale pink, which matches her cheeks. She never wears makeup.
She doesn’t need any. She’s stunning. Maybe the most stunning person of all of the mothers—or at least of the mothers of me, Tiff, and Crystal.
Mom’s eyes are a very deep blue, almost electric blue. They startle when you look at them. Karl says he would call them Paul Newman blue, only that makes her sound like a man, and she’s anything but manly. I know what he means, though, because of all the old movies I watched with Tiff and Crystal when we were trapped in that magical library. Paul Newman had the most amazing eyes; you could get lost in them—and that was through a movie screen.
I have no idea how they would have looked in person. Maybe like Mom’s. When she’s being intense. Like now.
Lise asks me how I got the job, and I tell her the entire story. My side of the table laughs when I mention my confusion about illegal aliens, and Ivan, know-it-all that he can be, says that’s an impolite way of referring to people who have entered this country without the proper documentation.
Mom compliments him on his diplomacy, Anna asks me a few more questions, and then my successful job hunt gets forgotten.
We listen to Hilde’s attempt at reporting on her day in preschool, Hans’s discussion of his first grade teacher, and the first gym class that Ingrid was allowed to participate in since she broke her ankle. Mine throbs in sympathy.
None of us can leave until the last person finishes. Usually that’s Hilde and that’s under protest, but she loves Sloppy Joes, even though she ends up wearing most of her meal, so tonight we waited on Leif, who got seconds.
When he finished, we lined up to take our dishes into the kitchen to scrape and rinse. I’m not on cleanup duty tonight, so I can try to make sense of my Biology homework.
But Mom slips her arm around my back.
“Come with me,” she says.
She leads me to the coat closet, pulls out a parka, and then grabs her regular jacket. She takes me out the back door.
It’s even colder than it was earlier, and the wind howls. Leaves swirl across the yard. The yard light illuminates the parking areas, but the rest of the yard is slowly disappearing into darkness.
Mom’s taking me to the part of the yard she calls “The Office.” I know this because I’ve gone to The Office before. It’s the only private place in the entire house. (Or, rather, out of the house.) No one can listen in, and no one can read lips or spy on body language.
The Office is a second patio on its own concrete slab halfway down the yard. The regular patio has several round tables (that had giant umbrellas shading them until school started, when the umbrellas came down), a huge grill that uses some kind of fuel that’s not wood, and another big cabinet for grill supplies.
The Office has a picnic table like the one in the dining room, only older (I think). But The Office is on the edge of that hollow right near the “stream.”
It’s not as dark down there as you’d expect. The light from the back of the garage hits that part of the hollow like a spotlight—again, only visible to the people who are at the picnic table. I sit down with my back to the house. I’m freezing, but at least the parka protects my butt from the picnic table bench. The first time Mom brought me down here, I got splinters on the backs of my thighs.
“What’s bothering you?” she asks as she sits down.
I shrug. Everything. Nothing. I don’t want to ask if she’s talked to Eric, because I don’t want to know that he betrayed my confidence.
“You smiled very beautifully, Brit,” Mom says, “but your eyes seem sad.”
I shrug again. Mom needs me to get a job, so I’m getting a job, and I’m not going to go all drama-queen on her and complain about something the other kids do as a matter of course.
“Am I pushing you too hard?” Mom asks. “I know that a job is a big step.”
“I’m going to be fine,” I say, and hope it doesn’t sound like the really big lie that it is.
She stares at me, as if she can pull the words out of me. “You’d tell me if something’s wrong, right?” she asks. “Because you don’t have to take this job.”
“I do, though,” I say. “We need the money.”
Her lips tighten. I’m beginning to recognize that look. It’s as if she’s holding back her first reaction so that she can remember to be nice.
“We don’t need money that much,” she says, taking my hand. Her fingers are warm. Mine feel like they’re slowly turning to ice. “We can make do, Brit. I told you that I didn’t expect anyone to hire you so soon. We’re prepared for that.”
“But Mrs. Larson did,” I say. “She likes me, and she thinks I’ll bring in customers.”
Mom frowns. “Why does she think that? You don’t know anyone here.”
A flush warms my face. “Because she says I’m pretty. She says I look just like you in high school. She says pretty brings in—”
Mom makes a sound of disgust. “She wants to display you. You call first thing tomorrow and decline.”
“I already told her that I’d take the job,” I say.
Mom’s lips get even thinner, something I didn’t think possible. “Well,” she says, “you’ll just have to apologize.”
The Sloppy Joes sit heavily in my stomach.
“I’m confused,” I say, and I’m not lying. It seems like with each passing moment, I get more and more confused. “I can get out of a promise by apologizing? Because a job seems like a big deal around here, and Lise says they’re hard to come by, and Mrs. Larson had me fill out paperwork and stuff.”
“Brit,” Mom says, “sometimes, it’s better to decline a job than to take it.”
If only we’d been able to do that with the Fates’ job. I wouldn’t even be here.
“Aren’t I kind of lying, though, by saying that I want the job when I apply and fill out all the paperwork and then saying the next day that I don’t want it?” I ask.
“I’ll take care of it,” Mom snaps. “I’ve known Mrs. Larson forever and she’ll understand—”
“That I’m fragile? You told her to let me interview. I appreciate that.” I want to slide my hand back, but I don’t. “You didn’t think she’d hire me.”
“You have no experience,” Mom says. “Of course, I didn’t think she’d hire you.”
“But she says most people who start in retail have no experience, and she
likes me
.” I surprise myself by putting emphasis on that last part. It matters more to me than I thought it would. “I know I get into these situations where I get hired even with no experience, but I’ve been thinking about it.” After talking to Eric, that is, but I don’t tell Mom that part. “It doesn’t sound like working in a retail store will be life or death. I mean, the fate of the world isn’t at stake this time, right?”
Mom chokes out a laugh, then she shakes her head. “My goodness, Brit. You are a treasure.”
I freeze—and not just because it’s cold out here. I’ve watched TV where they say that people use phrases like “you’re a treasure” to convey sarcasm, not love.
“I don’t mean to be,” I say.
She chuckles. This time it sounds freer. “Baby,” she says, “I meant that as a compliment. I didn’t think you wanted the job.”
I take a deep breath. “You talked to Eric.”
“No,” Mom says. “Why? What would he say?”
“Nothing.” I shrug. “He just—never mind.”
She stares at me for a moment. When I don’t go on, she says, “I know we’re forcing you into all kinds of things that you’ve never experienced before. I know everything is new. A job, on top of school, on top of dealing with the family, it might be too much.”
“But applying for jobs isn’t?” I almost feel like I did as an Interim Fate. People want something from me, but they’re not clear about what exactly they want, so I feel like I’m making decisions without having all of the facts.