casual. “What’d you tell him?”
“He said I looked tired, and I told him about my nightmares.”
“What they were about?” The other boys had fallen silent, as if they were all holding their breath.
“I told you,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
Hopes dashed, Daniel asked for and got a full report, not on the sin of lying but the inefficiency of it. And then they were home. Home to the scent of braising pot roast, to the comforting sight of Jesse carefully removing an apple crisp from the oven, to the racket of four boys shouting, arguing, laughing, racing up and down the stairs of the huge, creaky old Victorian house and the family dog, Aengus, barking, delighted they’d come back.
To Daniel, it sounded like the sweet strains of the Westminster Abbey boys’ choir.
“LILAH JAMISON?”
“Yes.” Lilah gave the portly manager of the Ben Franklin dime store a confident smile. Don’t be modest. Sell yourself. You have to, for your sake and Jonathan’s.“I saw that you’re looking for a person to handle your crafts section. I’m a crafter myself, and…”
“Already filled,” the woman said. “Retha, she’s one of our cashiers, says her daughter wants the job.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten this response. Jobs in Churchill went to relatives of current employees. Lilah wanted to say, But have you interviewed Retha’s daughter? Does she know anything about knitting? Or decoupage? Or tole painting? But it wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was Retha’s daughter.
“Well,” Lilah said, forcing another smile, “thanks for talking to me.” She couldn’t ask the woman to call her if she had another opening. She hadn’t been able to afford a cell phone since Bruce had gone to prison. Her address, at the moment, was CWC 402, her license plate number. “While I’m here, I’d like to look at yarn.”
Now that Lilah was a customer rather than a job applicant, the woman was all smiles. “You picked the right day,” she said. “We’re having a sale.”
Lilah fought the tidal wave of discouragement threatening her belief that leaving Whittaker had been the right thing to do. First, she’d gone to the hospital to look for work as a hospital nurse or a home caregiver. “No openings in nursing,” said the head of personnel, looking at her warily.
“I also have bookkeeping experience,” Lilah said. “Would you have anything in Accounting?”
“No, but if something comes up, I’ll give you a call.”
But, of course, Lilah didn’t have a phone number.
Since she’d arrived in Churchill, she’d followed up on every job offer on the grocery store bulletin board and in the classified ads of the local newspaper. There weren’t many. Apparently Churchill folks didn’t hire cleaning ladies. And the school didn’t need cafeteria workers or teachers’ aides.
She dropped in at the local diner. “My husband’s the short-order cook, my daughter and I are the waitresses, and we hire the intellectually challenged to bus tables and clean up,” the woman at the counter told her. “Sorry.”
Before she picked up Jonathan at the park, where she’d discovered the town ran an informal, drop in, drop out, day care in the summer months, Lilah took one last look at the grocery store bulletin board. No job offers, but a brightly colored poster caught her eye:
Fair Meadows Soccer Camp
Attention, future soccer stars aged five to sixteen!
Coach Wetherby and the Town of Churchill offer you this opportunity to sharpen your skills for competitive team play!
Nine to noon, Monday through Friday at Friendship Fields.
All Serenity Valley students welcomed.
Sign up now!
Registration fee includes…
Lilah’s eye stopped at “registration fee.” Jonathan excelled at soccer. He could make friends at the camp, and then he wouldn’t have to enter second grade as the “new kid.” The fee wasn’t much, but she couldn’t afford a fee of any size.
It was the last straw. “Go team,” she whispered. They’d have to go without Jonathan. His mother had missed one goal too many.
She hurried out of the store before she fell apart. What was she going to do? Would she have to move to a larger town outside the valley, where she’d find more job opportunities?
“I have an idea,” she told Jonathan when she picked him up, giving him a smile that took all the optimism she could muster. “Let’s blow it all out at the diner—hamburgers, French fries, the works—and then we’ll drive back to our secret hideout and make Nick a dreamcatcher.”
Chapter Two
Daniel eyed the mountain of laundry on the basement floor, started a load, stalked up the steep stairs and said, “Jesse, we need a housekeeper.”
“Last thing we need’s a woman around here,” Jesse said. “They don’t have their priorities straight. Want things to look pretty before they really do anything.”
A typical reaction from Jesse O’Reilly. A long-retired marine and a widower for many years, he’d been renting the apartment over the carriage house when Daniel bought the property. Because any income to offset Daniel’s investment was a plus, he’d encouraged Jesse to stay.
Then, when Daniel took in his first foster child, Jason, a rebellious, fighting-mad fourteen-year-old at the time, Jesse had told Daniel if he ran into a problem, he should just call and he’d keep an eye on the boy. And slowly, Daniel had begun to trust Jesse. He took in more boys, and Jesse became even closer to the family, somehow having dinner ready before Daniel got back from picking up the kids after school, somehow producing stacks of laundered clothes, a full cookie jar.
Last year Jesse had fallen down the apartment stairs, and Daniel had talked him into moving into the house. Now he was chef, chauffeur, child-sitter, homework supervisor—and Daniel’s best friend, next to his brothers. More like a father than a friend. A grumpy father with a heart of pure homemade spaghetti sauce.
“Let me put it another way,” Daniel said. “You work sixteen hours a day, the boys have their chores, we all help clean on Saturday, but if you could see the condition upstairs you’d have us court-martialed.” He was exaggerating, but not by much.
Jesse, who was even now engrossed in dinner preparations while the boys—Jason and Maury, Will and Nick—did their homework at the kitchen table, spun around from his stovetop. “It’s dirty?” he gasped.
“Criminally,” Daniel assured him. “If Child Services came around, they’d take the kids away.” Thinking that might scare the younger boys, he gave them a wink, and they gave him a thumbs-up. “Then there’s the laundry. Imagine Mount Everest.”
“You’re the one won’t let me go down those stairs any more,” Jesse grumbled.
“For
