guys?”
“No!” they all say at once. They’ve had my eggs before. Since Mom has been spending a lot of time at either doctors’ appointments for herself or doctor and physical therapy consults for Dad, they’ve suffered through the full range of my limited culinary talents.
“I’ll get rid of the owl if you give us money to eat breakfast in town,” Duff says.
“Alice, look!” Andy says despairingly, “I knew this wouldn’t fit.” She hovers in the doorway in the sundress I loaned her, the front sagging. “When do I get off the itty-bitty-titty committee? You did before you were even thirteen.” She sounds accusatory, like I used up the last available bigger chest size in the family.
“Titty committee?” Duff starts laughing. “Who’s on that? I bet Joel is. And Tim.”
“You are so immature that listening to you actually makes me younger,” Andy tells him. “Alice, help! I love this dress. You never lend it to me. I’m going to die if I can’t wear it.” She looks wildly around the kitchen. “Do I stuff it? With what?”
“Breadcrumbs?” Duff is still cracking up. “Oatmeal? Owl feathers?”
I point the oatmeal spoon at her. “Never stuff. Own your size.”
“I want to wear this dress.” Andy scowls at me. “It’s perfect. Except it doesn’t fit. There. Do you have anything else? That’s flatter?”
“Did you ask Samantha?” I glare at Duff, who is shoving several kitchen sponges down his shirt. Harry, who doesn’t get what’s going on – I hope – but is happy to join in on tormenting Andy, is wadding up some diapers from Patsy’s clean stack and following suit. My brother’s girlfriend has much more patience than I do. Maybe because Samantha only has one sibling to deal with.
“She’s helping her mom take her sister to college – she probably won’t be back till tonight. Alice! What do I do?”
My jaw clenches at the mere mention of Grace Reed, Sam’s mom, the closest thing our family has to a nemesis. Or maybe it’s the owl. God. Get me out of here.
“I’m hungry,” Harry says. “I’m starving here. I’ll be dead by night.”
“It takes three weeks to starve,” George tells him, his air of authority undermined by his hot cocoa mustache.
“Ughhh. No one cares!” Andy storms away.
“She’s got the hormones going on,” Duff confides to Harry. Ever since hearing it from my mother, my little brothers treat “hormones” like a contagious disease.
My cell phone vibrates on the cluttered counter. Brad again. I ignore it, start banging open cabinets. “Look, guys, we’re out of everything, got it? We can’t go shopping until we get this week’s take-home from the store, and no one has time to go anyway. I’m not giving you money. So it’s oatmeal or empty stomachs. Unless you want peanut butter on toast.”
“Not again,” Duff groans, shoving away from the table and stalking out of the kitchen.
“Gross,” Harry says, doing the same, after accidentally knocking over his orange juice – and ignoring it.
How does Mom stand this? I pinch the muscles at the base of my neck, hard, close my eyes. Push away the most treacherous thought of all: Why does Mom stand this?
George is still doggedly trying to eat a spoonful of oatmeal, one rolled oat at a time.
“Don’t bother, G. You still like peanut butter, right?”
Breathing out a long sigh, world-weary at four, George rests his freckled cheek against his hand, watching me with a focus that reminds me of Jase. “You can make diamonds out of peanut butter. I readed about it.”
“Read,” I say automatically, replenishing the raisins I’d sprinkled on the tray of Patsy’s high chair.
“Yucks a dis,” she says, picking each raisin up with a delicate pincer grip and dropping it off the side of the high chair.
“Do you think we could make diamonds out of this peanut butter?” George asks hopefully as I open the jar of Jif.
“I wish, Georgie,” I say, looking at the empty cabinet over the window, and then noticing a dark blue Jetta pull into our driveway, the door kick open, a tall figure climb out, the sun hitting his rusty hair, lighting it like a match.
Fabulous. Exactly what we need for the flammable family mix. Tim Mason. The human equivalent of C-4.
We walk up the creaky garage stairs and Jase hauls a key out of his pocket, unlocks the door, flips on the lights. I brush past him and drop my cardboard box on the ground. Joel’s old apartment is low-ceilinged and decorated with milk crate bookcases, ugly couch, mini-fridge, microwave, denim beanbag chair with Sox logo, walls covered in Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and all that – tits everywhere – and a gigantic iron weight rack with a shit-ton of weights.
“This is where Joel took all those au pairs? I thought he had better game than this massive cliché.”
Jase grimaces. “Welcome to Bootytown. Supposedly the nannies never minded because they expected it of American boys. Want me to help yank ’em down?”
“Nah, I can always count body parts if I have trouble sleeping.”
After a brief scope-out of the apartment, during which he makes a face and empties a few trash cans, he asks, “This gonna work for you?”
“Absolutely.” I reach into my pocket, pull out the lined paper list I snatched off my bulletin board, and slap it on the refrigerator, adios-ing a babe in hot pink spandex.
Jase scans my sign, shakes his head. “Mase . . . you know you can come on over anytime.”
“I’ve been to boarding school, Garrett. Not like I’m afraid of the dark.”
“Don’t be a dick,” he says mildly. He points in the direction of the bathroom. “The plumbing backs up sometimes. If the plunger doesn’t work, text, I can fix it. I repeat, you’re always welcome to head to our house. Or join me on the pre-dawn job. I gotta pick up Samantha now. She ended up not going to Vermont. Ride along?”
“With the perfect high school sweethearts? Nah. I think I’ll stay and see if I can break the plunger. Then I’ll text you.”
He flips me off, grins, and leaves.
Time to get my ass to a meeting. Better that than alone with a ton of airbrushed boobs and my unfiltered thoughts.
When I walk up the Garretts’ overgrown lawn after the meeting – which only partially took the edge off – the first thing I see is Jase’s older sister, Alice, tanning in the front yard.
In a bikini.
Shockwave scarlet.
Straps untied.
Olive skin.
Toenails painted the color of fireballs.
Can I say there are few things on earth that cheer me up more than Alice Garrett in a bikini?
Except Alice without a bikini. Which I’ve never seen, but I’ve a hell of an imagination.
She’s almost asleep, in a tiny blue-and-green lawn chair, her head and her long, always-morphing hair (brown with blond streaks right now) flopping heavily to one side, curling shorter in the late-summer heat. Because I’m unscrupulous, I flop down on the grass next to her and take a good long look.
Oh, Alice.
After a few