Terry Essig - A Gleam In His Eye

“Good. Christopher took me seriously about doing a better job cutting the grass,” she acknowledged to herself as she passed through the yard and entered the house through the back door.

“Looks like the dishes are done and it’s possible the floor may have been swept.” Johanna opened the refrigerator door. “Lunches made.” She closed the door, went to the bottom of the steps to the second floor and yelled, “Homework check! Bring your assignment notebooks and matching papers down to the kitchen! Aubrey?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you practice?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh-huh. Anybody hear you practice that would be willing to bear witness?”

“William said I had to say he’d practiced, too, otherwise he was gonna say I didn’t, either, but I really did. You can even ask.”

“Charlie?” Johanna yelled.

“All right, okay, I’ll turn it off. Man, you have radar ears. How’d you even know I had the television on while I studied?”

She hadn’t. “I know all and see all. Did Aubrey practice?”

“Yeah.”

“For more than five minutes?”

Charlie didn’t respond right away. Evidently he had to think about it. “Maybe,” he finally responded.

“Close enough,” Johanna muttered, too tired to pursue it any further. She went out to the kitchen table and began to check homework assignments. After a few minutes, she sat back and eyed her four youngest siblings, who stood waiting for her to finish.

“Pretty good, guys. William, this one paper needs to be rewritten more neatly, but other than that, you all did a great job.”

Johanna glanced around the kitchen, noted the cookie sheet in the sink. “Did Chris bake the cookies?”

They all nodded.

“Peanut butter. But he wouldn’t let us have none,” Aubrey complained. “Said he was keeping them all for hisself.”

“He was teasing, honey. They’re for lunches. But you know, you all did such a great job at swimming and getting your work done I think we should break out the milk and all have a cookie.”

“Yes!” Grace pumped her fist and raced for the milk, Stephen got the glasses and Aubrey climbed on a chair to reach the cookie tin while William hurriedly rewrote his paper in better handwriting. Johanna knew for a fact it still wasn’t his personal best, but decided not to push it. She was too tired and the end of the school year was too close.

Sixteen-year-old Christopher ambled in during their treat. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, snagging a cookie.

“I was gonna have that one,” William immediately complained.

“Then you should have been quicker,” Chris informed Will while holding the cookie out of his reach. “Besides, I’m the one who made them.” He bit into it.

Johanna shook her head. “Mom had a late meeting,” she explained. “Probably will every night this week. She’s got a big deal cooking.”

Chris snorted. “What else is new? She’s never home.”

“Be grateful,” Johanna said. “Things could have gotten really rocky after Dad died if she hadn’t been able to make a success of herself. And she’s a whole lot tougher than me. Why, I remember when I was your age…”

Aubrey edged closer to her big sister. “Jo?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Those two new kids at swim practice? They came to school today, too. One of them is going to be in my class. I kinda liked them.”

“Did you? Good. Me, too. And it’s hard to be the new kid, so they’ll need you to be nice to them.”

“Yeah, only know what?”

“What?”

“That guy?”

“What guy?”

“The guy what brought them.”

“Their dad? What about him?”

“He looked like a dad, only he wasn’t.”

Johanna’s ears perked up. “He wasn’t their dad?”

“Nuh-uh. They kept calling him Uncle Hunter, so I asked Karen why and they said it was ’cuz that’s what he was. Their uncle.”

Aubrey now had Johanna’s total attention. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah. Everybody was yelling and stuff in the locker room and I still had some water in my ears so I couldn’t hear too good what she was saying, but it was something about their parents going someplace and them staying with their uncle.”

Well, well, well, wouldn’t it be nice if her instincts had been off base? Easily over six feet with dark, dark hair and piercing blue eyes, this particular man fit her definition of the quintessential male. In fact, you could probably look up the word male in the dictionary and find Hunter Pace listed as the definition. “So he only has the kids temporarily,” Johanna murmured out loud.

Aubrey scrunched her thin little shoulders. “I guess. Know what else? They got two more in their family. Aaron and Mikie. Karen says it’s no fair ’cuz she’s the only girl.”

Johanna watched Christopher finish off the milk directly from the gallon container. Boys were so…primitive. “I can see her point. Rinse that out and put it in the recycling container, Chris,” she directed her brother, and sat back in her chair. “I wonder why they changed schools and everything?” she mused out loud, then shrugged. “Maybe they took a job overseas or something and are going to be gone for months.”

“Wouldn’t they have taken their kids with them?” Grace asked.

“Not necessarily,” Chris responded as he stepped on the milk carton to crush it. “Some parts of the near East, for example, aren’t all that safe, but the money’s probably too good to pass up. I mean, the real father could be an engineer or something who works in oil. Heck, for all we know the mom could be an industrial or chemical engineer.”

Aubrey’s eyes widened. “Wow. That’s what I’ll be. A engineer. I want to make lots of money, too, just like Karen’s mom.”

Johanna laughed. “Chris was just guessing, honey. For all we know Karen and Robby’s dad could be an elephant hunter and their mom a hula dancer.”

“For real?”

She laughed again. “I’m teasing, although I guess they could be. We’ll never know unless Karen or Robby tells us. I’m just surprised they didn’t send the kids to boarding school or something. It must be hard on their uncle to suddenly have four young kids living with him, but who knows, maybe the family is close and he’s used to it.”

The three youngest lost interest after that and fell into a discussion on whether Alexander Snyder was the dorkiest kid in school or not.

“He reads the encyclopedia at the bus stop.”

“Yeah, he’s up to F already.”

“F for fathead,” Stephen giggled.

“Why does he do that?” Johanna wondered. Any kind of intellectual display in front of preadolescents or adolescents, either one, was asking for trouble. “Did you ask him?”

“He says he hungers for knowledge,” Will snorted. “Ty told him he was a dorkhead and beat him up after that,” he reported matter-of-factly.

“You three better not be part of that,” Charlie said on his way through the room, giving Johanna much hope for his future. “You know what Johanna and Mom say all the time.”

“You don’t have to marry them, but you do have to be kind,” they all chorused together.

“That’s right,” Charlie nodded. “And you better not forget it or when I’m in charge after Jo leaves there may be serious rear end damage done around here. You think she’s tough, wait’ll you get a load of me.”

“Jo won’t let you spank us,” Aubrey said in her best nah-nah-nah voice.

“Jo won’t be here.”

Before things escalated out of control, Johanna got the four youngest up the stairs and into the bathroom to brush teeth and prepare for bed. She made a mental note to talk to Charlie some time before she moved out about not letting authority go to his head, and prepared for bed herself. She and her mother shared a bedroom. Cognizant of both their needs for privacy, they had put back-to-back shelving units partway down the center of the room. It was an imperfect solution, but provided more storage in a house crammed full of people and their paraphernalia and it gave Johanna the illusion of a space of her own.