Susan Wiggs - Starlight On Willow Lake

Returning to the computer, she stared for a moment at the still-frozen screen, then tried clicking the link to the job-posting site she had been checking three times a day, without fail. Her search for a new position was getting desperate. The home health care agency she had been working for hadn’t sent anything her way in three months. Even when they did find work for her, the outfit didn’t pay her enough to sustain a pet gerbil, let alone two growing daughters. Faith was already two months behind on the rent, and the place was under new management.

In desperation, she had posted her résumé on every home health aide job site she could find, hoping to negotiate a living wage on her own rather than going through yet another agency that helped itself to a hefty percentage of her wages.

Finally, the sluggish browser responded. The mobile home park’s “free” Wi-Fi unfurled at leaden speed. She usually got several chores done while waiting for a page to load.

“Mo-oo-om!” Faith’s younger daughter, Ruby, stretched the word to several whiny syllables. The little girl stomped inside, slamming the door open wide. The impact caused the rented double-wide to shudder. “Cara forgot to wait for me at the bus. And she stole my lunch ticket—again.”

“Did not,” said Cara, following her younger sister into the room and flopping down on the tiny swaybacked sofa. With elaborate nonchalance, she opened her AP biology textbook.

“Did so.”

“Did not.”

“Then where did my lunch ticket go, huh?” Ruby demanded. She shrugged out of her backpack, depositing it on the built-in table.

“Who knows?” Cara asked without looking up. She twisted a strand of purple-dyed hair around her index finger.

“You know,” Ruby said, “because you stold it.”

“Stole,” Cara corrected her sister. “And I didn’t.”

“You’re the one who took it last time.”

“That was a month ago, and you were sick that day.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Did you eat anything for lunch?” Faith broke in, exasperated.

Ruby pulled her mouth into a pout that somehow made her look even more adorable than usual. Sometimes Faith believed Ruby’s cuteness was the only thing that kept her alive, she was so fragile. “Mrs. Geiger gave me half of her tuna fish sandwich and a carton of milk. And those yucky dried apple chips. I hate tuna fish. But then after school, Charlie O’Donnell gave me Bugles during soccer practice.”

Ruby had a little-girl crush on Charlie O’Donnell, an eighth-grader who helped coach the primary school soccer team.

“Get some water and sit down,” Faith said. “We’ll check your levels in a little bit.” A familiar knot of tension tightened inside her. Every day, Ruby’s type 1 diabetes brought a new worry, and a new challenge. She turned to Cara. “You’re supposed to wait for her at the bus stop.”

“I forgot.”

“How can you forget something you’re supposed to do every day?”

“She knows the way home.”

Faith suspected the real reason was that Cara didn’t want people to see where they lived. Lakeside Estates Motor Court wasn’t all bad, but no kid wanted to admit she lived in a trailer park. Despite its name, the place was not beside the lake, and it was far from an estate, but it was safe and close to the girls’ schools.

The page finally loaded, and Faith turned her attention to navigating her way to the job-posting response. Outside, the Guptas’ dog went crazy barking, heralding the daily arrival of the mailman in the central courtyard. Ruby, who was scared of dogs, cringed at the sound.

“I’ll go.” Cara shoved aside her homework and went to check the mail.

The response to Faith’s carefully worded posting, offering her services as a skilled caregiver, looked promising. She leaned toward the screen, her interest piqued. “We’re looking for an experienced individual to supervise all aspects of in-home care for a wheelchair-bound lady with a spinal cord injury. Salary and benefits package to include on-site living quarters.”

Okay, so maybe not. Faith and her girls couldn’t all fit into a closet-sized guest room in some woman’s house. Still, the position was right here in Avalon, which made it worth looking into, because the girls hated the idea of changing schools at the very end of the school year.

She wrote down the contact information in case the laptop crapped out again. Then she replied to the interview request, suggesting a meeting the following morning. Tomorrow was Saturday, so Cara would have to miss work at the bakery to watch Ruby, which meant squabbling, but that was too bad. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

Cara came in from the motor court, sorting through the mail. “Bills and junk,” she said.

“You were expecting maybe we’d won the Publishers Clearing House?”

Cara dropped the bills on the counter next to Faith and put the rest in the recycle bin at her feet.

Faith picked up a glossy brochure. “What is this from Johns Hopkins? It’s addressed to you.”

Cara shrugged and turned away. “Like I said, junk mail.”

Faith regarded the beautiful photograph of a college campus. A letter on university letterhead slipped out. There was a personal note at the bottom—“Cara, you have a bright future ahead of you”—and it appeared to be signed by hand from the director of admissions. “It says here that based on your test scores, you’re invited to apply early, and the admission fee will be waived.”

Another shrug. “Not interested.”

“You didn’t tell me you got your scores back.”

“Oh. So I got my scores back.”

Cara drove Faith crazy as if it were her job to do so. Daily.

“And?” Faith demanded.

“And I did okay.”

“Cara Rose McCallum.”

Heaving a long-suffering sigh, Cara dug in her backpack and came up with a printout.

Faith scanned the numbers, assessing her elder daughter’s verbal and quantitative achievements. If she was reading it right, her daughter had crushed the hardest standardized test given at Avalon High. “And you were going to show me this...when?”

“It’s just a bunch of numbers.” She flopped down again and went back to her homework.

“Numbers that tell us you’re in the ninety-ninth percentile of students who took the test.”

“Does that mean she’s really smart?” Ruby asked.

“Really, really smart,” said Faith. Pride, exasperation and frustration mingled together. When a girl was as smart as Cara, she should be proud of her own potential, not blasé or, worse, defeated. Faith wanted to give her the world. She wanted to give both girls the world. Instead, she had them living in a trailer park while she held on by the tips of her fingernails.

“If she’s so smart,” Ruby mused, “why does she keep forgetting me after school?”

Faith ignored the question as she looked through the bills—two ominously thick packets from St. Francis Hospital and Diabetes Center. She had been paying a dead man’s bills for six years. The vows said “until death do us part,” but clearly the hospital billing system still believed that even in death, the bills didn’t have to end.

The next envelope gave her a jolt. She opened it, read the single page. “Oh, come on,” she muttered under her breath. “Really?”

“What now?” asked Cara.

Faith sent her a warning look. “E-V-I-C—”

“T-I-O-N. You don’t have to spell it in front of me,” said Ruby. “I know how to spell it, and I know what it means.” She got up and crossed the room, leaning over Faith’s shoulder. “And I know what final notice means.”

The new management company gave her no quarter. She had tried reasoning with them and had held them at bay for several weeks, but apparently they were done waiting. She hated the tone of the letter. Did they think she actually had the money and was holding out on them?