Daly Thompson - One Of A Kind Dad

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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.”

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 good reason,” Daniel said. “The housekeeper doesn’t have to be a woman, but whoever it is, I won’t let him or her get in your way.”

“Well, okay, look around.” His nose in the air, Jesse turned back to the stove. “Just don’t let anybody mess with my kitchen.”

“Why would I do that?” Daniel asked. “It’s the cleanest room in the house.”

“THIS IS A FUNNY WAY to wash clothes,” Jonathan said.

“But it works,” Lilah told him, smiling brightly and trying to hide the sickness she felt inside. “The sun dries them, they smell fresh and sweet…This is the way the pioneers did their laundry. How about a bologna-and-cheese sandwich before I take you to the park?”

Their hideout hadn’t been easy to find. After scouring the back roads of the three towns that made up the valley, Lilah had found, just outside Churchill, a lumber road that led up to a forested area, beautiful and serene, with no heavy equipment around to indicate that the trees were marked to be cut any time soon. This is where she and Jonathan were living. They slept in the car, bathed in the icy stream and washed their clothes there, leaving them to dry in the dappled sunlight.

They ate cereal and milk, sandwiches made of the least expensive sandwich meat and cheese, or peanut butter and jelly, with a piece of fruit for Jonathan each day. Lilah ate as little as she could without making herself feel faint, saving everything possible for her son. They’d been living like this for almost two weeks now. She couldn’t hold out much longer. It wasn’t fair to Jonathan.

“What do you think about the dreamcatcher?”

“It’s great,” Jonathan said, his face lighting up.

Together they admired her handiwork. She’d cut a circle out of a cereal box and had painted it with scarlet nail polish she’d found among the things she’d hastily thrown into garbage bags when they left Whittaker. When had she ever worn bright-red nail polish? Long years ago, when she was still in love with Bruce and had no idea what he would eventually do to her, to their lives? The love hadn’t lasted long. The bottle of polish had been almost full.

When the polish dried, Lilah filled in the circle with the yarn she’d bought, a twisted red and white, and then she attached red-painted twig arms and legs, crocheting fanciful feet and hands to fit over the twigs.

In a moment of whimsy, she crocheted a baseball cap and attached it to the top of the circle. A Boston Red Sox dreamcatcher. And then, giving it one last critical look, she decided it needed a catcher’s mitt.

“Is Nick right-or left-handed?” she asked Jonathan.

Jonathan looked at her as if she’d asked a pretty dumb question, but then he thought about it. “Left,” he said suddenly, “because when there’s a new kid at Sunday school everybody writes himself a name tag, and Nick was sitting over here,” he gestured to his right, “so our elbows kept bumping and we thought it was funny and that’s when we started talking.”

“You’re a great detective,” Lilah congratulated him. So she’d crocheted the mitt onto the left toothpick hand, smiling to herself as she worked.

Making the dreamcatcher had been as good for her as she hoped it would be for Nick. It was the first time in ages she’d found anything humorous to think about her in life.

“Okay, kiddo,” she said, giving him that forced bright smile. “Off to the park.”

And back to her desperate job search. This week, she didn’t even have to buy the Valley News. Someone had left a copy on a park bench, which she spotted after dropping Jonathan off at the soccer field. In the classified ads section, she read, “Single father is seeking housekeeper. Call 802.555.4432. References essential.”

It was as if an angel had left the newspaper for her to find. She felt a glimmer of excitement, and then the glimmer began to shine. It would be a perfect job for her.

She had no references, however. If she asked for one from the son of the woman she’d cared for these past three years she’d be letting him know where she was, and she didn’t want anyone in Whittaker to know where she was. She raised her chin resolutely. She’d have to convince this single father that she’d be the housekeeper of his dreams, references or not.

Gathering change from the bottom of her handbag, knowing every penny had to be spent carefully, she sought out the pay phone on Main Street and dialed the number. If no one answered, she’d just have to call again and again. In her mind’s eye she saw dollars and dollars clinking through that slot…