Margot Early - Good With Children

Desert, whose head was entirely shaven beneath her ski hat, ignored the approach of her roommate and continued spinning the burning balls. Total concentration was required, and still poi spinners got burned. Samantha asked, “Did you bring the rabbits?”

“Yes,” Rory said, with resignation, letting herself in the back gate. She and Samantha were of one mind about Lola—the python had to go. Samantha now refused to have anything to do with the snake beyond assisting—from a safe distance—at feeding time. She’d been bitten the previous summer and she was convinced the snake would have killed her—by constriction—if both Desert and Rory hadn’t been there to pull it off. As it was, she’d needed sixteen stitches to close the bite.

Rory agreed that the snake might have killed Samantha. In fact, Lola had frightened Rory more thoroughly than anything else ever had in her entire life. And Rory was not afraid of snakes.

She wanted to plead with Desert not to do anything that might jeopardize her job. But Desert wouldn’t welcome an interruption to her practice. And on second thought, Rory didn’t think she was up to coping with Desert at the moment.

Desert, christened Naomi Katz, had come to Colorado at the age of eighteen. She’d immediately rechristened herself and had begun living off a trust fund provided by her grandfather, a diamond broker, and also by her mother’s family. Rich and beautiful, she’d trained in Boulder as a massage therapist and as a fire dancer, had moved to Sultan and bought the two-storey Victorian where she, Rory and Samantha now lived. Its exterior was painted bordello pink.

Sometimes, Rory and Samantha asked themselves why they put up with Desert.

But they loved her. And pitied her. And wanted to help her somehow; help her to not make life hard for herself. Desert’s boyfriend was a recent acquisition—they’d been together nine weeks. Rory and Samantha were holding their breaths, dreading the ending. Dreading it for themselves as well as for Desert, who was sensitive and, well, troubled.

Rory said to Samantha, “Can you take these? I’ve got to go show some clients to the Empire Street house.”

“Sure.” Samantha took the rabbits, clutching the bundle against her with one arm. “Go.”

RORY GORENZI WAS ATTRACTIVE, but Seamus had come from Telluride, where beautiful was the norm. He didn’t want another girlfriend; he only wanted to sort through the things his ex-girlfriend had said. He wanted to attend to the flaws she’d pointed out. And they were flaws. He didn’t want to marry again—his experiences with other women reminded him not that Janine had been the perfect wife and mother, but that she hadn’t been. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d been the mother of their kids and, so, the perfect mother for them.

But she’d always needed to prove something. He’d known she was sensitive beneath her sometimes-abrasive exterior. One of his male employees had once said to Janine, “You have more testosterone than I do.”

She’d said, “Thank you!” and had clearly been pleased by the compliment.

She’d been an athlete, but that wasn’t the only thing that had made her challenging. It was the way she’d presented herself. Her certainty that her way was right. She’d been insecure and determined to hide the fact, and in their twelve years of marriage she’d never revealed the source of that insecurity or the reason for it.

She’d been smart—a legal-aid lawyer employed by the Women’s Resource Center, defending the battered and the terrified. And she’d never struck him as particularly maternal, although she’d nursed each child for at least nine months. She’d spoken of it so casually, saying once, “When I get this one off my tits…”

Janine had been difficult, and since her death Seamus had vacillated between the notion that no relationship could be as trying as his marriage had been and the idea that no woman would be as good for his children as Janine had been. And how good was that, really?

Better than you, Seamus.

But that hadn’t been so true, back when his wife was alive. He’d spent time with his kids, talked with them and listened to them.

Janine had listened, too—long enough to get the gist of situations. Then, she’d pronounced judgment. You’re not going to take that from anyone, she would order the seven-year-old who’d just had his lunch money stolen.

Lauren seemed determined to remember her as a sort of warrior mother, an Amazon who had demanded warrior-like behavior from her children, as well. Even these days, Seamus occasionally heard his oldest say, “Mom wouldn’t have stood for that,” or “Mom wouldn’t have put up with that.”

But actually, she might have. To be as much bite as bark required a certain resolve that she lacked. Janine had been a great skier, a hard-riding cyclist, a distance runner, a strong ice-climber and, above all, a fantastic talker. She had talked big. It was the one quality that had come to define her and that Seamus had eventually found most annoying.

Seamus went inside the Sultan Mountain School to see if Kurt was around. Lauren accompanied him, leaving Beau, Caleb and Belle outside with Seuss.

As they stepped into the lobby of the Victorian building, Seamus spotted Kurt, talking to two men in mountaineering clothes and showing them something on a topographical map on one wall. Seamus saw that the map was composed of many geological survey maps joined together.

“You don’t want to go that way,” Kurt was saying. “Too much avalanche danger. I’d recommend taking the V-Dot Road….”

Lauren said, “There’s not going to be anything to do here.”

“You’re going to have plenty to do.”

“I don’t want to spend three months snowshoeing.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Ms. Gorenzi has in store for you.”

“Is she going to be our teacher?” Lauren seemed suspicious. Of what, Seamus couldn’t be sure, until his oldest daughter added, acidly, “Or our new nanny.”

“Seamus.” Kurt had spotted them. Tall, gray-haired, unpolished, he joined Seamus and held out his hand. “Roads clear?”

“Not bad. Snow-packed on the pass. The usual. You’ve met my daughter, Lauren.”

“I think she was a few heads shorter back then. Nice to see you.” Kurt shook Lauren’s hand. “Where are you in school?”

Very politic, Seamus observed, as Kurt knew Lauren’s age.

“Still in high school,” she said, taking the implied compliment—that she was perhaps a college student—in stride.

“In the Sultan Mountain School, no less.” Seamus smiled at his friend, now recognizing traces of Rory in Kurt’s features. “We met your daughter.”

“Where is she?”

Any disapproval was well-concealed, yet Seamus wondered if it was there, nonetheless. Father-daughter tensions? Kurt had high standards—for himself and others.

“She went to feed her snake,” Lauren said.

“Her roommate’s,” Seamus corrected, as if it were important.

“Ah.” Kurt made no further comment.

“And she’s coming back to take us to the house.”

The front door swung open, and Rory came in, curls flying loose from her ponytail, expression mildly agitated. “Hi. Ready to go?” she asked without preamble.

Seamus wondered if Rory was trying to avoid her father’s notice for some reason.

Kurt seemed to sense it, too. “Everything all right?” he asked mildly.

“Yes.” A tight smile. “And here?”

Kurt nodded.

The phone rang, and a young man behind the hotel’s old reception counter picked it up. “Sultan Mountain School,” he said. Then, “She’s here.”

“It’s Desert.”

Irritated, Rory walked to the phone and said, “Hello?”

“When are you going to be able to practice? We’re planning to do our new combo with the staffs on Friday, and we still don’t have it right.”