Cara Lockwood - The Big Break

“Oh, come on. He can’t hear us, and even if he did, he’d have no idea what we’re talking about.” Kiki tossed an oven mitt on her countertop. “Your problem is you’ve been in mommy mode far too long. You need to think about your whole self. You’re a woman, too, not just a mommy.”

“I’ll have plenty of time to think of that later.” Jun shook her head. “Like when Po is eighteen.”

Kiki sputtered a derisive laugh. “You’ll be shriveled up and dried out by then.”

“Kiki!” Jun slapped her sister’s arm.

“You know I’m right.” Kiki bustled over to the refrigerator and pulled out ingredients for a salad. She handed the lettuce, tomatoes and carrots over to Jun, and immediately she knew it would be her turn to wash them, Kiki’s to cut. She ran the lettuce under the sink and briskly shook it out.

It was no surprise Kiki worried about how much Jun was getting laid. Kiki had always been more into going out and having fun when they were younger. She’d been the rebel who butted heads with their tiger mom for years: getting a tattoo, coming home drunk, showing up with a new boyfriend every month. Jun had been the picture-perfect daughter with the impeccable grades and dreams of going to med school, and yet, irony of ironies, Jun’s one drunken mistake ended with her pregnant at nineteen. And now Kiki was the one who’d gone to college, come out the other side a nurse and had a doting husband, the cozy house, the nice green lawn, while Jun had had to drop out of college and work odd jobs to support Po.

Jun still remembered her mother’s face when she told her she was unmarried and pregnant at nineteen. Her mother had reared back and slapped her hard across the face. If she thought about it, the blow still stung. Her tiger mom, so angry, so completely rigid about her rules, hadn’t even come to the hospital when Po was born. Jun felt her mother had abandoned her then, and when a sudden heart attack took her six months later, it was more like a formality.

“You need to stop living like a nun,” Kiki said as Jun handed her freshly washed pieces of lettuce that she broke off by hand and tossed into a waiting teak bowl. “Po needs a father. All the research says that boys with single moms are at a disadvantage. You don’t want Po to be a statistic, do you?”

The more Kiki had settled down into her white-picket-fence life, the more judgmental she’d gotten, a quality Jun liked less and less the older they both got.

“Po and I are doing just fine.”

“Is that why he got kicked out of day care?”

“Kiki.” Jun hated when her sister brought up her shortcomings, especially now, since she had so many and Kiki had so few.

Jun still couldn’t believe Kiki used to listen to punk rock, wear black lipstick and stay out all night. Now she was the spitting image of their mother, down to the way she wore her hair in a short bob. One of these days, if Kiki pushed her too far, Jun might just point that out. “Come on. That’s not fair.”

“Po needs a father. He wouldn’t be biting if he had a father.”

“You don’t know that.” Jun exhaled a long, frustrated sigh. Her sister meant well, she knew that, but she just didn’t understand. She wasn’t a single mom, and she probably would never be one. It was easy for her to backseat-drive when she had a loving husband with a good job who spoiled her at every turn. Kiki didn’t know what it felt like to be on her own, worrying about paying her bills or frantically finding last-minute child care. How could Jun realistically date when she had no one to watch Po? And even if she did, somehow she thought it was selfish to take time away from her boy chasing after a man who probably would only disappoint them later.

“Jun, I’m sorry. I just... I just hate to see you unhappy.” Kiki paused, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “Kai Brady is rich, he’s handsome and he sounds like he’s into you.”

“No.” Jun shook her head furiously, thinking of yesterday when she had rung his bell and he didn’t even remember her. Not to mention, she couldn’t compete with the leggy blondes he seemed to prefer. “That’s not why he wants to hire me.”

“It’s not?”

“I think it’s for Po.” Jun had it all figured out. Kai seemed to like Po for some reason, like maybe he was one of those rich celebrities who every now and again decided to adopt a stray.

“Great! He’s dad material, then.”

Jun felt panic in her throat. A party-happy millionaire was not good dad material.

“No. You don’t get it. I don’t think he’s got it in him to commit to Po...or anything. Surfing is his life, extreme surfing at that, and even that’s something he puts aside to party. Besides, if I take this job, I’ll have to quit my others, and what if he fires me after one month? Then what?”

“Then you and Po come live with us. We just finished the guest room.”

“Kiki...”

“I mean it. Opportunities like this don’t come along any old time, Jun. You’ve got to take them when you can.”

Jun sighed as she washed the tomatoes beneath the tap. “Even if I take the job, I’m not sure I can train him. He doesn’t want to be trained.”

“Is that what the hesitation is about? You know what Mom always said about training people.” Kiki began slicing the tomatoes Jun had placed on her cutting board.

Jun smiled at the memory of their no-nonsense, sugar-coat-nothing mother. “‘In a contest of wills, the laziest one loses.’”

“See? All you have to do is work harder than he does, which doesn’t sound like it would be too difficult. Why don’t you channel Mom and see if you can’t whip that surfer into shape?”

Jun imagined what her mother might do to Kai if she’d been assigned the job of getting him in shape for a surf competition. She’d crush him in one week flat.

“You did it before when you worked at CrossFit two years ago. Didn’t they have a name for you there?” Kiki asked.

“The Terminator,” Jun said, and laughed a little. She had been a tough trainer then. It had been one of her first classes, and she’d maybe overcompensated for nerves by being extra tough on everyone. But the nickname had stuck until she’d transferred over to Island Fit and discovered Tai Chi, yoga and a more Zen approach to fitness.

“See? You’ve already got this in the bag. Plus, I know you have a thing for surfers. What was his name? John?”

“James.” Jun thought about the year in high school she’d spent following around James McAlister, the towheaded surfer whom she’d had a crush on. Nothing had ever happened. James never even knew she existed, really, but she had learned how to surf. Still, she wasn’t anywhere near Kai’s caliber.

“I don’t have a thing for surfers.” Jun saw Kai’s inviting dark eyes once more in her mind’s eye. Or did she?

“Okay, then, well, you owe Kai a debt. You know how Mom felt about debt.”

The woman had paid cash for everything and had never owned a single credit card. If a neighbor brought her a basket of fruit, she’d somehow turn it into a full meal, which she’d return the following day. Jun knew herself well enough to know that her staunch independence came directly from her mother. She knew she couldn’t turn Kai down. She owed him.

So why did working for him fill her with dread? Why did repaying a debt feel as though somehow she would just be asking for more? Because she had a sinking feeling that Kai was so far into self-destruct mode that she might not be able to help him. What if she tried and failed?

“It’s not how I wanted to repay the debt,” Jun said. “Besides, how is it being repaid if he’s paying me to do it?”

“You want to take the job for free, that’s your business, but he’s asking you for help. You know you can’t turn him down.”