“Fine. Hi, Daddy.”
“Hey, pumpkin. From the look on your mother’s face, I’d say this is interesting news.”
“You might see more of me.”
“That’s great,” he said.
Lucy sipped her drink. Maybe they’d catch a glimpse of Olivia’s mystery date.
“I’m only going to work part-time this summer so I can start working toward my masters.”
Charlie looked Lucy’s way. She nodded. “Sounds good to us, Olivia. We can’t help financially, but . . .”
“No. I know that. I hoped you wouldn’t mind if I crash at home more often, since I can save money if I sublet my apartment for the summer?” She ended with a vocal question mark.
Lucy held the phone aloft while sliding the straw she’d one-handedly unsheathed into her lemonade. “We’d love seeing you more often.”
“I’d be in and out. It depends on where I can find part-time work that pays decent.”
The eternal dilemma.
“I know God’s got this,” Olivia said.
Yes. That’s what Lucy should have said. God’s got this.
“But right now, I feel kind of lost.”
Know the feeling.
“Three years out of college, and I’m still eating Ramen noodles for too many meals. But I have to go for it.”
“We’re always here for you,” Lucy said. “No matter what’s going on.”
Olivia’s sigh traveled through the phone and filled the car. “I know it will cost me money I don’t exactly have right now.”
“Join the club,” Charlie said. “Just don’t take the job your mother needs.”
I do?
“Mom, you’re getting a job?”
I am?
“Hey,” Charlie said, his voice brighter than ever, stingingly bright, “maybe you two can find something at the same place.” He leaned closer to the phone and added, “Your mom isn’t signing on to my worm business, I guess.”
“You’re not serious, Daddy. You’re going through with that?”
Finally. Reinforcements.
“Without a partner? Dad, come on. That could be a lot of effort. And you’ve never run a business.”
Charlie’s “I thought I had a partner” barely registered as audible.
Chapter 8
8
They talked more details with their daughter until Charlie dropped Lucy where they’d left Lucy’s defaced Malibu. She wondered if the term vermiculture originated in the similarities between vermin and worms, or if the “verm-” part was a Sergeant Schultz pronunciation of worm. Sergeant Schultz. Hogan’s Heroes. TVLand. The places her mind drifted these days . . .
It wasn’t until she’d strapped herself into her battered car that she realized Olivia’s temporary homecoming would make what they called the guest room off-limits for worm breeding. Things were looking up.
When they got home, Lucy immediately aimed for the guest room. What could stay? What would have to relocate to make room for their grown daughter and her accumulation of things? When she’d stayed only a night here and there, the guest room had sufficed the way it was, with just a sliver of space in the closet. Lucy started a mental list.
“So . . .” Charlie entered the room behind her.
“Doesn’t seem that long ago we converted this room from her college-break hovel to this much tidier version of a bedroom.”
“So . . .”
“What is it?”
Charlie ran his hand along the edge of the chest-high set of drawers. “I made breakfast.”
The grapefruit half she hadn’t eaten. “Yes?”
“It’s lunch time.”
She wasn’t hungry. He was. A good wife would—would what?
Her mother would have apologized for not realizing it was past noon, dropped everything, and raced through getting the breadwinner something to eat. Ania would have said, “I’ll take a grilled ham and cheese. Thanks.” Scratch that. A grilled eggplant and roasted red pepper. Lucy’s sister—twice divorced—would have planted her hands on her hips and stared him down until he said, “I’ll . . . I’ll just go make myself something.” To which her sister would have replied, “You do that,” and muttered merciless adjectives under her breath. Olivia might say, without missing a beat, “Oh, you’re right. Time flies. I’m not hungry yet, and I’d like to keep working here. If you have trouble finding something in the kitchen, let me know.”
Lucy had been all of the above at various stages of their marriage and to varying degrees. She only planted her hands on her hips and gave the stare-down in her mind, never externally. And she wasn’t that fond of eggplant.
The answer she most admired? Olivia’s.
“I’ll get you something in a minute, Charlie.”
An answer like that was supposed to make her feel good about doing the selfless thing, like Jesus taught. Why did it make her feel as if she’d missed His larger point?
She tried singing while she made tuna salad. After the first few notes of “who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” she abandoned the musical soundtrack for lunch prep. Some of her students’ influences weren’t worth archiving.
“Want to eat on the deck?” Charlie asked when she called him away from the noon news. “Beautiful day out there.”
During summer school, in an ordinary summer, she would have grabbed a nectarine and a bag of microwave popcorn for lunch between her packed schedule of students’ individual lessons or the group lessons for beginning musicians. In nineteen years, she hadn’t yet, but had intended to start taking the stairs or walking the track outside the school for exercise. This was the summer, she’d told herself. Best laid plans.
She looked at the dome of tuna salad on her plate surrounded by a halo of barbecue-flavored potato chips. She replaced one chip with a baby carrot. Good enough for today. “The deck. Sure. That sounds great.”
It did. And it was. Enough of a breeze to keep the bugs away. Everywhere she looked, something was blooming, chirping, or flying. Under the lawn a few inches, grassroots earthworms created fertilizer for the green blades that fought dandelions for dominance.
Charlie opened the tabletop patio umbrella to shade the two of them from the high sun the maple tree failed to block. Lucy sank into her favorite glider patio chair and pulled up to the table.
Charlie prayed briefly over their meal, with an extra line thrown in for Olivia. Lucy wondered if Olivia had called her brother. She and Sam had become such good friends in adulthood. Who would have thought? They’d tolerated each other as toddlers two years apart. They’d loathed each other in high school, tormenting each other both intentionally and unintentionally. How had they moved from tolerating and tormenting, she wondered—watching Charlie smear tuna salad onto a potato chip—to admiration and respect?
They’d grown up.
Now, that was a dangerous thought.
“This is my definition of perfect,” Charlie said, leaning back in his matching patio glider rocker, then leaning forward to grab a napkin to catch the dollop of tuna that landed at breastbone level.
“Perfect?