Chapter 1 #2
“I know. I love her a lot, too.” He smiled bigger and so did I.
JuJu and I hadn’t always gotten along, but I also loved her and I wanted all of my siblings to be happy.
Right now things seemed to be going well for them, even Brenna.
She was the sister closest to me in age, and she had always hated me.
I dropped Beckett back at his office in downtown Detroit and then I had an important decision to make.
Would I have falafel for lunch, or would a PB and J do it for me?
I decided that a homemade sandwich was for the best so I went home—to my childhood home, I meant, and not to where I was currently living.
My mom was there but she was busy giving a haircut to her new lodger Dion because he had an interview for a better job.
She mostly ignored me, but she did have a few things to say about him.
“This is the second time they’re talking to him about the position,” my mom told me proudly, and patted his shoulder. He beamed.
“I have a good feeling about it,” he said. “There are a lot of openings at this company, Grace. You should take a look.”
“I already have a job,” I told them.
“What? You do?” she asked, and I nodded. She seemed to register what I was wearing. “Something in the medical field?” she suggested, but I said no.
“If that shirt isn’t required, you shouldn’t wear it,” Dion advised. “You’re very fair and that shade of blue washes you out.” He looked at me more closely. “Are you wearing pants?”
I checked too, and I was. They were just hard to see because they were actually cutoffs that belonged to my oldest sister Nicola.
She was short (the shortest out of all of us Currans) and I was tall (the second tallest sister after JuJu).
The shorts ended very, very high on my thighs and the scrub top was very, very huge, so they were camouflaged.
Anyway, I didn’t really care about his fashion tips, so I ignored him and focused on my lunch.
Then Dion noticed how late it was getting and said he had to leave to be on time for his interview, so my mom quickly shaped his sideburns. I also left before I had to say anything more about my job. It was a little hard to explain.
I had a few other things to accomplish that day.
First, I went over to my friend Quintus Hortensius’ house because I knew that he never threw away any of his old stuff, and then I did have to go to work for a while.
It was all right but I wasn’t sure how long I would keep doing it.
I’d had lots of different jobs and in comparison to being a landscaper or painting water towers, it wasn’t very physically demanding.
I wasn’t sure when it had started to bother me so much mentally.
After I was done with that, it seemed to have gotten very dark and I realized that my next stop might be closed.
I hurried over to the same building where I’d been with Beckett earlier, and the tall parking structure was almost empty.
The tenth floor of offices was very quiet, too, just me and a woman pushing a janitor’s cart.
Luckily, the door I needed was still unlocked and I let myself in.
I was in the middle of things when the other door opened, the one that led to the back where the patients were seen. The same doctor from this morning walked out and he froze when he saw me.
“Please don’t tell me that your arm is stuck in the fish tank again,” he immediately stated.
“No,” I said, and showed him both free hands.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m replacing the lid,” I explained. “Otherwise, someone else might get trapped in your filter.”
“I can’t imagine that anyone else, ever, will put her hand into our fish tank.”
“Someone might,” I answered. “I would have done the same thing.”
“In fact, you did do the same thing. You were stuck in there,” he said, but I shook my head.
“I mean the same thing of losing the ring and then how she solved the problem,” I explained.
“What ring? What problem?”
“The problem of losing it,” I said patiently.
“If that happened again and someone needed to get a ring out, then it would be very important to find the tallest person who had the longest arms. Also, that person should have a knowledge of fish to recognize danger, like if there was a barracuda to avoid. It would be good to pick someone with those qualities, just like the little girl in your waiting room did today.” I thought for a moment.
“It would be hard to know about a person’s fish knowledge just by looking at them. ”
Dr. Winter stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I want you to leave. Right now.”
“Ok,” I agreed. “I’ll just put this here, and you can replace it yourself.” I set the new lid on the chair, the same one where I’d sat to wait for my brother-in-law.
For the first time, he seemed to notice what I’d been carrying. “You brought a different top for the aquarium because you broke ours?”
“No, I didn’t break it. It was already broken and I’m not sure how you were cleaning the tank,” I said. “I got stuck because it wouldn’t open.”
“I see.” He paused. “Kind of. Anyway, it’s time to go.” He waved his hands toward the door, shooing me out.
“Ok,” I agreed again. “You could just take a look tomorrow, because I think you have an issue with ammonia. See how the fish are acting so tired?”
He came closer. “They do seem lethargic. That’s due to ammonia?”
“Maybe. I learned about aquariums because I worked for a while in an animal shelter, and we were one of the few that took fish.” The temperature had felt fine when I’d been stuck in theirs, so that wasn’t the issue.
“Maybe no one has been testing or changing the water, since the top was broken,” I suggested.
As far as I remembered, I wasn’t doing anything the next day and I decided that I could come by and try to help.
“Yes, tomorrow would work to do that,” I said out loud. “Ok, bye.”
I left, but before the door could close behind me, the doctor had joined me in the hallway.
The lady with the cart was gone and the overhead lights had dimmed to some kind of nighttime setting so it felt a little like being in the twilight zone underground.
I had done guided tours of a cave when I was at my second college in Kentucky.
I hadn’t learned much at that school but below Earth’s surface, I’d found a whole other world.
“I should walk out with you,” he said.
“Why?”
“For safety,” Dr. Winter answered. “Have you noticed that there’s no one around?”
“Oh, sure. Yes, you’re safe with me,” I told him. “I used to take martial arts and out of all my siblings, I fight the meanest. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“I meant…ok, let’s go.” First he locked the office door and then we went down the murky hall toward the elevator bank. When we got there, he looked at me again. “If you didn’t break the aquarium, why did you bother to bring a part to fix it?”
“I told you. I didn’t want anyone else to get stuck in there,” I reminded him.
“Why were you stuck in there?”
“I thought I explained it,” I said as we got onto the elevator. “I was the tallest, so it made the most sense. Also, my knowledge of fish—”
“Were you trying to get something?”
“Yes,” I said. “The ring.”
“What ring?”
The elevator slowly descended. “In your waiting room, a little girl and I were talking and she whispered that she needed help. She had stood on one of your chairs to look at the aquarium and she took off her special ring with the blue stone so that she could show it to the fish. It’s something I would have done, too.
” Really, the two of us had a lot in common.
“The nurse told her to get down but unfortunately, before she did, she dropped it.”
“A child lost a ring with a blue stone. She dropped it through the one small area that was open and it fell into the blue pebbles. Are you serious?”
I nodded. “The fish weren’t bothered by it,” I assured him. “They don’t appreciate the beauty of jewelry and only pay attention if it’s shiny and they want to attack. But I think I mentioned that I checked for barracuda before I put my arm into your tank.”
“No, we don’t have barracuda. Just so I can fully understand, you reached in there to try to get a ring back for a little girl.”
“Yes,” I answered, pleased that he finally got it. “They had brought her uncle for his appointment with you and he’s very sick, and her mom was already upset about everything. The girl didn’t want to bother them so she told me about it instead.”
“I see.” He nodded slightly. “I guess that makes more sense than what my nurse said, which was that you were trying to steal the fish.”
“That would be a really bad way to go about it. If I wanted to steal your fish, you better believe that I would have come at night and I would have been prepared with my own strainer and bucket. That bucket would have been filled with water that I had tested, and I guess I might have brought a glass cutter, too.”
“I see,” he repeated, a lot more slowly. “Were you actually planning to take them?”
“No, I’m just explaining how I would prepare for an aquatic heist. I came here now to help you, not hurt you by stealing.
But your fish are doing so poorly that it might be more like a rescue, if someone did happen to steal them.
That person should wear a mask to disguise herself.
” I pointed at the camera in the corner of the elevator. “And the bucket will need a lid.”
“I’ll look into the ammonia issue in the morning.” He briefly pressed his hand against the side of his face, where his jaws hinged, and winced.
“You’ll need water testing strips,” I mentioned.
“I’ll get those.”
“I already have them.” I showed him the cannister that I had put in my purse before I came here. “I could have done it tonight, but then you threw me out.”
“Because I thought…” He hesitated. “I don’t know what I thought you were doing, but it wasn’t giving me free aquarium parts.”