Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
POLLY
I’ll stay home with my Kindle and my cat. They never disappoint.
Melanie Harlow, Man Candy
I ’ve never been asked to do this, but if I was asked to find a needle in a haystack, my guess is that even if I went through it one piece of hay at a time, it would still be faster than brushing my daughter’s hair.
“Oww! You’re pulling!” Ryla yelped, scooting forward on her bed and out of my reach, as I painstakingly teased apart the world’s biggest rat’s nest in her hair. I was literally pulling it apart hair by hair. My daughter had a sensitive head. My daughter had a sensitive everything.
“This is why we need to brush it every night, sweetie,” I explained, trying to keep my voice gentle.
“I brushed it last night!” Ryla lied, tone indignant. She absolutely didn’t brush it last night. Getting her to brush her hair was akin to giving a cat a bath.
“Ryla. You know it won’t hurt as much if we brush it every night. New rule, we have to brush your hair after your nighttime snack, just like with your teeth.”
Ryla merely harrumphed.
“I guess you don’t like eating chocolate then,” I replied.
“THAT MAKES ME EVEN MADDER!”
I sighed, turning quiet as my emotionally reactive volcano erupted. I knew better than to threaten her. Even if it was in a teasing way, it never worked. She always exploded. I knew the best thing would be to let her calm down first. Or make her laugh, because there would be no brushing her hair until that tiny Tasmanian devil inside of her calmed down.
But, today, I was on a time crunch.
“Please sit back and let me brush your hair.” I tried to keep my tone soothing. “Mr. Jace will be here soon, and we need to make sure you and Max look nice when he gets here.”
“Why? He knows what I look like.” Ryla’s tone was still angry, but she did scoot back.
“It never hurts to make a good impression,” I said as I resumed the painstaking task of brushing her hair and shouted for my son.
“Max? Did you get dressed, yet? Mr. Jace will be here soon!”
I heard a muffled shout from Max’s room next door, which I took as tacit agreement.
“Mom?” Ryla piped up a few minutes later.
“Yeah?”
“Is Mr. Jace really gonna, like, live here and take care of us like Giselle did?”
“Yes, just like we talked about last night. You and Max were all for it. Remember?”
“Do I have to call him Mr. Jace?”
“We can ask him when he gets here.” I looked at my watch. Never has an hour passed so quickly. Jace would be here any minute. I’d been madly picking up around the house for the last hour, only to realize that Ryla’s hair was a snarly mess and Max had never changed out of his pajamas.
“There! Done,” I said after another minute, giving the back of her head a kiss. “Now, I need to go change.”
I bolted across the hall to my room, quickly changing out of my leggings and tank top and into more appropriate white capris. I grabbed a black T-shirt from the top of my dresser and started slipping it on when the doorbell rang. As I dashed down the stairs, I vaguely registered that the shirt was tighter than I’d remembered. The hem barely reached the top of my pants. I made a mental note to start drying our clothes on low heat.
Pausing for a brief moment, I inhaled quickly, then opened the front door to reveal Jace, sans rash. He wore a soft looking navy T-shirt and easygoing smile—a stark difference from yesterday, when he’d come to the door wearing his Kent the Clown costume. The memory made a smile play on my lips and as if reading my mind, he smiled knowingly back at me.
“Hi,” I breathed out. My breath stuttered as I watched a few curly strands of his chocolate brown hair catch in the breeze.
I wanted to run my hands through it.
Inwardly, I winced.
Involuntary Biologically Programmed Response: 1
Polly: 0
“Hiya, little miss,” Jace greeted Ryla as she skipped up next to me.
“Do I have to call you Mr. Jace?” Ryla blurted.
“Most of my friends call me Jace. Why don’t we go with that?” He turned his cute, dimpled smile back to me. “Hiya, Polly.”
Nodding, I averted my eyes from the dimples, but that meant I was now staring at his chest, which of course made me think about his abs.
Don’t think about his washboard abs under that shirt!
. . .
Ok. Don’t think about his washboard abs, again .
“Are we friends?” Ryla asked Jace from where she was standing three inches in front of him. Personal space was not really a concept she grasped yet.
“Sure, we are.” Jace placed a knee on the ground, his focus completely centered on Ryla. “We even have a secret handshake.”
Ryla’s eyes bugged out. “We do?”
Jace put his hand over his heart. “You don’t remember our secret handshake?”
“No.” Ryla shook her head vigorously.
“Here, make a fist.” Jace demonstrated. “It starts like this.” He knocked his fist over and under hers. “Then like this.” He gave her fist a little bump. “And for the ending.” Jace flared his fingers out, brought his thumb to his nose, and blew a raspberry, making Ryla jump up and down, utterly charmed.
She wasn’t the only one.
“I want to try!” Ryla mimicked the handshake back to him, then blew her own raspberry with relish.
“Great job!” Jace popped up at the same time Ryla asked, “Do you and Mommy have a secret handshake?”
Exhaling a small tittering laugh, a sound I have never made before in my entire lifetime, I waved Ryla’s question away with a fluttering shake of my hand.
“Nah, we shake like adults do.” Jace bestowed a bemused smile to Ryla, then shifted it to me as he held out his hand.
It’s funny how you can shake someone’s hand and think nothing of it; it’s just a simple handshake and then you move on with your day. But when my hand slid into Jace’s warm, strong grasp, a buzzing awareness spread through my body. I instinctively moved a step closer to him, craving more, unable to stop myself. It was like he was the edge of a cliff, something that’s risky to be near, but you can’t stop yourself from looking over the edge.
“Why are you wearing Max’s shirt?” Ryla announced loudly, breaking me out of my trance.
I dropped Jace’s hand like a hot potato, looking down at my shirt in horror. Stretched tight across my chest were the words ‘Friday Night Funkin’, my son’s favorite computer game. Both f’s were unfortunately placed over the swell of each breast, accentuating them loud and proud. I knew this shirt was too tight! It must have gotten mixed up with my clothes somehow.
“Shoot!” I exclaimed, mortified. I quickly crossed my arms over my chest, which caused the shirt to ride up over the waistband of my capris, exposing my stomach like I was a coed pledging a sorority. I pulled the shirt down, but that accentuated the f’s even more.
Doing a weird self-hug, I laughed nervously and excused myself, running up the stairs and cursing this day to hell.
I changed into my originally intended black shirt whilst busy mentally chastising myself.
Remember what you told yourself last night? You can think he’s attractive. It’s an empiric fact. A nun would revoke her chastity vows at the sight of him! But you are a mature, thirty-eight-year-old, mother of two. You will not be felled by a man with cute dimples and slabs of abs who is fourteen years your junior. Get it together!
“Where’s Max?” Jace was asking Ryla when I returned to the foyer.
“He’s in the playroom reading,” Ryla explained, grabbing Jace’s hand. “Wanna see my room?”
“Ryla!” I admonished. “You can’t ask a strange man to see your room.”
She eyed Jace, then me. “You think he’s strange?”
Twin circles of red permanently took up residence on my cheeks. “Strangers. I meant strangers. Any stranger in general, male or female. Unless I give them permission.”
“Is Jace a stranger?” Ryla cocked her head, appearing confused. As she should be, I wasn’t making sense. I’d lost any functioning brain cells somewhere between the f’s of Max’s Friday Night Funkin’ shirt.
“No,” I said weakly.
“Then why can’t I show him my room?”
I looked down to the ground in defeat. So much for getting it together.
Jace merely looked down at Ryla. “I’d love to see your room. But I think your momma wants to give me a tour first. How about we start down here and work our way up?”
Grateful to Jace for putting together an actual intelligible sentence to end this mortifying back and forth, I gestured toward the living room.
“OK.” Ryla shrugged and skipped off toward the living room. I glanced at Jace and saw that his lips were pursed together, fighting a smile.
“You scared off yet?”
His hazel eyes danced. “Not in the slightest.”
* * *
“And this is the kitchen!” Ryla was having a great time on this tour, announcing each room with jazz hands, interjecting commentary here and there. Once I spent too long explaining something so she’d flounced off to the next room yelling, “You coming this century, slowpokes?”
Jace was attentive and curious, quietly asking a few questions to me or Ryla. We started off the tour by showing him the basement theater room, then returning to the first floor, starting at the library and moving down the hall to the kitchen.
“This is where I put the meal plan and daily schedule.” I powered on the tablet on the island as Jace came to stand beside me. “This also has a calendar, important information for the kids, those kinds of things. We’ve been using it since our previous au pair, Giselle, was with us.”
“His name’s Barry!” Ryla chirped, nudging me out of the way so she could stand between us.
“Oh yeah? Why’d you name him Barry?” Jace drawled.
“Because that’s what he looked like.” Ryla’s tone was matter-of-fact, but I still winced, peeking over at Jace who was nodding as if she made sense.
“What does Barry do?”
“Mommy puts the menu in him and lists and not fun stuff like going to therapy and I have to mark it off like this.” Ryla demonstrated how each of the kids tapped the screen to check off the scheduled tasks for the day.
I took over from Ryla and went through how to navigate the app. “Here’s how you get to the home calendar and here’s where you press to get to the to-do lists and meal plan. Giselle loved to cook, so she helped plan out the meals and I’ve kept a lot of the recipes the same. If you don’t know how to make something, the recipe pops up like this. I usually plan everything out a week or two in advance. At least, that’s what I did for our previous au pair?—”
“Giselle?” Jace grinned, tone playful.
I let out a light laugh, then squinted one eye. “Have I mentioned her name before?”
Chuckling quietly, Jace glanced down at Barry again, his grin falling slightly.
I hesitated. “Do you know how to cook?”
Jace glanced up, a reassuring smile on his face. “Sure. Not a problem.”
“I can help! I have an apron, and my name is on it, see?” Ryla emerged from the pantry wearing her apron proudly showing off her name that had been stitched onto it.
“I see. Did your momma help you do that?”
“Giselle did it! She cooked with me and played with me and one day when I’m really old, like sixteen, I’m gonna go live with her in Italy for real!”
For the first months after Giselle left, I’d heard these types of comments daily. Luckily it had been happening less often now, but each time she said it, that old wound got pressed, a bruise that’s never been allowed to heal. Gratefully, Jace asked Ryla a question about cooking so I was able to collect myself. After Ryla put her apron away, I slowly began to back out of the kitchen, gesturing to them both. “I can show you your room, Jace, and then we can go upstairs.”
Jace and I were walking under the arched open doorway separating the kitchen from the living room, which was easily wide enough for two people when Ryla scurried past me and the wall, shooting off toward the living room. I sidestepped toward Jace, accidentally knocking into him. It really could have stopped there, but I jerked to the right, resulting in my feet and body turning in opposite directions. Losing my balance, I was horrified as I began to fall, but Jace caught me, bringing his arms around me and pressing me into his chest.
“Sorry!” I wheezed, inadvertently catching a lungful of his cologne.
“Don’t apologize. Are you alright?” he asked, helping me stand upright.
“I’m fine, really. Thank you.” I stepped back as soon as I gained my bearings. His hands, however, trailed down my arms to my wrists. Goosebumps that I hoped he wouldn’t notice erupted over my skin. He let go of me almost reluctantly, watching me with a wary expression, not letting me go completely until he was certain I was fine.
Which I certainly was not . Mentally, that is.
Not in any way.
Cheeks fire engine red, I spun and walked toward my parents’ old bedroom, extra aware of Jace’s presence beside me. Leah’s words from yesterday kept playing in my head, that he was hands off with single mothers, showing them no interest. Yet that was contrary to every interaction I’d ever had with him. Including today. He was easygoing, yes, but he was also flirtatious. He showed keen interest throughout the entire tour, asking thoughtful questions. He didn’t seem like someone disinterested in me or my kids. Was it all just an act?
“You might remember this room.” I half turned to Jace as we walked down the hall.
“I do, but not with regular shoes on,” Jace smirked.
We found Ryla jumping on the bed. The very old, antique, four-poster bed that would cost a fortune to repair.
“Ryla! You’re not allowed to do that! Get down!”
Ryla landed on her butt. “Giselle let me jump on the bed.”
“Not this bed. And she’s not here.” At my firm tone, Ryla’s face scrunched into a mask of fury. She slid off the bed, then stomped past me, huffing all the way down the hallway and up the stairs, until I heard the familiar faraway slam of her door.
I glanced at Jace to explain away or apologize for what happened, but I found I didn’t quite have the words. It was embarrassing. And disheartening. My own daughter preferring an au pair to her own mother. My complete inability to control her. I opted to ignore what happened, straightening my spine and fixing a too-bright smile across my face. I purposefully didn’t meet his eyes, not wanting to see his expression, which was likely full of regret at taking this job, or worse, sympathy.
“This was my parents’ room. My room’s upstairs across from the kids so I can be closer to them.”
And to avoid the hazard of repressed memories that come with this room.
Jace was quiet as I continued to point out things around the room. “I don’t know the last time this actually held a fire, so I’d probably avoid that,” I explained when we got to the fireplace. My attention snagged on the rose window treatments my mom had loved, which were still draped from floor to ceiling. I reverently stroked one of the gauzy curtains, remembering hiding behind them, giggling while my mom looked for me. I felt tears threaten suddenly; since I’d come back to live here, the memories of my mother were harder to avoid, like they’d transformed themselves into gaping black holes, their gravitational pull threatening to suck me in.
“Polly?”
I blinked to see that Jace was leaning against a bedpost, watching me warily.
I pointed to the windows, trying to play off my tears. “You can keep the windows open or closed, whatever you like.” I started to walk back toward the bed, gesturing around the room. “Feel free to put your stuff anywhere.”
“Are you ok?” I could hear the concern in Jace’s voice. Unable to stop myself, I turned to face him and took in his expression. Kindness radiated from him. And I didn’t deserve it. I was a mess of guilt and anger and sadness, bone-deep tiredness, a thousand spinning thoughts, and it was my own stupid spineless making.
“Look,” I began, crossed my arms.
“Uh-oh.” Jace smirked, his teasing in his tone tempering some of my distress.
“What?”
“Whenever someone starts a sentence with ‘ Look’ , in that way it’s never followed by anything good.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s never a, ‘Look, I’ve inherited a billion dollars but can only spend half of it so I’m giving you the other half,’ kind of conversation. It’s always a, ‘Look, your buddy’s in jail and you need to bail him out, so give us all your money,’ type of conversation.”
I don’t know what kind of magic Jace possessed to diffuse the tension in my body in seconds, but he did. The stereotype of what I thought a young, twenty-something guy would be like was completely at odds with his calm demeanor, his patient concern.
Leah was absolutely right. He really was a unicorn.
Huffing a resigned laugh, I shook my head. He didn’t deserve this. I had to give him an out that I honestly hoped he wouldn’t take. But it would be borderline irresponsible to let Jace get mixed up in all of this chaos unknowingly.
“It’s nothing like that. Before you officially start, I feel compelled to lay it all out, all the crazy complicatedness of my life, and if you want to leave, I understand. No questions asked.”
Jace shrugged, looking almost amused.
I sat down in one of the fireplace chairs. “We moved here from Chicago at the beginning of June. My husband and I divorced last fall, after which he gave up all custody of the kids.”
Jace sat down as I talked, eyes narrowing, all amusement gone from his expression.
“Giselle had been with us for almost two years at that point. She was willing to stay on another year, but her mom got sick, so she had to go back to Italy shortly after the first of this year. It broke Ryla’s heart.”
I tried not to get stuck on the mental image of Ryla clinging to Giselle when she left for the airport, her little face crumpled and tear-stained.
“Two months after Giselle left, I had to quit my job to homeschool Max. His anxiety became so severe, he’d have panic attacks leaving the apartment and needed to go to an IOP, an intensive outpatient program, to receive the care he needed. All the money I had left, that money I’d hoped would eventually go toward a downpayment for a new house, needed to be used for therapy bills or monthly expenses. The child support payments I received were nowhere near the cost of Max’s health care expenses. Yes, I could have forced the courts to make my ex-husband split the medical costs, but my ex, David, was never supportive of Max seeking help for mental health issues. I didn’t want to risk David fighting me on it, so I didn’t even ask. Don’t get me wrong, I’d gladly do it all again. Max is much better, but I fear he’ll relapse at any point. And Ryla’s gone completely off the rails with all this change.”
I’d been looking down as I spoke, so I snuck a glance at him after this last revelation. I wanted a hint at how he was taking this, wondering if he was going to bolt.
But his attention was steady. Giving me time. Giving me the courage to continue. So, I did.
“The only reason we’re here is because my father offered us this house rent-free, in exchange for having brunch with him once per week. But he keeps piling up new demands. And now that I’m working again, the spousal support payments I’m required to pay are essentially canceling out any money coming in from child support. Yesterday, just before I came in here, my father pulled me aside and told me that he was bringing in a militant-looking nanny and I panicked, thinking that if I refused, he’d kick us out and we’d be homeless. And you know what happened next.”
I gentled my tone, feeling strangely shy now that I’d laid the good, the bad, and the ugly all out for him to see. “So, knowing all that, there’re no hard feelings if this isn’t for you.”
Jace leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
“What’s next on the tour?”