Chapter Thirteen #2
“People will have the option to wait and take the wagon, or to linger. It’s walkable to the parking lot. It’s just that this place is a little bit mazelike. But we’ll have signs up for the pads soon. I’m making them.”
“Oh?”
“In his studio,” Jax commented. “He’s got all kinds of things in there. He’s a mad genius.”
“Yeah,” Dakota said dryly. “That’s me.”
Dakota was the only one of the three brothers—and she did think of them as brothers now—that she didn’t really know much about.
He was an artist, so it kind of seemed like if any one of them was going to be a little bit more open to sharing about themselves it would be him.
Except she had the distinct feeling that wasn’t true.
That with Dakota, that openness was a bit of a put-on, and if you tried to get under his skin you would hit a brick wall.
“Are you going to join us for dinner?”
“Probably not,” he said. “I’ll probably sleep at the house.”
There was a lot that she wanted to say. To ask him. She felt bad, like maybe he was lonely, or felt excluded because the rest of them were pairs, even though Jessica and Rowdy weren’t really a pair. Not like that. They still moved in tandem as a team.
Of course, she and Jax weren’t a team, even though they were sleeping together. It was very different. She knew that. She liked him, and he liked her very much. But they weren’t Jessica and Rowdy.
When she left here he probably wouldn’t really have much to do with her.
Except… The discovery. The discovery was probably going to link her to this place in more ways than she imagined.
She had thought that they would have a fling, she would do her digging and then she would leave.
But now she felt like there was so much more at play. It complicated everything.
Absolutely everything.
They ate a lovely dinner by the campfire, and she listened to Rowdy and Jax talk about some of the better times in their childhoods. Times when they’d gotten into mutual trouble together in the group home.
And times when they had done things that were sweet.
“Well, of course Dakota liked the art teacher. She came a couple of times a week, and Jax and I were terrible at art.”
“Unbelievably bad,” said Jax.
“But still, we could see that Dakota was getting a whole lot out of it, and the last thing we wanted to do was make things harder for him with our mediocrity. And we wanted her to feel appreciated…”
“We snuck in the classroom in the middle of the night and basically made paper chain snowflakes which we hung up everywhere, to try and make it a little bit more crafty.”
“She cried,” Jax said. “She said mostly the kids didn’t show her a lot of outward appreciation.”
“So the home you lived in was also at the school you went to?”
“Yeah,” Rowdy said. “It was kind of a big facility. And it was run by CPS, so it wasn’t like one of those for-profit troubled-teen camps or anything like that.
Not saying that CPS is perfect, but to be honest with you, we didn’t have other options.
It’s a broken system, sure. But the world is broken. ”
Jax nodded slowly. “That’s the truth. Nothing is perfect. But you have to work with what you have.”
“Have you ever considered running a camp here? I mean, obviously not instead of having it be a resort, but what if you did a week of camp in the summer? And you taught the kids self-defense and art and how to ride horses.”
Jax and Rowdy exchanged glances. “I mean, it’s not a bad idea. But we’d be looking at tent camping, I suppose. Maybe here. Or we would have to build some off-grid cabins. Which we were kind of tossing up doing anyway.”
“Yeah. We could devote a couple weeks out of the year to that.”
“That’s a good idea,” Jax said. “Thank you.”
“It’s just that… You’re right. You know more about that than anybody. The good people in it, the bad things that can happen. I just think about all the things you learned to do, and how it changed your lives.”
“You know,” Jax said slowly. “We are going to need to hire employees.”
“Child labor is frowned on,” Rowdy pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I’m not suggesting child labor.
But I am thinking of kids that are aging out of the system and don’t have anywhere to go.
Because you remember what that was like.
You remember when we didn’t know what we were going to do, where we were going to go.
We had each other, though. But not everybody does. We can get them jobs and skills.”
“Well, makes me feel like I ought to get back in touch with my old social worker. See what she thinks. If we can get some information about it as a kind of job program.”
Ernestine was completely taken with the idea. “Well, we could do something like that at the museum.”
“Something like what?” he asked.
“We could hire some kids specifically who don’t have experience and train them very closely. As tour guides or cafeteria employees. We have a lot of jobs in the museum that don’t require you to have a PhD.”
“Would you really do that?”
“Yes. I told you, I’m very influential. I think that would be wonderful.
We often hire younger employees, but… I think sometimes if people don’t know something is available to them they won’t apply.
And think about yourselves, I’ve heard you talk about your experiences as foster kids, and I imagine that you all didn’t really feel like you were part of something.
Or like you could just walk into anywhere and feel like you belong. ”
“Well, that’s true,” Jax said.
“So I think this is a great idea, getting the word out, getting the word to the kids that are about to age out, letting them know that there are jobs that will take them, even if they don’t have previous experience, and they don’t have to feel like it’s closed off to them, or they aren’t… good enough for it.”
“Well, let’s get some information together then,” he said.
“That sounds great.”
Dinner was followed up with a skillet cobbler, and while Ernestine had never been a huge fan of hot fruit, it was delicious.
Maybe it was that they were camping. Maybe it was the outdoors.
Maybe it was him. Yes, it was entirely possible it was Jax.
And all the changes that he had been effecting in her life. Because he was different.
And so was she.