Chapter 7
Cade
I’d done some hard things in my life, and succeeded at them.
Not to brag, but I have. I bought a dying company that my entire finance team and my own father told me was a terrible idea.
I bought it anyway. I put in the work. Two years later it was the most profitable acquisition in Sonnenberg Group history.
I walked into rooms full of people who wanted me to fail and I walked back out with exactly what I came for.
My whole life, I understood one thing clearly: if you want something badly enough, and you work hard enough in the right direction, you will see results. That’s not arrogance. That’s just math.
This was the first time the math was not working.
Two weeks of showing up before anyone else.
Two weeks of sweeping and mopping every floor in Happy Steps before Maple arrived, of having her coffee ready before she came through the door, of doing every job Nancy gave me without complaint, including the one that involved a glue gun and sixty-seven pompoms. Two weeks of watching the door every morning thinking: today. Today her face will be different.
Every single morning it was the same.
She came in. She said thank you for the coffee and the clean floors. And then she went into the studio and the door closed and that was the end of Maple’s interaction with Cade for the day.
I wasn’t exactly working with a lot here.
The kids, at least, were coming around.
Marcus had been the first real breakthrough.
I’d found him one afternoon sitting against the wall watching the others dance, his arms crossed, doing the full statue impression.
I’d been trying to fix a loose bolt on the studio door that had been driving Nancy insane for a week, and I went over to him.
“You’re good with your hands?” I asked.
He looked up. “What?”
I held out the screwdriver. “This bolt. I can’t get the angle right.”
He stared at the screwdriver for a second like it might be a trick.
Then he took it. He went at the bolt with focused energy.
When the bolt was screwed within forty seconds, he looked at me and smiled.
He had definitely done it before and he understood tools in the way some kids understood math or music.
“You’re good,” I said. I meant it.
He shrugged. But he didn’t walk away.
I asked Maple the next day if Marcus and I could work on the large oak tree prop together — the centerpiece of the performance.
The tree required various mechanical branches that would open and close and that would require a pulley strong enough to lift Olivia, the twelve year old “Oak Tree Fairy” up through the branches.
It was a real engineering problem and I needed a real partner.
Maple had looked at Marcus, who was trying very hard to look like he didn’t care either way.
She shrugged . I took it as a yes. Marcus and I had been working on the pulley system every day since.
He was quiet, almost always. I tried conversations and mostly got single-word answers, but he showed up every day and he worked with total concentration, and I had learned that some people communicated better with their hands than their words and Marcus was one of them.
One evening, a man from the foster home came to pick up the kids. He spotted me across the room and said something to Maple, and Maple walked him over.
“This is David,” Maple said. “He’s one of the coordinators at Shineforth House.” She looked at me. “David, this is Cade, our volunteer.”
David shook my hand. “I actually wanted to meet you.” He had an easy manner about himself I instantly got drawn to. “Marcus talks about you. Like, a lot.”
I blinked. “He does?”
“Yeah.” David laughed. “Which is saying something because Marcus does not talk a lot. But lately he’s been talking. We had a careers session last week.” He paused. “He said he wants to be like you when he grows up.”
I didn’t say anything.
There was a lump in my throat that had arrived without warning and was not moving. I was thirty-nine years old and standing in a dance studio and I was not going to be undone by this information in front of a foster home coordinator and also in front of Maple.
I swallowed. Hard.
“That’s—“ I stopped. Tried again. “That’s really good to hear.”
I looked up. Maple was watching me. Her face was completely still. No warmth, no softening. She held my gaze for exactly one second and then looked away.
I swallowed the lump and looked back at David.
“He’s a great kid,” I said. “Really great.”
Apart from my personal breakthrough with Marcus, nothing else had moved. Maple still looked at me like she didn’t care if I even existed, which was fair, considering what I had done.
Two weeks, and I still felt like I was walking on a treadmill, walking as fast as I could and staying in exactly the same place. But I was not getting off the belt. I didn’t care how long it took. I wasn’t backing down.
Right now, Marcus and I were in the back room putting final touches on the oak tree.
It was, genuinely, the most impressive prop I had ever seen come together.
Marcus had opinions about the branch angles and the leaf density and the structural integrity of the pulley mechanism that were several years ahead of his age.
I had learned to stop arguing with him about the engineering and just do what he said.
Nancy was at the table next to us, hot-gluing individual paper leaves onto a garland.
“Hand me the copper wire,” Marcus said.
I handed him the copper wire.
“No, the thin one.”
I handed him the thin one.
“That’s the medium one.”
“Marcus, these are the same width—“
“They are not the same width.”
I held them up next to each other. He was right. They were not the same width.
Nancy laughed.
The back room door opened and Maple came in. She had her rehearsal clipboard in her hand, and an expression on her face that meant something had gone wrong.
“Olivia’s sick,” she said. She said it to Nancy but she was looking at the clipboard. “Her foster family just called. She has strep. She won’t be able to perform.”
Olivia was supposed to be the oak tree fairy. She was supposed to stand in front of the tree we had spent three weeks building, be lifted by the pulley Marcus and I had engineered, and be the centerpiece of the entire second act. The Fall Festival was six weeks away.
Nancy put down the glue gun. “Oh no.”
Maple pressed her mouth together. I watched her think.
I watched her go through the options and find none of them good and try not to show on her face how stressed she was, because she was always protecting other people from her stress, I had seen her do it around me a dozen times in the three months I had known her.
“I can do it,” I said.
Three heads turned.
Nancy. Marcus. Maple.
A pause of about two seconds.
Then two of them started laughing. Not polite laughter. Actual, helpless, full-body laughter. Marcus made a sound I had not heard from him before. Nancy put her head down on the table. Maple stayed still with an amused look on her face.
“Are you sure?” Maple asked.
“What’s not to be sure of?” I said. “It’s a fairy. I can do a fairy. How hard is a fairy?”
“You haven’t seen the costume,” Nancy said. She still had tears from laughing.
“How bad can a fairy costume be?”
Turns out?
Pretty bad.
***