Page 7 of Broken SEAL'S Secret Baby
Kate. James’ brat of a little sister. She’d blown up at me for making what she thought was a slighting remark about one of the kids at her high school. She’d read me the riot act for not closing gates, and she thought it was funny when I’d been upset that she spilled chocolate milk on my school uniform shirt.
Cece loves her, but it is about all I can do to be in the same room with her.
“Oh?” I say, letting the end of the syllable curl up, inviting more. Who knew what the young woman was teaching the kids.
Cece nods.
“Yep. The moon is made out of green cheese,” she states authoritatively. “After the picture book, we sang a song about a man who lives in the moon.”
She stands up, takes a deep breath and sings in an off-key treble, “There is a man lives inna moon, inna moon, inna moon, an’ his name is Aiken Drum.”
On a day when I thought I would never smile again, my girl brought me joy. Even though it makes me question Kate’s tutelage even more, because…green cheese? Really? I turn away to hide my smile. I won’t have to start planning her college career just quite yet.
“Daddy has some work to do,” I say. “Can you be extra, extra quiet like the mice on the moon?”
“The mice were kind of noisy,” Cece tells me. “But I can be extra, extra quiet.”
She settles down to coloring her rocket ship. I put my headphones on so I can listen to my voice mail and take notes.
Sherry puts her head in the door. “I gotta go, Mr. Emory.Mom and Dad want me home by dinner. Dad’s picking me up ’cause he doesn’t want me to take the bus or get an Uber.”
I pause the message on my answering service. “All right, Sherry. See you tomorrow?”
She frowns. “I hope so. Things are getting awfully weird.”
“Be safe,” I say. “Tell your dad hello, and don’t forget your mask.”
I go back to listening to the message on the phone. That is when I realized that I could not bring myself to talk about people dying from this strange new disease with Cece in the room. The topics are too sensitive to email, and I will not send my little girl out into the big apartment to watch television by herself.
I am going to need some help. Maybe Manuela could come in early tomorrow? I’ll send her a text message.
Chapter three
Kate
I lay back in the faux leather front passenger seat of my brother’s company car. It is compact and fuel efficient, with a seat heater that feels good after the cold, damp winds at the cemetery.
It is a six-hour trip from the Agri-Oil high-rise in the City. I might as well make progress on my term paper for child psychology. It isn’t easy researching and taking notes on my phone, but it was better than wasting all that time. I plug my phone into the dash power supply and get to work.
“Are you on the Internet again?” James asks. “Our phone bill is going to be over the moon if you keep using data like that.”
“I’ve got a paper due at the end of March,” I reply. “Classes have gone online, they’ve not closed down. I still need to do the work.”
“I don’t see why you need college classes to take care of little kids,” James gripes. “You’ve been babysitting since you were twelve.”
“For which I took classes,” I point out with exaggeratedpatience. “I was licensed to look after kids. Babysitting isn’t like mowing lawns.”
It was a low jibe, and I knew it. When he was mowing lawns, he was taking classes from the local Master Gardeners Club. James had studied landscaping and architecture, and had earned a PhD. before he was hired to do inspections and purchasing for Agri-Oil.
It wasn’t his fault that the economy had taken a nose-dive about the time he graduated. But sometimes he just makes me want to scream.
“Can’t you just drop your classes for now and sign up again later?” he whines at me. When James is on a roll, he is nothing if not persistent.
“At nearly $500 a credit hour? I’ve already paid for this semester, Jamie, and it’s too late to drop without penalty. Do you have a spare $6000 to pay for me to sign back up?”
Silence meets my inquiry, and I go back to reading about Montessori and taking notes.
More than an hour later, James asks, “Hey, Kate?”
