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O
ur house on Highcliffe Court doesn’t sit square on the lot. I mean, this entire neighborhood was built on a hillside with one main road winding to the top, and shooting off to both sides are stubby cul-de-sacs where each house is placed according to the slope. Our house is on a pie-shaped lot with the hill rising straight up in the back, so the house is turned away from the street a bit. Which sometimes makes people confused. Often they come to our side door thinking it’s the front. It drives Mom nuts because the den is right there, so she might be inside folding laundry and all of a sudden the door beside her starts banging.

Today it works well for me. Fully aware that Mom is a bit suspicious of Joules, I decide that getting Dad onside first might increase my chances of getting hired as the Mother’s Helper. Besides that, I miss him. I want to see him.

It’s just after six o’clock, Thursday night. With any luck, Dad will be taking command of the weather in the den while Mom is in the front of the house fussing with dinner.

I knock on the side door and almost instantly it flies open. Dad stands there, all red-headed and buzz cut, his
droopy face all friendly and his feet all slippered. Behind him I can hear the music from The Weather Show. It’s the song they play every ten minutes when they show the local weather in stages of what’s happening right now, what’ll be happening the rest of the day, then the next three days, the next week and the next two weeks. Usually all you see is a little illustration of the sun. Sometimes Dad gets lucky and there’s a teensy drawing of a cloud beside the sun. But that’s mostly it.

He rubs the top of his head with his palm and smiles. “Well there. What can I do ya for?”

I can’t resist. It’ll make him so happy. “Umm, I was wondering if you have the time. The exact time.”

You can’t believe how high his eyebrows shoot up. The man is thrilled. He pushes up his sleeve and consults his watch, pushing a few buttons. “I surely do.” After a squint, he announces, “It is six-oh-eight, my dear. Universal Time.”

“Oh, thanks. I’m actually here about the Mother’s Helper position. Is it filled yet?”

This makes him even happier. He opens the door wide and motions for me to come in. “It most certainly is not. The boss isn’t home just yet but you can leave a bit of information for her. She’ll be thrilled that you stopped by.”

I follow him into the den and take a deep breath, trying to drink my life in. If I was hoping to detect a smell, I’m disappointed. It hasn’t been long enough. My life still smells like nothing.

He pulls out a chair at the folding card table set up by the far wall and he lowers the volume of The Weather Show without turning it off. “I’m Gary Birch. And you are?”

“Joules Adams.”

“Good, good.” He sneaks a peek at the TV and frowns, then looks back at me. “So you’re looking for a part-time job, are you, Joules?”

“Yes. Working with children.”

He laughs. “Well, you came to the right place for that. You have any experience babysitting? Do you have your certificate?”

I nod. “Both, yes. I’ve watched kids of all ages.”

“You live nearby?”

“Just over on Skyline.”

He whistles like he’s impressed. “Some gorgeous properties up on that hillside. You have a good view from your place?”

“Pretty nice. But I think I like your house better.”

This thrills him right down to the sheepskin slippers. “Well, now, isn’t that interesting. You see straight through to the next town from your place?”

I shrug. I can see him processing this: the possibilities of seeing straight across to another county to keep track of not only his own pressure system but his neighbors’.

“Well, I think the big boss is going to like you just fine, Joules. I might even put in a good word for you.” He winks. “We have a daughter about your age. Andrea. You see her around school?”

“Um …”

The sound of grocery bags comes from the kitchen. About a second later, Mom’s head pops around the corner. “Who are you talking—?” Her face falls when she sees me. “Oh. Hello.”

“Honey, we have here our very first applicant for the
position of Mother’s Helper. All chock-full of experience and training and what have you. I’m sold on Joules. What do you say? Should we give her a try?”

Silently, I beg. Silently, I plead. It’s the only way I know—until I figure things out—to get back into this house, at least part-time. I can help with Bray—whose crush on Joules Adams might finally come in handy. He might actually listen to what she has to say about his friends. I can listen to my dad’s slippers padding around the back room. I can see the way the Ks settle right down after their bath because they know Mom is going to sing them “Rock-a-bye, Baby.”

I can try to figure out if they really do know who I am.

Mom has to say yes. She has to.

I throw him a big smile. “I actually love working with kids. I can sterilize bottles, change diapers, wash sheets, watch them at the playground. Anything at all. Help with dinner.”

Dad winks at Mom like hiring me is in the bag. “Tell me, Miss Joules, what do you charge?”

“Anything. I don’t even care. You don’t even have to pay me at all. I just love kids.”

He laughs. “Oh, don’t you worry. If you do the work, you reap the rewards. I think we agreed on seven dollars an hour, didn’t we, hon?”

Mom smiles politely. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to hire a friend of Andrea’s.”

Dad leans back and looks at me as if I’ve turned into a monkey. “You’re friends with our Andrea?”

“Well, yes, I—”

Mom says, “Joules was here yesterday morning, when she and Andrea went to the bridge.” She looks at me, analyzes me.

I smile. “I know it looked weird. It was this stupid kid thing. We wanted to make a wish come true. Idiotic. It was my idea, not hers. A bad choice. And I’m sorry if I trampled your flowers.”

Mom seems almost willing to forgive and see me in a different light. Not quite, but almost.

“We all have to make choices,” I add, hoping to hit her in her soft spot. “And I’m trying to make some good ones for once. Trying to make sure I don’t repeat the poor choices of my past. It’s what life is about, right?”

It’s worked. I can tell by the way Mom has tilted her body toward me. She leans against the door frame. “And you say you have training?”

I nod yes at the same time Joules’s cellphone rings loudly from her purse. I ignore it. “I do. And the instructor said I was the best …”

Dad points toward the phone, which is still ringing. “Go ahead and get that.”

“No, it’s okay. My instructor said I—”

Mom said, “You’d better get your phone. It could be important. It could be your parents.”

With Joules’s phone, it could be anyone—Shane, even. I really don’t want to answer it right here, right now, when I’m on the verge of getting hired back into my life. Then again, if I don’t, Mom will take it that I don’t care about my parents and she’ll think I’m not family oriented. I have no choice. Praying the call is a wrong number, I flip open the phone. “Hello?”

The connection is so loud I have to hold the phone away from my ear. Nigel’s voice says, “That you, missie?” When I say loud, I mean loud. Mom and Dad can hear him for sure. I wish Dad would up the volume on the TV or someone would have a coughing fit or something. Anything to drown out Nigel.

“Jujube—you there?”

“Yes, Nigel. I’m here.”

“Now what did we say about calling me names that make me sound like a shallow rock star?”

Mom and Dad look at each other and smile.

“Dad, I’m kind of busy right now.” Why does Joules have the stupid volume set so high? I scramble to find a way to turn it down.

“Listen, pumpkin,” Nigel’s voice booms through the back room. It’s as if he’s here with us, shouting as loud as he can. Mom and Dad start fussing with things on the table to make like they’re not listening, but they hear him. Boy, do they hear him. Dad even starts to joke around and cover his ears.

“Bit of a glitch,” Nigel shouts. “It’s all a matter of red tape and legal garbage, ridiculous really. You’d think these wankers would spend their time arresting actual criminals, but baby, I need to let you know what’s going on. I’m in jail.”

I
didn’t get the job.

Mom didn’t come right out and say it but it was pretty clear from the way her mouth crushed itself into the shape of a flattened bicycle tire. If there is anyone, anywhere, Mom doesn’t approve of it’s a parent who “abuses their God-given privilege to care for a child.” And I’m guessing Mom thinks it’s pretty hard to care for a child from the inside of a prison cell.

One year this teeny tiny newborn baby girl came to us. Lee-Ann, her mother called her, if you could call this woman a mother. I don’t often see them, the parents of the foster kids. It’s usually the lady in the flowered pants who drops off and picks up. But after Lee-Ann came—a long time later, three months or maybe four—I started to see this beat-up old car sitting outside the house. In it was a nervous lady, kind of young, really skinny with scraggly yellow hair and the kind of teeth that push out your lower lip. She wore all this blue glop on her slitty eyes and smoked nonstop.

I’d see her on my way home from school, not every day or anything but often enough. She never made like she was watching our house. When I walked past she got busy lighting another cigarette or examining her nails or
digging through her glove compartment. But come on, there are only four houses on our cul-de-sac and only one of them houses the abused offspring of lousy parents. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who she was, what she was up to. She wanted to catch a glimpse of her baby. When I got real close she’d always look up as if she was surprised to see someone and flash me a smile with these scary chipped teeth.

Lee-Ann was a really well-behaved baby as far as babies go. Slept through the night, never fussed, loved bath time. The weird thing about her was that she never cried. I didn’t even think that was possible for a baby—to never cry, not even once. Even when Mom and I took her to the doctor for shots, the doctor poked her with the needle and nothing. Lee-Ann just looked at him and blinked.

I thought she was some kind of super-baby, but one time late at night I got up to get a drink of water from the kitchen and overheard Mom and Dad talking in the back room. They were talking about Lee-Ann’s mother and why Lee-Ann never cried. The woman in the car, apparently, used to go out and leave Lee-Ann all alone. Sometimes for hours. So here was this baby who at first probably cried and cried in the hope that her mother would respond, but eventually she just gave up. She learned crying doesn’t get you much in life and stopped bothering. The night the flowered pants lady took her into foster care, the mother had left the house in the evening and not come home until six the next morning. By that time her neighbors had figured out what was happening. The police had broken into the place, given Lee-Ann
to the Child Services people and were waiting for the mother at the kitchen table.

You should have heard Mom go on about that mother. Called her a nasty piece of business who should get sterilized already. Mom said that if she ran the show she’d ensure certain people, once they’d proven themselves to be abusive or neglectful to a child, be sterilized by law.

Her forgiving attitude toward wayward fosters does not extend to lousy parents.

But here’s the strange thing. It made me feel so sad for the lady with the chipped teeth. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d go hunting through the glove box, then look up and flash me that broken smile. Don’t get me wrong, I get why Mom was upset. But there was something so childlike about that smile. As if she wasn’t much older than Lee-Ann herself or something.

Anyway. There’s no way Mom will bring me into the house to care for the children now. I’ve been tainted by Nigel’s arrest.

I walk back to Skyline Drive more slowly than I’ve ever walked in my life. There’s no reason to hurry. I’m not all that excited to find out what, exactly, Nigel did to land himself in jail—and why did he have to go and do something stupid anyway? Here’s the world thinking he has it so good: big rock star guy, totally generous, his song just goes platinum. But the truth is he doesn’t. How could he—he lives with a daughter who couldn’t care less about any of it.

The house is dark when I arrive. No surprise, I guess. Nigel is, as they say, detained. I dig through Joules’s purse for keys and come up empty. Great. Just freaking great.
I walk around the house, stepping over the bushes, and catch the first bit of luck I’ve had in days. The bedroom window isn’t locked. I climb inside, fall into Joules’s bed and go to sleep.

When I wake Friday morning the house is full of people. I can hear loud voices coming from the kitchen, along with the sounds of cupboard doors slamming and pots and pans clashing. Nigel must be home.

I forgot to close the bedroom window last night and the wind blowing in is cool. I shower, floss Joules’s precious teeth like she begged me to and pull on a thick cotton sweater and jeans. Maybe I feel like I’m going into battle or something, because I reach for a pair of tough-looking motorcycle boots and slip my feet into them. With my hair still damp, I head into the kitchen.

I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe another party, but the atmosphere in the kitchen is serious. Newspapers are spread out across the island where Nigel sits looking terrible in a sweatshirt and jeans. Bare feet with hairy toes. When he sees me, he half smiles. “Hey there, kitten. I hope we didn’t wake you.”

About six or seven men and women drip from counters and stools, or lean against the table. Some are on cellphones, one guy is rooting through the fridge, two women are madly writing on pads of paper.

“What’s going on?” I say.

“You know Eddie. Clara, Sue, Aidan and the Hendridge boys. Old Nige’s Dream Team.” He motioned toward each
as he said their names. “We’re building me a new image.”

“How did you get out so fast?”

I ask. “Bailed myself out.”

The short, muscled guy Nigel introduced as Eddie, in a tight black T and gelled hair, picks up one of the papers and raises his eyebrows at Nigel. When Nige nods, Eddie tosses it onto the island close to me. There, on the front page, is a huge picture of Nigel. A mug shot in which his eyes are only half open, his cheeks are sunken in, and his hair is a mess. The headline reads “Nigel Adams Arrested for DUI.”

Driving under the influence. Drinking and driving—of course. He did it the other night, when I was with him.

“We’re doing a bit of damage control here,” Eddie says. He nods toward the two women with the notepads. “Nothing Nige’s brilliant publicists can’t handle.”

A tray of coffees appears atop the newspapers and everyone reaches for one. There seems to be one for me left over so I take it and sip. Sure enough, it’s spiked. I set it down again, once again disappointed that Nigel is willing to go to such lengths to make his daughter love him.

“I’m screwed,” Nigel says into his coffee cup. “Mel Gibson screwed. Look at that photo. It’ll be seared into people’s minds forever.”

An older guy with long hair and ripped jeans laughs. “You ain’t pretty, dude.”

“Hey,” says Nige. “It was the middle of the night.”

“It was barely six o’clock. In the evening.”

“What happened, exactly?” I ask. “Were you drinking champagne again to celebrate or what?”

Nigel waves my question away. “I wasn’t doing anything
that would hurt anybody. I’d had a few sips over a late lunch and got pulled over on the freeway. Not because I was too wasted to drive. I was fine. I’d just dropped my CD and was fishing around for it on the floor. Damned cops just needed a celebrity to make an example of, that’s all.”

Eddie and the other guys start shaking their heads in anger, completely offended on Nigel’s behalf.

“How many drinks had you had?” I ask. “Did the police have you blow into the breathalyzer?”

“Those things are never accurate,” Eddie says. “The cops set them high so they can meet their arrest quota for the month. It’s all a big money-grab.”

A tall blonde with a headpiece in her ear—Sue, I believe, one of the publicists—brings her notes over from the table. She’s very competent-looking, dressed sharp with her hair pulled back in an efficient ponytail. “Clara and I have got it all worked out,” she says after sipping her coffee. “America loves a comeback.” She looks at Nigel, hunched over a piece of toast, his hair pointed every which way, his face more wrinkled than ever. “Celebrity makes a bad choice. Celebrity repents, shows himself to be serious by checking himself into rehab and comes out humble and full of remorse but determined to keep himself on the straight and narrow in the future. It happens all the time.”

Nigel thinks about this. “Rehab?” He laughs. “No way. Seriously, I messed up but I don’t need rehab.”

“I agree,” Sue says. “You won’t go to rehab. But the world will think you’ve gone to rehab. There are many, many facilities in many, many countries. All we need is
a good photo of you hugging your daughter goodbye as you get on a plane. Believe me, we’ll make it look so real the pilot himself will be weeping.”

“Wait,” I say. “I have to get on a plane? I’ve never been on a plane!”

Nigel looks at me like I’m high, then starts laughing. “You’re killing me, Jujube. Seriously.” He sips from his probably rum-soaked coffee and wipes his mouth. “Never been on a plane!”

“You won’t be flying anywhere,” Sue explains to me. “Nigel boards the plane while paparazzi snap pictures they will then sell to
People
magazine,
In Touch
and
Star.
You’ll wave at him from the tarmac and look every bit the loving daughter of the most generous man on earth. The plane will be sealed up, it will taxi away from the gate, and the paparazzi will leave and go sell their photos for megabucks.”

“But where will the plane go?”

The other publicist—the shorter one with the dark bob, Clara—stands up and stretches. “The plane will pull into a hangar on the other side of the airport. Nigel will exit in disguise and step straight into a limo. A few hours later, once it’s nice and dark out, a different car will pull into your garage and your dad will hole up in the house for the next twenty-eight days.”

Sue says, “Nigel reemerges a changed man. He appears looking healthy on a few magazine covers and we sell the exclusive story to
People
magazine for hundreds of thousands of dollars, positioning him as the wholesome, loving father who is asking his daughter’s forgiveness. America will eat it up. It’s a no-fail scenario. Nigel will become the
most read-about musician of the year.”

Nigel starts to nod, clearly in favor of the scheme. “It’s like I always say, for every itch there’s a scratch. And this, my friends, is one hell of a brilliant scratch.”

Eddie rubs his hands together. “Ca-ching. I like the sound of all this publicity. It’ll sell a lot of records.”

“You oughta be my agent, Eddie,” says Nigel.

“I am your agent, dude.”

“So?” says Clara. “What do you think, Nigel?”

Nigel frowns a minute. “Most read-about musician of the year, you say?”

“That’s right.”

He sits back in his seat and clasps his hands behind his head. Then he nods. “I like it.”

Everyone is grinning like it’s the most genius plan on earth. Then Eddie starts to clap very slowly. One by one, they all join in until the whole freaking room is clapping for Sue and Clara, who laugh and take these fake bows in front of Nigel.

When things quiet down, Sue puts her arm around my shoulders. “The key to pulling this off is this beautiful young girl here. What do you say, Joules? Want to help your darling father out of the terrible mess the police have put him in?”

No,
I want to say.
I don’t. I don’t want any part of this ugly lie.
And no one put him in any mess, he did it to himself. He drank too much, drove, got caught and now has to suffer the consequences just like any other criminal.

Nigel watches me with this big worried smile on his face.

Any other father—a father like my own—would stand up and say no way. My daughter is not going to
lie to cover up my own mistakes. Nigel doesn’t. But that isn’t what’s bugging me right now. Nor is it that Nigel messed up in the first place—that bugs me, but not as much as this.

The smile on Nigel’s face isn’t the smile of a spoiled-rotten rock star who is used to getting his way. It’s the smile of a father who
really
wants to believe his daughter loves him. Other dads—dads who are waiters and engineers and daycare workers and bottled water delivery guys—might go about their business with the security of knowing their kids love them wholly. But not Nigel. Not the guy whose publicist says he’ll be the most read-about musician and father on the planet.

His daughter can’t disappoint him, no matter how immoral their plan. Joules can’t let him down in front of all these people. It would devastate him.

I walk around to where he sits, put my arms around his shoulders and kiss him on the cheek. “Of course I’ll help. I would do anything for this old guy.”

He beams. Looks at me, looks at his people, and just beams and beams and beams. Then he laughs, reaches for a tea towel and pretends to snap me with it for calling him an old guy. He chases me around the kitchen, roaring. At this moment, he just might be the happiest father in America.

I don’t go to school at all today. One of the publicists calls in and says I have a family emergency. So instead of fighting with Joules, staring at Will and hoping to catch
a glimpse of my mother in the parking lot, I pose for father–daughter pictures with Nigel. Me and him packing his bag. Me and him at the piano as he sings me a goodbye song. Then, later, at the airport, there will be me and Nigel hugging beside a private plane. This photo will not be shot by Clara and Sue, however. One of them called the paparazzi and claimed to be Nigel’s snitch of a housekeeper who wanted to give them a tip: that Nigel would be at LAX, at Gate 13C, 4:45 p.m. sharp. Sure enough, the photographers are there when we pull up.

Nigel and I stand on the tarmac, drinking in jet fumes. It’s cool again now that the sun is getting low in the sky, and I’m under-dressed. I didn’t realize how windy it can get out at the airport—mostly because I’ve never been to the airport. A fake flight attendant keeps poking her head out of the plane, which has its engines roaring. At first we just sort of stand there on the steps up to the jet, looking like morons, but then Sue—who’s about a hundred yards away in a car—flashes the headlights to signal to us that enough paparazzi have shown up. Then Nigel moves into action.