Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291) Read online

  “Fine. That geek in Graphics is working on the video presentation. He says he’s got some fresh ideas about how to mix the pieces. When are you going to give us some face time?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  From her makeshift office in the living room, Jo glanced upstairs, where Grace rustled about the spare bedroom like a squirrel. Twice Jo had meant to sneak up and peek through that door to see what on earth the kid was doing, but both times she’d been interrupted by phone calls. Now Jo could tell, by the sumptuous smell of warm cheese wafting from the kitchen, that Benito, the cook she’d hired for the day, was putting the finishing touches on lunch. She’d check on Grace when the food was ready.

  Jo tapped her pen on the day’s ink-blotched schedule, the one she’d started at six in the morning and had been filling ever since, operating in her fiercest Mistress of the Universe mode in order to pull her life back together. “I’ll have everything worked out by the end of today, Hector. But listen, this proposal is useless if we don’t find a face. Who did you catch?”

  “No one. I called those people you mentioned, but not a single bite. And get this, that soul singer with the big rear asset? She’s working on her own perfume.”

  “Shit.”

  “Maybe that’s what they’ll call it. And that girl band you suggested, well, I talked to the lead singer. She still thinks it’s all about the music.”

  “What about that starlet from that Sundance movie, the one who played the lesbian vampire?”

  “No callback. Listen, Jo,” Hector said, “you’ll probably hand me my balls on a platter, but Sophie might be right about that supermodel.”

  Jo bristled. Sophie’s impression on this project—Jo’s project—was like a spreading cloud of poison. “Are you talking about the model with the fried nasal passages? The only mystery about her is where she’s hiding her stash.”

  “But she’s cheap now. And desperate. By the time the perfume is launched, she’ll have done rehab, sobbed on Barbara Walters’ shoulder, and finished her community service. She’ll be walking the runway for Versace again—”

  “—and backstage she’ll be cutting lines on her boyfriend’s butt. No way. The model we choose is everything. We’ve got to find someone else—”

  “In ten days?!”

  “Who’s got a movie coming out? A CD? A midseason TV series to launch?” Jo’s doorbell rang, and she checked her watch. “Find someone looking for a tie-in, Hector. You work the phone on your end, and I’ll work on it on mine. We’ll talk in an hour.”

  The fireplug of a man standing in her doorway wore a red polo shirt and a pair of navy pants. He couldn’t be more than an inch or two above five feet, and all of it was muscle. His shoulders bulged so fiercely that they threatened to consume his shiny bald head.

  He consulted his clipboard. “You Bobbie Jo Marcum?”

  “Yes.”

  “George from SafeKiddies.com.” He flexed his arms. The muscles that stretched from his neck to his shoulders twitched in a way that was not quite human. “I’m here to give you an estimate on how to protect your kid from everyday household dangers.”

  “Come on in.” Jo strode toward the couch and pushed her laptop aside. She cleared papers off a stretch of coffee table, only to realize that the fireplug hadn’t even crossed the threshold.

  “Is this the place?” He eyeballed her bilevel condo. Dropping the clipboard to his side, he ran his hand over his head. “Oh, geez. Oh, geez. How long you had it like this, lady?”

  Jo glanced around. Piles of papers teetered on the couch. Dishes, spoons, and bowls littered the kitchen table. Her jacket had slipped off its peg and lay in a puddle on the floor. A couple of sweaters festooned the banister. “It’s been cleaner,” she admitted. “Maria comes tomorrow.”

  “Any kid could catapult himself from there,” he said, gesturing to the second level. “They’d crack their head on that glass table of yours and splatter like ground meat.”

  Benito, singing Sinatra in the kitchen, stuttered midriff.

  George said, “Kid’s not here, right?”

  “She is here,” Jo said. “She’s playing in her room.”

  “Alone?”

  “Well, yeah.” She blinked. “Grace is seven years—”

  “Are there blinds in that room? With cords?”

  “Of course.”

  “Naked outlets, like these? Bookshelves to climb on, like these?” He seized a shelf, rattling the books and photos. “You know how quick a kid could pull that down on herself? How do you know she’s not fried to ashes right now, or laying there in a pile of her own fractured bones?”

  Jo managed a tight Southern smile. Why couldn’t SafeKiddies.com send some hot young gym rat? She really didn’t have time for characters. “Because,” she said, pausing long enough to hear the rustling she’d been listening to all morning, “I can still hear the little darling.”

  “Could be convulsing in her death throes.”

  “I’ll just have to check on her, then.” Jo’s phone vibrated, and sang a rousing chorus of “I Will Survive.” “George, is it? You’ll have to excuse me—I’ve got to take this call. Why don’t you get started on that estimate?”

  “Geez, lady, look at that table—it’s gonna take a boatload of wrap to cover that.” He consulted his clipboard and tugged a pen from behind his ear. “It’s a wonder the kid hasn’t slit her wrists on those edges. And those stairs. That’s an eight-foot drop. The opening’s wide; that’ll be a custom gate for sure.”

  Jo turned away and met Benito’s arched gaze above a bowl of tossed salad. She rolled her eyes and then glanced at her caller ID before answering the phone.

  “Jessie, did you find those papers?”

  “Look, I tried to get you what you needed,” Jessie began, “but it’s going to take some time.”

  “Time is something I don’t have a whole lot of, Jessie.” Jo wandered into the kitchen. She peered through the oven window to where something was bubbling and just starting to brown. She was starved. She hadn’t eaten since 7 a.m. “I can’t keep Grace out of school any longer. There are laws against that in Kentucky—I suspect New York is no different.”

  “The doctor will send the immunization forms. But the office needs a few days. I called Grace’s old school for transcripts, but they have to send them directly to the new school. So you need to tell me what school she’s going to. I need the full address—”

  “Fax them. It’s faster.”

  The fireplug bustled about, whistling through his teeth as he fingered edges and pushed aside curtains and shook his head at the exposed radiator under the window. He let out a shout of dismay when he measured the space between the balusters on the second level.

  “Well, okay.” Jessie sighed. “But there’s another problem. I can’t find her birth certificate.”

  “Jessie, sugar, that’s one piece of crucial information.”

  “You know how bad Rachel was about papers. It’s nowhere. I’ve looked and looked. I’ll have to write to the city clerk’s office to get a certified copy.”

  “It’s October.” Jo hungrily eyed the pile of carrots on the table. “This kid’s got to go to school.”

  “It could be a week. Or two.”

  Jo scooted out of the way as Benito opened the oven door and squinted at the dish. “That’s unacceptable,” she said.

  “I know. She’s got to be about twenty pages behind in her math and spelling workbooks. That’s where I’d be if I could ever find a damned teaching job. You’d better start her on those subjects at home.”

  “Honey, I’m no teacher.” Jo shook her head. “Not for what you want her to learn, anyhow.”

  “Then talk to the principal, or hire a tutor. Now, look, I have to go. I’ll get that stuff to you as soon as I can.”

  Jo pulled the earpiece off and tossed it on a granite countertop, then leaned against it. A tutor now. Another body to hire. Another expert on the project. A project that was going way over budget.

&nbs
p; This sure wasn’t the way her mother had done it, raising Jo alone in that small-town backwater. A Manhattan nanny ran thirty-two to sixty-four thousand a year. The laundry service added another weekly cost, as did the delivering of groceries for a refrigerator that usually stood empty. Childproofing this condo wasn’t going to be cheap, either, if she could judge by the way the fireplug was flashing his measuring tape. It was darn lucky that she’d spent so many years fully funding her retirement account, and keeping a “just in case I’m fired” account with nearly a year’s salary tucked away. She was a vice-president of a major media company—she got paid well, she could absorb all this… but she sure as heck hadn’t planned for it. It certainly made Rachel’s motivation for giving her Gracie a lot more understandable.

  “No window guards?” the fireplug cried out. “You got no window guards? She could sail right out and become anchovy pizza right on Eighty-second Street—what are you here, tenth floor?”

  Jo sank onto one of the three barstools that edged her kitchen table. “Benito, how ’bout mixing me a big ol’ margarita?”

  “No, no, no margarita.” He pushed out his lower lip. “Doesn’t mix with the lunch.”

  “Tell me lunch has bourbon in it.”

  “You hired me to cook for a child. I cook macaroni and cheese.” With padded hands, he opened the oven and pulled out the white casserole dish. “You say she no eat, I give you something she won’t stop eating. Look,” he said, tipping it toward her before he settled it on a trivet. “The finest homemade elbow macaroni—my father’s recipe—drowning in the freshest of cheeses: smoked Gouda, Parmesan, a bit of sharp cheddar, and a drop of Worcestershire sauce just to give it a bite, then crusted with bread crumbs and browned to perfection. She will eat, yes, she will eat!”

  “Benito, you’re a genius.”

  “That’s why you hired me.”

  At a hundred and fifty dollars, it’d be the most expensive macaroni and cheese ever made. Benito touched his fingers to his forehead and rolled them toward her, then went back to peeling curls of carrots that he shaped into roses.

  Pouring a fresh cup of coffee, Jo got back to work. She searched the Internet for grade-school tutors. There were a huge number of companies that arranged private tutors for all age groups. (Kindergarten? Kindergarten? Why would a kid need a tutor for kindergarten?) Jo did what she’d been doing all morning: She chose the organization with the biggest ad.

  The doorbell rang while she was in the middle of a phone conversation with a perky young woman extolling the virtues of her company’s college-age tutors. Jo told her to send someone over this very afternoon, and then she disconnected the call and opened the door.

  To Biker Brünhilde.

  At least, that’s the name that came to mind to describe the brick house of a woman standing in her doorway. She wore a fitted black leather jacket and circulation-cutting black jeans tucked into black boots. Her white-blond hair was spiked up with gel, and she carried a purse the size of a credit card.

  “Mrs. Marcum?”

  “Ms.,” Jo corrected.

  “No, I’m no miss. You can call me Gretalda.”

  “Gretalda?”

  “The agency sent me.” She thrust out a piece of paper. “Where is the little one? Come take me to the kindlein.”

  “She’s in her room.” Jo sidestepped as Gretalda marched into the house. “We’ll talk first.”

  “But where’s the child? I want to meet her. I’ll have a look at the little one I’ll be watching.”

  Jo managed yet another tight smile as she perused her papers and sat, decisively, on the couch. “I see you were at your last position for eight years.”

  “Ja. Two little kindlein, nice Jewish family, Upper East Side. No discipline in the house.” Gretalda eyed the chair for crumbs and then perched on the edge. She tucked her purse over her camel toe. “Kids run wild, so wild.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  “Oh, no! I left when Jason went to college. Columbia University, he went, my little schüler. You have two children?”

  “Just one.”

  “Oh. One children are problems. No one to play with, think I be their playmate. Who’s that?”

  Benito set a glass of milk on the table beside a plate of the macaroni and cheese. “Lunch,” he said, tossing a dishcloth over his shoulder, “is served.”

  “You have cook?” Gretalda’s forehead crumpled into accordion folds. “You have one child and a cook?”

  “Thank you, Benito. I’ll get Grace in a minute—”

  “Don’t wait long,” Benito said. “It’s just the right temperature now.”

  Benito was a sous-chef at Poulet, a trendy SoHo restaurant, which brought a lot of prestige but not much money. Which explained the willingness to make macaroni and cheese for a private client, and the snotty attitude as well. Jo’s face was beginning to ache from all the false smiling.

  “And who is this other man, wandering around?” Gretalda glared at the fireplug and his measuring tape. “You doing carpentry? I won’t stay in a house with all that banging and dust.” She patted her ample chest. “Not good for my asthma.”

  “Gotta get rid o’ these right away.” The fireplug ran his fingers through the river stones in a bowl on the sofa table. “The kid puts one o’ these in her mouth, inhales, and that’s it—she’s as blue and dead as if you’d stuffed her in a garbage bag.”

  Jo jerked up. “Why don’t I fetch Grace for lunch?”

  She grabbed the railing—the one with balusters apparently too far apart—and took a leaping step up. I’m Mistress of My Universe. I handle twenty-two employees. Among my staff I have a guy with a vial of blood hanging from his neck. Another is a practicing Wiccan. At least two of my employees are Young Republicans. The rest are pure save-the-manatee Manhattan liberals. We all get along. The CEOs of large corporations depend on me to run their Christmas office parties, their product launches, their PR campaigns, their international retreats. I can do this. I can run my life and Grace’s, both at the same time.

  Jo pushed open the door. “Hey, kiddo, lunch is ready.”

  Dim gray light filtered through the slats of the drawn blinds. As her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, Jo noticed the fort in the corner of the room—a tangle of cloth and chairs and ropes. Only when Grace poked her head out from under a sleeve did Jo realize that the fort had been constructed with her freshly delivered dry cleaning.

  Jo’s breath froze in her lungs. She noticed the knotted wrinkle of a blue silk Versace skirt and the crinkled sleeve of a Ralph Lauren jacket. “Grace,” she stuttered, “what… what are you doing?”

  “I made a fort.” She hid one eye behind a watered-silk sleeve. “I wanted to use those bags, but he took them away.”

  The fireplug had been here. A pile of hangers and plastic sheaths jutted out of the garbage pail. The rope pulls of the blinds were knotted high up like big bows.

  He couldn’t have rescued her Vera Wang?

  “He said if I used the plastic,” Grace muttered, “I’d suffocate like a dead puppy.”

  Jo took a deep breath and told herself it was okay. The clothes could be freshly pressed. They could be cleaned and ironed and put back in new plastic, and hidden in her own closet. This was not Grace’s fault; it was Jo’s own fault. Buying the kid toys was on her list, but not until later in the day.

  “Don’t mind him,” Jo said, willing herself calm. “He’s trying to make this place safer.”

  “Is it true that an eye can really pop out? ’Cuz that man said the point of a hanger—”

  “Now, don’t you go listening to him. My grandma would say he’s full of fish stories. Time to come out of the fort now, kiddo. I’ve got lunch downstairs—”

  “Not hungry.”

  More like never hungry. Gracie hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar since she’d arrived. Though there was something around her mouth right now, something gray and mushy, like oatmeal. Where’d she get oatmeal? “It’s your favorite”—accordi
ng to Jessie—“macaroni and cheese.”

  Grace withdrew into the designer fort. Deep inside. So deep behind Jo’s favorite black pants that Jo had to crouch to see her. Grace knelt on a rainbow pile of silk shells, and she was making two scruffy-looking stuffed animals talk to one another. Grace bounced them up and down. The rabbit had a ratty old ribbon around its head. The bear had a tear along its neck that was leaking small white balls.

  “C’mon, Grace,” Jo said. “I’m going to need a boatload of help with this macaroni and cheese. The cook made enough to feed Lee’s army.”

  “Teddy says that I shouldn’t go down there, because it’s like last time.”

  “What’s like last time?”

  “Like when there were lots of people around. The day Aunt Jessie told me Rachel went away.”

  Jo registered several things. One, Grace was talking about her mother’s funeral; two, Grace called her own mother “Rachel”; and, three, the kid was talking through a stuffed bear.

  Well, Jo had spent enough time with a pint of ice cream in front of cop shows to know that this was some sort of coping mechanism. Maybe, from those actors who played district attorneys, she could pick up a few tips on how to handle grieving children.

  Jo sat down gingerly, avoiding the other half of the Ralph Lauren suit, and intentionally didn’t look at Grace directly. “That was some day, wasn’t it? So many people around. So much noise. Everyone petting you like you’re a darn pony.”

  Grace pulled on the ears of the floppy rabbit.

  “Growing up, I had an aunt Lauralee. She was always trying to kiss me, and she had a big fat cold sore on her lip. Whenever she’d come over, I’d skitter right down to the basement to hide.”

  Grace pulled, pulled, pulled. Poor rabbit was going to lose those ears, and Jo depended on tailors to do anything that required a needle and thread.

  “And the basement was full of spiders,” Jo added. “Big hairy ones, the size of possums. I was scared to death of them, too, but that’s how much I needed to get away from her.”

  And away from her complaining of how no good Jo’s daddy was, leaving at the first sign of trouble, forcing her and her mother to live in a one-room dump. And didn’t she curse the day Mom met him, look at her living in this filthy apartment with no backyard for Jo—