Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children #2)(6)
“Your daughter’s a real scrapper, eh, Wolcott?”
“She is indeed,” said Chester, flipping a burger. (The fact that he called people who did this for a living “burger-flippers” and looked down his nose at them was entirely lost on him, as it was on everyone around him.) “She’s going to be a spitfire when she gets a little older. We’re already looking into peewee soccer leagues. She’ll be an athlete when she grows up, just you wait and see.”
“My wife would kill me if I tried to put our daughter in a pair of pants and send her off to play with the boys,” said another partner, a wry chuckle in his voice. “You’re a lucky man. Having two at once was the way to go.”
“Absolutely,” said Chester, as if they had planned this all along.
“Who’s the old lady with your other daughter?” asked the first partner, nodding toward Louise. “Is that your nanny? She seems a little, well. Don’t you think she’s going to get tired, chasing two growing girls around all the time?”
“She’s doing very well with them so far,” said Chester.
“Well, keep an eye on her. You know what they say about old ladies: blink, and you’ll be taking care of her instead of her taking care of your kids.”
Chester flipped another burger, and said nothing at all.
On the other side of the yard, near the elegant, sugar-dusted cake, Serena moved in the center of a swarm of cooing society wives, and she had never felt more at home, or more like she was finally taking her proper place in the world. This had been the answer: children. Jacqueline and Jillian were unlocking the last of the doors that had stood between Serena and true social success—mostly Jacqueline, she felt, who was everything a young lady should be, quiet and sweet and increasingly polite with every year that passed. Why, some days she even forgot that Jillian was a girl, the contrast between them was so strong!
Some of the women she worked with were uncomfortable with the way she enforced Jacqueline’s boundaries—usually the women who called her daughter “Jack” and encouraged her to do things like hunt for eggs on wet grass, or pet strange dogs that would shed on her dresses, dirtying them. Serena sniffed at them and calmly, quietly began moving their names down the various guest lists she controlled, until some of them had dropped off entirely. Those who remained had caught on quickly, after that, and stopped saying anything that smacked of criticism. What good was an opinion if it meant losing your place in society? No. Better to keep your mouth closed and your options open, that was what Serena always said.
She looked around the yard, searching for Jacqueline. Jillian was easy to find: as always, she was at the center of the largest degree of distasteful chaos. Jacqueline was harder. Finally, Serena spotted her in Louise’s shadow, sticking close to her grandmother, as if the woman were the only person she trusted to protect her. Serena frowned.
The party was a success, as such things are reckoned: cake was eaten, presents were opened, bounces were bounced, two knees were skinned (belonging to two separate children), one dress was ruined, and one overexcited child failed to reach the bathroom before vomiting strawberry ice cream and vanilla cake all over the hall. When night fell, Jacqueline and Jillian were safely tucked in their room and Louise was in the kitchen, preparing herself a cup of tea. She heard footsteps behind her. She stopped, and turned, and frowned.
“Out with it,” she said. “You know how Jill fusses if I’m not in my room when she comes looking for midnight kisses.”
“Her name is Jillian, Mother, not Jill,” said Chester.
“So you say,” said Louise.
He sighed. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”
“What, exactly?”
“We want to thank you for all the time you’ve spent helping with our children,” said Chester. “They were a handful in the beginning. But I think we have things under control now.”
Five is not where handfuls end, my boy, thought Louise. Aloud, she said, “Is that so?”
“Yes,” said Serena. “Thank you so much, for everything you’ve done. Don’t you think you deserve the chance to rest?”
“There’s nothing tiring about caring for children you love like your own,” said Louise, but she had already lost, and she knew it. She had done her best. She had tried to encourage both girls to be themselves, and not to adhere to the rigid roles their parents were sketching a little more elaborately with every year. She had tried to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid, and that neither of them was doing anything wrong. She had tried.
Whether she had succeeded or not was virtually beside the point, because here were her son and his wife, and now she was going to leave those precious children in the hands of people who had never taken the time to learn anything about them beyond the most narrow, superficial things. They didn’t know that Jillian was brave because she knew Jacqueline was always somewhere behind her with a careful plan for any situation that might arise. They didn’t know that Jacqueline was timid because she was amused by watching the world deal with her sister, and thought the view was better from outside the splash radius.
(They also didn’t know that Jacqueline was developing a slow terror of getting her hands dirty, thanks to them and their constant admonishments about protecting her dresses, which were too fancy by far for a child her age. They wouldn’t have cared if she’d told them.)