Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(51)
I winced. It didn’t help that the only job Brad had ever been able to keep was with his father-in-law, Debbie Mancuso’s dad, the Mercedes King of Carmel. Trying to keep up with the mortgage payments on the overpriced home on the golf course Debbie insisted they had to have in Carmel Valley Ranch (because that’s where all her friends who couldn’t afford houses in Pebble Beach lived), plus pay the fees for the girls’ private school education wasn’t easy. My mom and Andy helped out where they could, and both Jake and I had given Brad a few loans, too.
But I didn’t know how long the two of them were going to be able to keep it together, especially since Debbie insisted on being a stay-at-home mom, even with the girls gone all day (the mission believed a full-day kindergarten program improved cognitive development. It also improved the mission’s tuition coffers).
Debbie said she needed the “me” time to be the best mom she could be. A lot of her “me” time seemed to be spent working out at the gym with a personal trainer, buying clothes, and going to lunch with the likes of Kelly Prescott Walters.
Of course, Brad took a lot of “me” time for himself, playing golf and partying at Snail Crossing.
I totally understood their need for so much “me” time, since being the parents of rambunctious triplets (and the spouses of one another) had to be really exhausting.
“Brad, you’ve got to find a new job. One where you aren’t dependent on your father-in-law for your income.”
“I know.” He kicked at another dried bougainvillea bud. “But who’d want to hire me? I don’t have a college degree. I barely managed to graduate high school. I know I screwed up. At least I have them.” His gaze rested tenderly on his three daughters, who were now having a contest to see who could stretch their gum into the longest strand.
My own gaze rested on Brad—not exactly tenderly, but with more affection than in the past. He’d driven me crazy the entire time we’d been forced by our parents to live together—so much so that I’d given him the private nickname Dopey, and often wished for his premature death.
But his love for his daughters—and the fact that I rarely, if ever, had to watch him drink directly from a milk carton anymore—mostly made up for that.
“Hey!” he yelled at the girls, startling me. “What have I told you before? Gum stays in your mouth!”
That’s when I noticed something sitting beside Jesse on the bench, something I hadn’t seen earlier because it hadn’t been there earlier. It was white and fuzzy, with brown spots on it. It was shaped like a stuffed horse.
Lucia’s stuffed horse.
Jesse noticed the direction of my stare. He’d never seen Lucia’s horse, and had no way of knowing it belonged to her. But he knew it didn’t belong to the girls, because it was gleaming with the faint otherworldly glow all paranormal objects give off when they’ve recently made the journey from their dimension to ours.
That was why Jesse reached out instinctively to knock it from the bench, even though it could not hurt the girls. Not being mediators, they couldn’t see it. Still, his hypervigilance was not something he could turn on and off like a switch.
It turned out not to matter, however.
“That’s mine,” Mopsy said, and snatched the horse from beneath his fingers, then hugged it to her heart.
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“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Jesse said.
“Your objection’s duly noted. And you’re obviously not the only one. Debbie doesn’t seem too happy about it, either.”
It was much later. Jesse and I were seated in uncomfortable lawn chairs beside the fire pit in the backyard of Brad and Debbie’s three-bedroom house in Carmel Valley Ranch.
Brad’s fire pit paled in comparison to the one his older brother had constructed at Snail Crossing. Jake’s was made of limestone and was sunk into the ground and surrounded by luxurious built-in couches in a wooded area of the Crossing’s backyard, not far from the redwood hot tub (which comfortably fit ten).
Brad’s fire pit was an overturned metal drum that he’d placed not far from the girls’ swing set, engendering the wrath of his wife, who felt this was unsafe.
This wasn’t all that had engendered Debbie’s wrath.
“You don’t have to stay,” I whispered to Jesse, for what had to have been the fiftieth time since we’d pulled through the gated entrance to the golf resort community in which my stepbrother and his wife lived.
“Of course I have to stay. I’m not going to leave my future wife alone in a house that’s being haunted by a murderous demon child.”
“We don’t know that she’s haunting it. And I thought we established that she probably isn’t murderous, just overprotective. A lot like someone else I know . . .” I let my voice trail off suggestively.
He ignored me. “Then why, precisely, are we here?”
“To make sure the girls are okay.”
We had to keep our voices low because Brad and Debbie were inside the house having what they called “a discussion,” but what I thought might better be described as a domestic dispute. Debbie hadn’t been too happy when she’d come home from Pilates to find that she had houseguests.
I could understand it. I probably wouldn’t be too thrilled, either, to come home from my exercise class to find that my stepsister-in-law and her boyfriend had shown up at my house with their overnight bags.