Household Gods Read online

  Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. A red sea of brake lights lay ahead, and she had no way to part it. She glared at the car radio, which hadn’t said a word about any accidents. But the traffic reports seldom bothered with surface-street crashes; they had enough trouble keeping up with bad news on the freeways.

  “Why aren’t we going, Mommy?” Kimberley asked from the backseat, as inevitable as the traffic jam.

  “We’re stuck,” Nicole answered, as she’d answered a hundred times before. “There must be an accident up ahead.”

  They were stuck tight, too. With the park on one side of Victory and a golf course on the other, there weren’t even any cross streets with which to escape. Nothing to do but fume, slide forward a couple of inches, hit the brakes, fume again.

  People in the fast lane were making U-turns to go back to Hayvenhurst and around the catastrophe that had turned Victory into defeat. Nicole, of course, was trapped in the slow lane. Whenever she tried to get into the fast lane, somebody cut her off. Drivers leaned on their horns (which the Nicole who’d lived in Indianapolis would have been surprised to hear was rare in L.A.), flipped off their neighbors, shook fists. She wondered how many of them had a gun in waistband or pocket or purse or glove compartment. She didn’t want to find out.

  Ten mortal minutes and half a mile later, she crawled past the U-Haul truck that had wrapped itself around a pole. The driver was talking to a cop. “Penal Section 502,” she snarled, that being the California section on driving under the influence.

  She had to slow down again as cars got onto the San Diego Freeway, but that happened every day. She bore it in resigned annoyance as a proper Angeleno should, but with a thrum of desperation underneath. Late-late-late…

  Once she got under the overpass, she made reasonably decent time. Thoughts about locking the barn door after the horse was stolen ran through her mind.

  Parts of Van Nuys were ordinary middle-class suburb. Parts were the sort of neighborhood where you wished you could drive with the Club locked on the steering wheel. Josefina’s house was right on the edge between the one and the other.

  “Hello, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said in accented English as Nicole led her children into the relative coolness and dimness of the house. It smelled faintly of sour milk and babies, more distinctly of spices Nicole had learned to recognize: cilantro, cumin, chili powder. The children tugged at Nicole’s hands, trying to break free and bolt, first into Josefina’s welcoming arms, then to the playroom where they’d spend most of the day.

  Normally, Nicole would have let them go, but Josefina had put herself in the way, and something in her expression made Nicole tighten her grip in spite of the children’s protests.

  Josefina was somewhere near Nicole’s age, several inches shorter, a good deal wider, and addicted to lurid colors: today, an electric blue blouse over fluorescent orange pants. Her taste in clothes, fortunately, didn’t extend to the decor of her house; that was a more or less standard Sears amalgam of brown plaid and olive-green slipcovers, with a touch of faded blue and purple and orange in a big terracotta vase of paper flowers that stood by the door. Nicole would remember the flowers later, more clearly than Josefina’s face in the shadow of the foyer, or even the day-glo glare of her clothes.

  Nicole waited for Josefina to move so that Kimberley and Justin could go in, but Josefina stood her ground, solid as a tiki god in a Hawaiian gift shop. “Listen, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” she said. “I got to tell you something. Something important.”

  “What?” Nicole was going to snap again. Damn it, she was late. How in hell was she going to make it to the office on time if the kids’ daycare provider wanted to stop and chat?

  Josefina could hardly have missed the chill in Nicole’s tone, but she didn’t back down. “Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, I’m very sorry, but after today I can’t take care of your kids no more. I can’t take care of nobody’s kids no more.”

  She did look sorry. Nicole granted her that. Was there a glisten of tears in her eyes?

  Nicole was too horrified to be reasonable, and too astonished to care whether Josefina was happy, sad, or indifferent. “What?” she said. “You what? You can’t do that!”

  Josefina did not reply with the obvious, which was that she perfectly well could. “I got to go home to Mexico. My mother down in Ciudad Obregon, where I come from, she very sick.” Josefina brought the story out pat. And why not? She must have told it a dozen times already, to a dozen other shocked and appalled parents. “She call me last night,” she said, “and I get the airplane ticket. I leave tonight. I don’t know when I be back. I don’t know if I be back. I’m very sorry, but I can’t help it. You give me the check for this part of the month when you pick up the kids tonight, okay?”

  Then, finally, she stood a little to the side so that Kimberley and Justin could run past her. They seemed not to know or understand what she’d said, which was a small — a very small — mercy. Nicole stood numbly as they vanished into the depths of the house, staring at Josefina’s round flat face above the screaming blue of her blouse. “But — ” Nicole said. “But — ”

  Her brain was as sticky as the Honda’s engine. It needed a couple of tries before it would turn over. “But what am I supposed to do? I work for a living, Josefina — I have to. Where am I supposed to take the children tomorrow?”

  Josefina’s face set. Nicole damned herself for political incorrectness, for thinking that this woman whom she was so careful to think of as an equal and not as an ethnic curiosity, looked just now like every stereotype of the inscrutable and intractable aborigine. Her eyes were flat and black. Her features, the broad cheekbones, the Aztec profile, the bronze sheen of the skin, were completely and undeniably foreign. Years of daycare, daily meetings, little presents for the children on their birthdays and plates of delicious and exotic cookies at Christmas, reciprocated with boxes of chocolates — Russell Stover, not Godiva; Godiva was an acquired taste if you weren’t a yuppie — all added up to this: closed mind and closed face, and nothing to get a grip on, no handhold for sympathy, let alone understanding. This, Nicole knew with a kind of angry despair, was an alien. She’d never been a friend, and she’d never been a compatriot, either. Her whole world just barely touched on anything that Nicole knew. And now even that narrow tangent had disappeared.

  “I’m sorry,” Josefina said in her foreign accent, with her soft Spanish vowels. “I know you are upset with me. Lots of parents upset with me, but I can’t do nothing about it. My mother got nobody else but me.”

  Nicole made her mind work, made herself think and talk some kind of sense. “Do you know anyone who might take Kimberley and Justin on such short notice?”

  God, even if Josefina said yes, the kids would pitch a fit. She was… like a mother to them. That had always worried Nicole a little — not, she’d been careful to assure herself, that her impeccably Anglo children should be so attached to a Mexican woman; no, of course not, how wonderfully free of prejudice that would make them, and they’d picked up Spanish, too. No, she worried she herself wasn’t mother enough, so they’d had to focus on Josefina for all the things Nicole couldn’t, but should, be offering them. And now, when they were fixated like that, to go from her house to some stranger’s -

  Even as Nicole fussed over what was, after all, a minor worry, Josefina was shaking her head. “Don’t know nobody,” she said. She didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Of course she didn’t. She couldn’t mean, It’s no skin off my nose, lady. Josefina loved the kids. Didn’t she?

  What did Nicole know of what Josefina felt or didn’t feel? Josefina was foreign.

  Nicole stood on the front porch, breathing hard. If that was the way Josefina wanted to play it, then that was how Nicole would play it. There had to be some way out. She would have bet money that Josefina was an undocumented immigrant. She could threaten to call the INS, get her checked out, have her deported…

  Anger felt good. Anger felt cleansing. But it didn’t change a thing. The
re wasn’t anything she could do. Deport Josefina? She almost laughed. Josefina was leaving the USA on her own tonight. She’d probably welcome the help.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina repeated. As if she meant it. As if she even cared.

  Nicole didn’t even remember going from the house to the car. One moment she was staring at Josefina, hunting for words that wouldn’t come. The next, she was in the Honda, slamming the driver’s-side door hard enough to rattle the glass in the window frame. She jammed the key in the ignition, shoved the pedal to the metal, and roared out into the street.

  Part of her wanted to feel cold and sick and a little guilty. The rest of her was too ferociously angry to care how she drove.

  She might not care, but with the luck she was running, she’d pick up a ticket on top of being drastically late. She made an effort of will and slowed down to something near a reasonable speed. Her brain flicked back into commuter mode, cruising on autopilot. The main part of her mind fretted away at this latest blow.

  I can’t worry about it now, she told herself over and over. I’ll worry about it after I get to the office. I’ll worry about it tonight.

  First she had to get to the office. When she came out onto Victory, she shook her head violently. She knew too well how long tooling back across the western half of the Valley would take. Instead, she swung south onto the San Diego Freeway: only a mile or two there to the interchange with the 101. Yes, the eastbound 101 would be a zoo, but so what? Westbound, going against rush-hour traffic, she’d make good time. She didn’t usually try it, but she wasn’t usually so far behind, either.

  Thinking about that, plotting out the rest of her battle plan, helped her focus; got her away from the gnawing of worry about Josefina’s desertion. It was good for that much, at least.

  As she crawled down toward the interchange, she checked the KFWB traffic report and then, two minutes later, the one on KNX. They were both going on about a jackknifed big rig on the Long Beach Freeway, miles from where she was. Nobody said anything about the 101. She swung through the curve from the San Diego to the 101 and pushed the car up to sixty-five.

  For a couple of miles, she zoomed along — she even dared to congratulate herself. She’d rolled the dice and won: she would save ten, fifteen minutes, easy. She’d still be late, but not enough for it to be a problem. She didn’t have any appointments scheduled till eleven-thirty. The rest she could cover for.

  She should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Not today. Not with her luck.

  Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. “You lying son of a bitch!” Nicole snarled at the car radio. It was too much. Everything was going wrong. It was almost as bad as the day she woke up to a note on her pillow, and no Frank. Dear Nicole, the note had said, on departmental stationery yet, Dawn and I have gone to Reno. We’ll talk about the divorce when I get back. Love, Frank. And scribbled across the bottom: PS. The milk in the fridge is sour. Remember to check the Sell-By date next time you buy a gallon.

  Remembering how bad that day was didn’t make this one feel any better. “Love, Frank, “ she muttered. “Love, the whole goddamn world. “

  Her eye caught the flash of her watch as she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Almost time for the KNX traffic report. She stabbed the button, wishing she could stab the reporter. His cheery voice blared out of the speakers: “ — and Cell-Phone Force member Big Charlie reports a three-car injury accident on the westbound 101 between White Oak and Reseda. One of those cars nipped over; it’s blocking the number-two and number-three lanes. Big Charlie says only the slow lane is open. That’s gonna put a hitch in your getalong, folks. Now Louise is over that jackknifed truck on the Long Beach in Helicop — ”

  Nicole switched stations again. Suddenly, she was very, very tired. Too tired to keep her mad on, too tired almost to hold her head up. Her fingers drummed on the wheel, drummed and drummed. The natives, she thought dizzily, were long past getting restless. Her stomach tied itself in a knot. What to do, what to do? Get off the freeway at White Oak and go back to surface streets? Or crawl past the wreck and hope she’d make up a little time when she could floor it again?

  All alone in the passenger compartment, she let out a long sigh. “What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “I’m screwed either way.”

  She pulled into the parking lot half an hour late — twenty-eight minutes to be exact, if you felt like being exact, which she didn’t. Grabbing her attache case, she ran for the entrance to the eight-story steel-and-glass rectangle in which Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng occupied the sixth and most of the seventh floors.

  When she’d first seen it, she’d harbored faint dreams of L.A. Law and spectacular cases, fame and fortune and all the rest of it. Now she just wanted to get through the day without falling on her face. The real hotshots were in Beverly Hills or Century City or someplace else on the Westside. This was just… a job, and not the world’s best.

  Gary Ogarkov, one of the other lawyers with the firm, stood outside the doorway puffing one of the big, smelly cigars he made such a production of. He had to come outside to do that; the building, thank God, was smoke-free. “Nicole!” he called out in what he probably thought was a fine courtroom basso. To Nicole, it sounded like a schoolboy imitation — Perry Mason on helium. “Mr. Rosenthal’s been looking for you since nine o’clock.”

  Jesus. The founding partner. How couldn’t he be looking for Nicole? That was the kind of day this was. Even knowing she’d had it coming, she still wanted to sink through the sidewalk. “God,” she said. “Of all the days for traffic to be godawful — Gary, do you know what it’s about?” She pressed him, hoping to hell he’d give her a straight answer.

  Naturally, he didn’t. “I shouldn’t tell you.” He tried to look sly. With his bland, boyish face, it didn’t come off well. He was within a year of Nicole’s age but, in spite of a blond mustache, still got asked for ID whenever he ordered a drink.

  Nicole was no more afraid of him than the local bartenders. “Gary,” she said dangerously.

  He backed down in a hurry, flinging up his hands as if he thought she might bite. “Okay, okay. You look like you could use some good news. You know the Butler Ranch report we turned in a couple of weeks ago?”

  “I’d better,” Nicole said, still with an edge in her voice. Antidevelopment forces were fighting the Butler Ranch project tooth and nail because it would extend tract housing into the scrubby hill country north of the 118 Freeway. The fight would send the children of attorneys on both sides to Ivy League schools for years, likely decades, to come.

  “Well, because of that report — ” Gary paused to draw on his cigar, tilted his head back, and blew a ragged smoke ring. “Because of that report, Mr. Rosenthal named me a partner in the firm.” He pointed at Nicole. “And he’s looking for you.”

  For a moment, she just stood there. Then she felt the wide, crazy grin spread across her face. Payoff — finally. Restitution for the whole lousy morning, for a whole year of lousy mornings. “My God,” she whispered. She’d done three-quarters of the work on that report. She knew it, Gary knew it, the whole firm had to know it. He was a smoother writer than she, which was the main reason he’d been involved at all, but he thought environmental impact was what caused roadkill.

  “Shall I congratulate you now?” he asked. His grin was as broad as Nicole’s.

  She shook her head. She felt dizzy, bubbly. Was this what champagne did to people? She didn’t know. She didn’t drink. Just as well — she had to be calm, she had to be mature. She couldn’t go fizzing off into the upper atmosphere. She had a reputation to uphold. “Better not,” she said. “Wait till it’s official. But since you are official — congratulations, Gary.” She thrust out her hand. He pumped it. When he started to give her a hug, she stiffened just enough to let him know she didn’t want it. Since Frank walked out the door, she hadn’t wanted much to do with the male half of the human race. To cover the awkward moment,
she said, “Congratulations again.” And hastily, before he could say anything to prolong the moment: “I’d better get upstairs.”

  “Okay. And back at you,” Ogarkov added, even though she’d told him not to. She made a face at him over her shoulder as she hurried toward the elevators. She almost didn’t need them, she was flying so high.

  When she’d floated up to the sixth floor, her secretary greeted her with a wide-eyed stare and careful refusal to point out that she was — by the clock — thirty-three minutes late. Instead, she said in her breathy Southern California starlet’s voice, “Oh, Ms. Gunther-Perrin, Mr. Rosenthal’s been looking for you.”

  Nicole nodded and bit back the silly grin. “I know,” she said. ‘I saw Gary downstairs, smoking a victory cigar.” That came out with less scorn than Nicole would have liked. She had as little use for tobacco as she did for alcohol, but when you made partner, she supposed you were entitled to celebrate. “Can he see me now, Cyndi?”

  “Let me check.” The secretary punched in Mr. Rosenthal’s extension on the seventh floor, where all the senior partners held their dizzy eminence above the common herd, and spoke for a moment, then hung up. “He’s with a client. Ten-thirty, Lucinda says.”

  Cyndi down here, Lucinda up above. Even the secretaries’ names were more elevated in the upper reaches.

  Nicole brought herself back to earth with an effort. “Oh,” she said. “All right. If Lucinda says it, it must be so.”

  Nicole and Cyndi shared a smile. Sheldon Rosenthal’s secretary reckoned herself at least as important to the firm as the boss. She was close enough to being right that nobody ever quite dared disagree with her in public.

  Something else caught Nicole’s eye and mind, which went to show how scattered she still was after her morning from hell. She pointed to the photographs on her secretary’s desk. “Cyndi, who takes care of Benjamin and Joseph while you’re here?”

  “My husband’s sister,” Cyndi answered. She didn’t sound confused, or wary either. “She’s got two-year-old twins of her own, and she stays home with them and my kids and her other sister-in-law’s little girl. She’d rather do that than go back to work, so it’s pretty good for all of us.”