Household Gods

After Nicole pinned him and dressed him, she went in search of Kimberley. Her daughter hadn’t moved. She was still standing in the middle of her pink-and-white bedroom, in her underwear, staring at a tangled assortment of shirts, pants, shorts, and skirts. Nicole felt her hands twitch in an almost irresistible urge to slap. She forced herself to stop and draw a breath, to speak reasonably if firmly. “We don’t have any more time to waste, young lady.” In spite of her best efforts, her voice rose. “Here. This shirt. These pants. Now.”

Sullenly, Kimberley put them on. “I hate you,” she said, and then, as if that had been a rehearsal, found something worse: “Daddy and Dawn never yell at me.”

Only four, and she knew just where to stick the knife.

Nicole stalked out of her daughter’s bedroom, tight-lipped and quivering with rage she refused to show. As she strode past the nightstand on her way into the master bathroom, she glared at Liber and Libera – especially at Liber. The god and goddess, their hair cut in almost identical pageboy bobs, stared serenely back, as they had for… how long?

She grasped at that thought – any straw in a storm, any distraction before she lost it completely. The label on the back of the limestone plaque said in German, English, and French that it was a reproduction of an original excavated from the ruins of Carnuntum, the Roman city on the site of Petronell, the small town east of Vienna where she’d bought it. Every now and then, she wondered about that. None of the other reproductions in the shop had looked quite so… antique. But none of the Customs men had given her any grief about it. If they didn’t know, who did?

As a distraction, it was a failure. When she stood in front of the makeup mirror, the modern world came crashing back. Fury had left her cheeks so red, she almost decided to leave off the blusher. But she knew what would happen next: the blood would drain away and leave them pasty white, and she’d look worse than ever. When she’d done the best she could with foundation and blusher, eyeliner and mascara and eyebrow pencil, lip liner and lipstick, she surveyed the results with a critical eye. Even with the help of modern cosmetology, her face was still too round – doughy, if you got right down to it. Anyone could guess she was a schnitzel-eater from a long line of schnitzel-eaters. She was starting to get a double chin, to go with the belly she had to work a little harder each year to disguise with suit jackets and shirtdresses and carefully cut slacks. And – what joy! – she was getting a pimple, too, right in the middle of her chin, a sure sign her period was on the way.

‘Thirty-four years old, and I’ve got zits,” she said to nobody in particular. God wasn’t listening, that was plain. She camouflaged the damage as best she could, corralled the kids, and headed out to the car.

The Honda coughed several times before reluctantly kicking over. If Frank had got the last child-support check to her, or the one before that, she’d have had it tuned. As things were – as things were, she gritted her teeth. She was a lawyer. She was supposed to be making good money. She was making good money, by every national standard, but food and daycare and clothes and insurance and utilities and the mortgage ate it all up and then some.

House payments in Indianapolis hadn’t prepared her for Los Angeles, either. With two incomes, they were doable. Without two incomes…

“Yay! Off to Josefina’s,” Kimberley said when they pulled out of the driveway. Apparently, she’d forgotten she hated her mother.

Nicole wished she could forget as easily as that herself. “Off to Josefina’s,” she echoed with considerably less enthusiasm. She lived in West Hills, maybe ten minutes away from the splendidly multicultural law offices of Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng. The daycare provider, however, was over in Van Nuys, halfway across the San Fernando Valley.

That hadn’t been a problem when Nicole was married. Frank would drop off the kids, then head down the San Diego Freeway to the computer-science classes he taught at UCLA. He’d pick Kimberley and Justin up in the evening, too. Everything was great. Josefina was wonderful, the kids loved her, Nicole got an extra half-hour every morning to drink her coffee and brace herself for the day.