No one knew how messy that part of my family was because we kept it quiet, but anyone who knew of Effie had to see that she was hardly ever around. My other cousin Neo, her brother, was the total opposite, and he adored his niece, but he lived two hours away so he couldn’t take her all that much. My uncle was an awesome guy, but he already provided for Elodie financially and he couldn’t take her to work with him. This all meant that the rest fell on my family, and because I had such a great bond with the baby, it was no hardship at all to take her. In fact, that’s why I had more bedrooms than I needed in my new house – so that she had one of her own to stay in whenever she wanted to.
What was pissing me off was that the last time Effie had come back, she’d gone into rehab and had sworn that it would be the last time. It wasn’t the first time she’d said that, but even her counselors had told us they thought she meant it this time. What a big, fat stinking lie.
“Duke will be fine,” I muttered, knowing that I was right on that. “What time do you need me to come and get her?”
With a smile that looked like it was forced out of her because Maude was definitely feeling the same way that I was, she told me my uncle would drop Elodie over tonight. That gave me an hour after work to go to the store to get what I needed for her, get home and put together the bed I hadn’t built for her yet, make the bed, tidy her room, make sure that everything else was out of the way of tiny curious hands, and do some more organizing. It also gave me only an hour to figure out who was going to look after her while I was at work every day.
As my brother used to say when he was little and didn’t want to get into trouble for cussing: Sofa. King. Great. Say it all at the same time and you had that right. As an aside, we still said it around her now so that we didn’t get into trouble and made other versions up, too.
Now, with what felt like a suffocating amount of weight on my shoulders, I walked back to the stairs so that I could get into the safety of my office and either panic, breakdown, or get my shit together and create miracles.
I’d only just grabbed onto the handrail when Jarrod picked me up and started up the stairs. This sadly didn’t give me the feeling of ecstasy that it normally did because I was so deep in my emotional crash zone that it would take more than that to pull me out of it.
Placing me gently on my desk, he squatted down in front of me. “I need you to explain so that I can help you, Katy.”
If it had been anyone other than Jarrod or the two men who were still downstairs quizzing me about it just now at work, I’d have said it was all great and there were no problems, but the three men I worked with most of the time had something different about them. They genuinely cared, they were genuinely good guys, and I trusted them.
So, I started at the beginning. “That was my grandma Maude. She didn’t want to be called grandma because she said that was her mother’s title, and no way in hell could she ever live up to that level of greatness. There were other variations available, obviously, but she hated them all including the Italian versions seeing as how she’s of Italian descent. Her real name is Marianne, but her family all called her by her nickname, which is Maude. My Uncle Leo is so fricking awesome it hurts and his wife died of cancer two years ago. He has a son, Neo, who’s three years older than me and one of the best men I know. My Uncle Leo is also the reason my parents and Maude moved here four years ago, to be closer to him. Then there’s his daughter Effie who even before her mom died was an off the rails delinquent. She was born with a brain set on mayhem, causing people hell, grand theft auto, being known to the police, and testing the boundaries of her father’s sanity.”
Drawing as much oxygen in as I could, I forged on. “Thirteen months ago, Effie gave birth to Elodie. We didn’t know she was pregnant and, from the way she tells it, she didn’t know she was pregnant. She just felt some cramping and apparently out the baby came – even though she had enough time and concern to get to hospital, so at least she was born in a sterile place and not somewhere littered with needles and heroine spoons.”