“I’m not a shrinking violet,” she reminded him. “I’ve pitched tents with the kids at the center more than once.”
“That’s kind of like camping,” Janice snuck in.
Karen gave her mother-in-law a doubtful look. “Not really. A full kitchen, bathroom…everything was only feet away. It was more of a change of venue for the kids.”
“You spend a lot of time with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club?”
Michael snorted. “If Karen was paid for her time, she’d be rich.”
Karen giggled and Sawyer watched the two of them through the rearview mirror.
“I love it. At some point I want to open a center for runaways.”
Janice turned from the front seat. “Why not do that now?”
Karen glanced at Michael. “It’s not quite the right time. But someday. There are plenty of kids who need help that slip through the system because they don’t have a place to sleep at night. Many of them travel to a place like LA thinking they’re going to walk down Hollywood Boulevard, meet a producer who says they have the ‘perfect look’ for the part in the next blockbuster, and strike it big. But it takes a hell of a lot more than that to make it in LA.”
Michael huffed out a breath. “You can say that again.”
Karen tapped her fingers on his knee. The gesture so normal for her it was like breathing.
Michael smiled in her direction. “Poor kids need to worry about predators, con artists…any number of shitty personalities.”
“Not to mention drugs and sex for hire.”
Janice actually cringed. “We worried about all that when you were in college,” Janice told her son.
“I wasn’t a runaway,” Michael reminded his mother. “And I’d had over a year and a half of college before landing my first role.”
“You were still young,” Sawyer said.
Michael nodded and seemed lost in his own thoughts. “I guess I was.”
“But you were so confident in what you were doing. And once that first movie came along, your father and I knew you’d never go back to school.”
“School wasn’t going to help me in what I wanted to do,” Michael said.
Karen couldn’t help but feel that the conversation was a first for Michael and his parents. Had they ever really talked openly about his choice in profession? Maybe on some disjointed level over the phone…but not this, not cooped up in a car on a dusty road up to a cabin.
“We worried Mike would end up like those kids you talked about. Such a stressful time for us,” Janice admitted.
“My first film made me a ton of money, Mom.”
“And for all we knew there was someone there taking it from you. Being a parent is hard work. Letting your children make their own choices…it’s not easy.”
“I’ve always thought you were disappointed.” The words seemed to escaped Michael’s lips before he realized what he said.
Janice swiveled in her seat. “We were scared, Mike…not disappointed.”
Karen made a point to look at Sawyer’s face when Janice spoke. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his tiny glances in the rearview mirror that he felt the same.
Karen squeezed Michael’s knee and felt his hand cover hers.
The cabin nestled between a backdrop of pine trees and a massive meadow in front. A crystal blue lake stretched out several hundred feet from the cabin and meandered beyond the road.
“It’s beautiful up here,” Karen observed aloud.
“We don’t get up here nearly as much as we should,” Janice said.
“Zach and I made it up here a lot when we were teenagers.”
“What a fabulous escape.” Karen would love to have had a place like this to run to when she was a kid.
Sawyer pulled his truck alongside the others and everyone piled out. The crisp air was at least fifteen degrees cooler than that down in Hilton. Karen couldn’t help but toss her arms wide and suck in the freshness of the open space. “My lungs aren’t going to know what to do with all this clean air.”
“Maybe we can convince you both to visit more often.” Janice’s words reminded Karen that this would probably be her one and only visit, a sobering thought.
The inside of the cabin smelled as all closed-in wooden structures do. A mixture of moisture, dust, and oak made Karen think of spiders and possible unwanted four-legged vermin.
Janice and Rena strode into the cabin and began opening all the windows to let the light in and the air out. Hannah took the stairs to what Karen assumed was the sleeping loft, and soon the mountain breeze could be felt in the middle of the giant open room.
“Girls are on the right and boys are on the left!” Hannah yelled from upstairs.
Eli ran up the stairs with his backpack and Joe set up a playpen for Susie on the front porch. After a few trips back and forth to the trucks, each one with armloads of supplies, food, and luggage, Karen finally made it upstairs to see where they’d be sleeping. It was like sixth grade camp all over again. Only instead of the boys being in cabins across the lake, they were in the same room with only a curtain separating the sexes.
Eli had tucked a personal blanket around what looked like a stuffed alligator into a small bunk and sat next to said alligator to talk to him.
“Eat spiders, Nate.”
Hannah ran downstairs and Karen found herself alone with Eli. Not that she minded. She’d always loved kids, even the small ones.
Karen sat on the edge of the bed closest to Eli’s and asked, “Does Nate eat the spiders?”
Eli’s eyes grew wide when he gave an enthusiastic nod. “Yeah.”
“Oh, well when he’s done eating the spiders can he eat them on our side of the room? I don’t like spiders either.”
Eli’s big deer-in-the-headlight eyes blinked several times before he shoved his chubby little hand into his backpack and removed another stuffed friend. This one was a small cat. He looked at the cat, then to Nate and apparently decided that the alligator would do a better job of protecting him from spiders so then he handed the stuffed animal to Karen.
She couldn’t help but think poor Eli was giving up his backup plan; she decided to make a game of the spider worry.
“That’s a very nice cat. What’s his name?”
“Kitty.”
“That’s a great name. Appropriate, too.”
Eli smiled.
Karen stood and wandered to her side of the huge room and looked around as if inspecting the most likely place for a spider to hide.