4

After leaving the hockey player’s house, Dakota went to her favorite Chinese place and ordered a take-out feast. Normally, she wouldn’t spend this kind of money on restaurant food, especially the stuff that was deep fried and/or covered with salty and or sugary sauce, but today was cause for celebration. She’d just secured another regular client. If she managed to get herself a few more regulars, she might be able to move out sooner than she’d originally anticipated.

“Koko!” Zinny jumped up and ran to her when she came in the door. When Zinny had just been learning how to talk, every time she tried to say “Dakota,” all she could manage was “Koko,” so she’d been Koko ever since.

“Zinnia, no running in the house!” came Ellen’s voice from the kitchen.

Situated in a solidly middle class neighborhood, Ellen’s house was a modest three-bedroom bungalow with an attached garage and a neatly tended garden. Everything about the place was well taken care of, not to mention clean, but not particularly new. Ellen used to work for a bank, but she’d retired soon after the accident and seemed to have more than enough money to take Dakota and Zinny under her stiff wing.

After removing her shoes and lining them up neatly near the front door, Dakota hugged Zinny as best she could, given that she was laden with bags of yummy take-out.

“You brought Chinese food!”

“I did, baby.”

“Is it Nana’s birthday?” she asked, hopping on her tiptoes as they both walked toward the kitchen. Ellen stood at the counter, mashing potatoes.

“No, it most certainly is not Nana’s birthday,” Ellen said, hands on her hips. “You should have called. I defrosted pork chops.”

“I’m sorry,” Dakota said. “I was in the mood for Chinese.”

Which was true. What was also true was that sometimes she had to have something other than meat and potatoes or go out of her mind. Having come from hardy farm stock, Ellen believed in stick-to-your-ribs food. All her favorite recipes had been handed down to her from family members. The trouble was, Ellen didn’t always follow the recipes and her dishes suffered for it. She regularly over or undercooked things. Odds were she’d have turned those pork chops into dust.

Ellen gave the food a sidelong glance. “Well, we can’t very well let the food you bought go to waste, so we’ll just have the pork chops tomorrow.”

Waste was another sin in Ellen’s book.

“Yippee!” Zinny yelled. “Koko, you get the plates. I’ll get the forks and napkins.”

Dakota gave Ellen a grateful look.

“You look tired,” Ellen said.

“It’s been a really long day. The house I was cleaning was a real challenge. A six bedroom, five-and-a-half bath mansion belonging to a professional hockey player. A bachelor.”

“Zinny,” Ellen said, “the fork goes on the left and that knife is facing the wrong way. It should be blade in.”

Zinny dutifully paid more attention to her task. Ellen insisted that the place settings be centered on the table and that the plates were centered on the placemats. Napkins should be folded just so and spoons should be on the table, even if they weren’t eating anything that required a spoon.

“A hockey player?” Ellen momentarily stopped mashing and frowned. “A professional?”

“Yes.”

“Athletes serve no purpose in society,” Ellen said. “If they all disappeared, it would be no loss at all. I suppose you deserve Chinese after dealing with a useless jock all day.”

After putting the potatoes and pork chops into the refrigerator, Ellen poured all the Chinese food into serving dishes and set out glasses of water for herself and Dakota, a glass of milk for Zinny. Personally, Dakota thought dirtying four serving dishes was dumb when the food came in perfectly good containers to start with, but she’d learned long ago to choose her battles.

“You didn’t get enough forks, Zinny,” Ellen pointed out.

With a sly grin, Zinny pulled a pair of paper-covered chopsticks from behind her back. “Because I want to use these!”

“You don’t know how to use chopsticks,” Ellen said, dishing some of the food out to Zinny and herself.

“I can learn,” Zinny replied. “I can learn anything if I put my mind to it.”

As she spooned some of the food onto her own plate, Dakota pressed her lips together in an effort not to smile. Ellen said that very thing to Zinny all the time.

“Suit yourself,” Ellen said. “You’re just going to get frustrated and your food will get cold.”

Dakota fetched another pair from the bag and showed Zinny how to hold them.

“This one, you tuck right here. The other one, you hold like a pencil. That’s the one that does all the moving. Like this.”

Zinny watched her, a frown line appearing between her eyebrows. “Like this?”

“Almost. See how my thumb doesn’t move?” Dakota picked up a piece of black bean chicken and ate it. “Oh, you almost had it.”

“That’s a girl,” Ellen said, belatedly jumping on the bandwagon. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Zinny struggled for a few more minutes. Dakota ate as she watched and encouraged her.

“Zinnia, like I said, your food’s getting cold,” Ellen eventually said.

But both women knew Zinny had determination by the boatload. She would sit there all night trying before she’d give up.

Finally, she got a tentative grip on a piece of broccoli.

Dakota held her breath. “You’ve got it, Zinny, careful…careful—you did it!”

Bouncing up and down in her chair, Zinny beamed as the chewed the broccoli. “I did it! I did it!”

Dakota high fived her. “Good job, sweetie.”

“Did you see, Nana? I did it!”

Ellen smiled. “I’m very proud of you, angel, but don’t talk with your mouth full.”

Zinny turned back to her plate and tried to pick up another piece of food. It took her much less time to repeat her triumph and it wasn’t long before she was succeeding more often than not.

“So, I brought something else home other than Chinese food,” Dakota said.

“What?”

“Zinnia,” Ellen said. “Drink your milk.”

“Want a hint?” Dakota asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes, please,” Ellen said.

“Yes, please,” Zinny said.

“It’s two pieces of paper that look exactly alike.”

Zinny got that look on her face that said she was trying to figure something out. She loved mysteries and puzzles, adored solving things.

“Is it money?”

“No, but good guess.”

“Give me another hint. Please,” Zinny added after glancing at Ellen.

“There is printing on the paper. A date, a time and a title.”

Zinny’s eyes narrowed. Dakota loved watching the child think. Those little wheels were always turning—from the time she woke up to the moment she fell asleep. Someday, Dakota swore she would have the luxury of spending as much time with Zinny as she wanted. It was too bad Eye Candy Maids didn’t offer benefits. Dakota had done the math and she’d have to clean a hell of a lot more hours in order to buy insurance independently. Still, cleaning Cameron Bowes’s house today was a step in the right direction.

Zinny’s gasp pulled Dakota out of her thoughts.

“It’s tickets!”

“Good girl. It’s tickets for A Puppy in New York.”

Zinny shrieked and Ellen clapped her hands over her ears. “KOKO, THANK YOU! All the kids at school were talking about that movie this week and I wanted to see it so bad. You’re the best aunt in the whole world.”

“It’s a school night,” Ellen said, frowning.

“I know,” Dakota said. “But it’s an early show. In fact, it’s so early, we have to leave in five minutes.”

“We’ll do all the dishes before we go, Nana,” Zinny said, which meant Dakota would.

“All right,” Ellen said. “I’ll give you some money for Milk Duds. A movie’s not a movie without a box of Milk Duds.”


Later that night when Dakota was tucking Zinny into bed, she noticed her demeanor was quite a bit dampened. She’d have attributed it to fatigue since it was an hour past her bedtime, but there was more to it than a need for sleep.

“Zinny, is there something wrong?”

Her tiny little mouth pursed.

“It’s okay,” Dakota coaxed. “You can tell me. You can tell me anything.”

“I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”

“But you love school. Are you feeling okay?” She put a hand to Zinny’s forehead, but it was cool to the touch.

“My tummy doesn’t.”

Dakota might have thought it was too much popcorn, but again, her intuition said no.

“Is there something going on tomorrow that you don’t want to do?”

Dakota remembered hating having to give speeches. She’d also hated the days when they held the physical fitness tests.

Zinny kept her eyes downcast. “The other kids don’t play with me.”

This was new. Before, Zinny would be bursting with stories about what she did at school and how fun playing four-square was.

“Why not? Did something happen?”

Zinny pulled the covers up over her mouth and nose. “I don’t know. They say I’m dirty. They won’t play with me because I’m dirty.”

“But you take a bath every night, baby.”

“I told them that and they said it didn’t matter. They said I was dirty because you’re the custodian.”

Dakota took a deep breath. This explained so much. This was the reason why Zinny had wanted Dakota to buy a bottle of hand sanitizer to keep in her backpack. This was probably why Zinny had pretended not to notice Dakota waving hello at her from across the cafeteria on Friday. Dakota felt a cold anger replace the confusion but she controlled it for her niece’s sake.

She smoothed Zinny’s hair. “Honey, do you know what a custodian is?”

“It’s the person who cleans all the rooms after the kids are gone and who wipes up all the gross stuff, like barf.”

“That’s true, but beyond that, a custodian is a person who takes care of things. It can be a person or a dog or even a place, like your school. I take my job as custodian very seriously because your school is where all the kids learn what they need to know. That’s very important. My job is more than just cleaning up barf. It’s my job to make the school a good place for learning and nothing’s more important than children learning.”

Zinny nodded. “Okay. I’ll tell them that.”

But the sad expression on her face made Dakota’s heart hurt. Zinny probably didn’t think it would work and unfortunately, Dakota agreed, but this was the only idea she had right now.

She leaned over and kissed Zinny on the cheek. “Good night, honey. I love you.”

A little while later, Dakota got into bed herself. While her heart ached at the thought of Zinny being ostracized in the play yard, she also burned with anger. How dare those little brats tell Zinny she was dirty by association? She wished she could go into that yard tomorrow morning and talk to every one of those kids, face to face. They had no right to make Zinny feel like a second-class citizen. Maybe they were all just jealous because Zinny was so much brighter than they were. That was probably it.

She’d have to talk to the teacher about this, and Dakota dreaded that. Ms. Peterson already didn’t like Zinny. When the teacher found out Zinny’s reading level at the beginning of the school year, she petitioned the principal to move Zinny up to the third grade. Ms. Peterson liked everything to be just so. Dakota sometimes thought she and Ellen would have made great friends because in Ms. Peterson’s room, Dakota had to make sure all the tables and chairs were lined up exactly according to the little pieces of tape on the floor to mark the correct placement. Each afternoon, even though it wasn’t part of her job description, Dakota was expected to sharpen all the pencils so they were the same length. Order was the rule of the day in Ms. Peterson’s room and Zinny didn’t fit in. She was the pencil that didn’t match the others.

But Dakota wouldn’t allow them to skip Zinny to the third grade. All the kids would be two years older and fitting in would be impossible. If she continued at that pace, she’d be going to high school at the age of twelve. Like that was going to happen. No. Instead, they compromised and arranged for Zinny to go to reading in the other classroom and go back to her first grade room for everything else. And this annoyed Ms. Peterson. She didn’t like the disruption. She definitely wouldn’t like being confronted with the bullying taking place right under her nose.

But even though Dakota hated confrontation, she would do it for Zinny’s sake. She couldn’t allow the other children to continue making Zinny a pariah. She didn’t like the idea that they thought less of Dakota herself either. They needed to be taught to respect other people and the jobs they did, because, if this didn’t happen, Zinny might come to lose respect for Dakota and that thought made her stomach clench.