Juno peeked at her from behind her book. “I heard it.”
She lifted her chin to what Juno was reading. “Your library book about lizards mentions brothels?”
“No, it was in a movie I watched with Pops.”
Jess leaned an elbow on the dining table next to her abandoned bowl of oatmeal and slid her gaze over to Pops sitting innocently in the lounger. He scanned his crossword puzzle, saying casually, “It was on some history channel.” He flipped a page. “Practically a documentary.”
“A documentary about brothels, Pops? It can’t wait until she’s, I don’t know, ten?”
Upside-down Juno grinned at her victoriously. “I looked it up in the dictionary you got me.”
Dammit.
Pigeon darted off the couch barely a second before Juno slid the rest of the way to the floor, landing in a giggling, crumpled pile. Sitting right-side-up again, she flipped her head back, leaving her hair a tangled mess around her head. “It was a movie about Billy the Kid.”
Jess looked at Pops again. “Young Guns?” she said incredulously. “My seven-year-old watched Young Guns.”
“In my defense,” he said, still not bothering to glance up, “we were watching Frozen again and I fell asleep. When I woke up, she’d changed the channel and got invested. You want me to keep her from learning history?”
Juno skipped to Jess’s side and peered down at her laptop. Clearly Jess was grasping at straws; she’d actually typed Second Grade Art Projects into the search bar.
“I already know what I want to do for my project,” Juno said. “I want to do an art tape amusement park with a roller coaster, a carousel, tiny screaming people, and a Tilt-A-Whirl.”
“Honey, while I appreciate your ambition, that is a lot of work.” Jess paused. And giant, and messy, with five thousand sticky tiny pieces that would end up on Juno, Jess, the furniture, and the cat. “Also, I’m worried you’d tell Mrs. Klein how you arrived at roller coasters for art inspiration.”
“I wouldn’t tell her that I know what brothels are.”
“Maybe we could start by not repeating the word brothel.” Jess tucked a strand of hair behind Juno’s ear. “What about a hot air balloon collage? We can cut pictures out of magazines and glue them to a poster board.”
Her daughter was clearly not tempted.
Jess turned back to the screen and clicked on a list of projects. “These pinwheels are pretty. Or a Popsicle stick bridge?”
Juno shook her head, furrowed brow pinned firmly in place. Hello again, Alec. She grabbed a book from a pile on the table and turned it to a page listing the Top Ten Amusement Parks Across the World.
“I want to do something cool and enter it in the North Park Festival of Arts.” Juno pointed a sparkly painted fingernail at an old photo. “This is Switchback Gravity Railroad. It’s the one the guy built so people would go here instead of the”—she leaned in, whispering—“brothels.” Straightening, she returned to normal volume. “But I don’t want to do that one because it only went six miles an hour and that’s only two miles an hour faster than Nana’s Rascal scooter when she broke her knee.”
Pops chuckled from his chair. “I thought she was going to mow someone over in that thing.”
Juno turned the page to a brightly colored coaster, one with a loop so huge Jess’s stomach lurched just imagining it. “I think I want to do Full Throttle at Magic Mountain,” she said. “Since you don’t have to work at Twiggs anymore, maybe we could go there tomorrow for Try Something New Sunday?”
Jess had called Daniel on her way home from GeneticAlly last night. He’d sounded mildly relived when Jess gave notice; she’d shown no promise as a barista. “That’s a long drive,” Jess told her.
“We could take the train,” Juno singsonged.
“I don’t know if the train goes that far north,” Jess sang back.
Her daughter leaned in close, pressing the tip of her nose to Jess’s. “It does. Pops checked.”
Jess glared at Pops again, but guilt still hadn’t induced him to look up from his crossword.
“Are you even tall enough to ride that?” she asked.
“We’ll put lifts in her shoes,” Pops offered, to which Juno responded with an ear-splitting screech as she ran over to tackle him.
Jess rubbed her temples, looking up when her phone vibrated on the table with an unknown number. Who would be calling at 8:15 a.m. on a Saturday?
The foggy window of her mind wiped clean. River.
She should answer. She should. He probably had the test results. But she couldn’t make her thumb swipe over the screen. She just let it vibrate in her hand before it went over to voicemail.
It wasn’t panic over the possibility that the results were confirmed late last night. It was the opposite: She’d lain awake until after two a.m. thinking of what she would do with the money. College savings. A better hearing aid for Pops. A little cushion in the bank. Now that she’d taken the leap and signed the contract, Jess didn’t want it snatched away.