Anything to get away from Nancy Spaulding.
EIGHT
Minnie didn’t speak a word until we had climbed the grand curving staircase that led up to the top rooms of the mini mansion. Then she turned to me with wide eyes and whispered,
“You have to be careful around here! You can’t be disrespectful or you’ll get into so much trouble. What’s you’re name, anyway?”
All this was said in a single breath, as though she’d been holding back the words until that moment.
“I’m Kira,” I told her. “K-i-r-a,” I felt compelled to add, remembering the misspelling on my cup down in the basement.
“Oh—I’m Minh—not Minnie,” she said, seeming to understand. “But around here, you better answer to whatever Ms. Nancy calls you or you’re gonna get in trouble.”
In the tour of the top part of the mansion that followed, I found out that Minh was Vietnamese. Her parents, who had been immigrants with no other family in the US, had been killed in a car wreck, the same way my mom had. We bonded over this shared tragedy and I soon came to think of her as my only friend.
She showed me the family bedrooms, which were decorated in lavish style, as well as what she called the “show bedrooms”—a term I didn’t understand until later.
In Nancy and Gary’s master bedroom, which had an ensuite bathroom with a massive marble Jacuzzi tub, I collected the dirty clothes from a tasteful wicker hamper. In Alexis’s room, which was decorated in pink and gold with an elaborate canopy bed fit for a princess, they were strewn all over the floor in a haphazard mess.
“Be extra careful with Miss Alexis’s and Ms. Nancy’s clothes,” Minh warned me as we gathered the clothes and put them in the basket. “If you mess them up, you’ll get into big trouble. Mr. Gary doesn’t care so much, but you still want to stay away from him,” she added darkly.
There was also a work room which was stocked with huge many-gallon jugs of vegetable oil and big bottles of cut-rate scent. There were boxes of many tiny glass bottles with eye-dropper tops too. This, it turned out, was where the bottles of “essential oils” the Spauldings sold in their multilevel marketing scheme were produced.
They were advertised as being the “finest, rarest, purest oils, each handcrafted with painstaking care.” When actually, they were all just liquid Crisco with a few drops of cheap scent in them.
The “handcrafted” part was right, though. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would be spending hours in this room, filling the tiny bottles from the big ones and adding exactly three drops of scent to each one. Then you had to slap on a scent label and pack the bottle into one of the half-empty cardboard boxes for shipping.
When our regular cleaning chores were done, this was what we “fosters” were expected to be doing. It was monotonous, mind-numbing work, but at least it was indoors. And in the heat of the Georgia summer or during the short winter months, which could turn surprisingly cold, filing the endless rows of essential oil bottles was better than being outside.
As Minh was explaining the exact formula for getting each little bottle to meet Nancy Spaulding’s exacting standards, a new girl who I hadn’t met yet came into the work room.
“Move, you little shits!” She pushed in past us, saying something that sounded like a curse word in Spanish.
I stared at her in surprise. Was she part of the family, treating us like this? But no, her skin was brown, like mine and she didn’t look anything like Nancy or Gary or Alexis. She was a short girl of maybe around sixteen with large breasts and hips and long black hair, twisted into a knot at the base of her neck.
“Sorry!” Minh squeaked, though she hadn’t done anything wrong. “That’s Maria,” she said to me, nodding at the other girl. “And Maria, this is Kira.”
“Huh, she doesn’t look like much.” Maria looked me over, a bitter sneer twisting her otherwise pretty features. “What’s she doing? I don’t need any help in the kitchen,” she added.
“She’s taking Tina’s place—she’s on laundry duty,” Minh told her.
“Well, good luck,” Maria said to me. “At least Mr. Gary won’t bother you—he don’t like girls with no tits.”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?” I looked down at myself. I was a late bloomer at that age—still as skinny as a boy, as was Minh. But in my innocence, I didn’t see why Gary Spaulding would care one way or another about my figure.
“Never mind. Just hope you don’t find out,” Maria said darkly. “Are you two here to make oil bottles or are you just going to stand there getting in my way?” she added, frowning.
“I’m just showing Kira the house,” Minh said quickly. “But I’ll come back up and help you in a minute if you want.”