The Charm Offensive

She pressed her palm on her stomach before knocking on Ella’s bedroom door. “Hey, sweetie.”

Ella sat in the middle of a queen-size bed in a room painted pale lavender and decorated with fuzzy pillows, plump stuffed animals and a thick down comforter. It was the room Sophie and Tessa had never had as children. Ella had picked out everything to make her bedroom cozy. Sophie wished Tessa had been there. Sophie wished Tessa could see how accomplished her daughter had become. Sophie wished...

Ella pressed Pause on her CD player, drawing a smile from deep inside Sophie. These days she couldn’t order audiobooks fast enough for her niece.

“Do we have extra cotton balls?” Ella asked.

“In my bathroom.” The colored markers Sophie had found at the craft store last week covered Ella’s bed. Years ago, Sophie had taught Ella her colors through scent. Discovering scented markers had ignited Ella’s other passion besides books: art. “How many do you need?”

Ella pressed her palm against the upper corner of a poster board. “Enough to glue here for my clouds.” Then she frowned. “Or should the rainbow be above the clouds?”

“The rainbow can be anyplace you want it. So can the clouds.” Sophie touched the intricate braids that Ruthie had formed into her niece’s hair. She wanted so much for Ella to see how much she looked like a princess. “It’s your picture. Your art to create.”

“Do you think Mother will like it?” Ella asked.

Sophie’s heart stalled as if clogged by those extra cotton balls. “She’ll love it.”

“After we add the clouds and I finish the rainbow, you’ll help me write ‘welcome home,’ right?” Ella ran her hands over the rainbow arc she’d formed with thin, flexible wax strips.

The joy in Ella’s tone stole Sophie’s heart, and her throat swelled, feeling stuffed by another bunch of cotton balls. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“She’ll be home in nineteen days,” Ella said. “So I need to be ready soon.”

“About that.” Sophie sat on the bed. “I talked to your mother today.”

Ella’s hands stilled on her picture. “Is she excited to come home?”

A guardedness tightened Ella’s voice as if to protect the joy. Sophie swallowed her scream of anger. Her niece didn’t deserve this amount of pain. “She’s excited to see you.” Sophie hugged Ella, wanting the contact to be more comfort than her empty words, but knew it’d never be enough. “But she needs to stay a little while longer.”

“Then she isn’t excited to see me.” Ella dismantled her rainbow and her joy.

“Oh, sweetie, she wants to see you,” Sophie said. “She wants to be home, but she needs to finish her therapy.”

“She could do her therapy here.” Ella twisted the wax strips in her fingers.

Sophie resented that small kernel of hope in Ella’s voice. Sophie had had that same hope bubble when she was Ella’s age. Her grandmother would pop it with the harsh truth. Over the years, Sophie’s hope bubbles had shrunk in size until they were small enough for Sophie to hide in places her grandmother couldn’t poke.

Ella rushed on. “They have yoga here. I heard Taylor’s mom talking to another mom about their afternoon yoga class over on Market.”

She hated that she’d stomp on Ella’s hope now. She’d never wanted that for this precious girl. “It isn’t the same.”

How Sophie wanted it to be the same. To be that simple.

“It’s better.” Ella smashed the purple modeling clay in her fist. “Her family is here. I’m here. You’re here. There’s yoga here.”

And there was nothing else Sophie could say. She couldn’t promise Ella that Tessa would be home soon. Tessa always found a reason to delay. She’d tell Ella that her mother loved her as usual, but Sophie was too mad at her sister to spend the time to convince Ella it was true. Mothers weren’t supposed to break their daughters’ hearts. Her chest ached and her stomach tightened into knots no Yogi master could release. She’d tried to soften the hurt every time, but the pain was always there. “I’ll go get those cotton balls.”

“There’s no rush.” Ella pushed her drawing across the bed and picked up her headphones. “I’m going to finish my book.”

Ella rolled over onto her side, away from Sophie. Sophie ached. Ella ached, too. Yet no tears dampened either of their faces. But Sophie always dried Ella’s tears and teased away the disappointment. The tissues she’d shoved into her pocket before talking to Ella remained untouched. When had they stopped caring? Ella could see the truth better than most people with twenty-twenty vision. She could see better than her own mother. Sophie’s ache spread like a poison vine, strangling every bone, every vein, consuming her.

Sophie tapped Ella’s shoulder. “I’m going to change over the laundry, then we’ll figure out dinner.”

Ella nodded and covered her ears with her headphones.

Sophie carried Ella’s hamper down into the basement. She wasn’t sure if she smelled the lavender-scented detergent first before she splashed into the water. Or if the water ran into her shoes up to her ankles before the lavender coated every breath, failed to calm her and instead encouraged rage.

She did know that the ancient overflowing washing machine with soap bubbles everywhere and a waterfall streaming up and over the lid became the topper to her rotten day.

She sloshed through the water and kicked the appliance. “Clean underwear. That’s all I wanted.” She kicked the machine again. “That can’t be too much to ask.”

It was too much to ask for her father to tell Sophie about needing money. It was too much to ask for the gala sponsors to show professional courtesy and give Sophie more time before backing out. It was too much to ask for her sister to come home when she’d promised.

But clean underwear was not too much to ask.

Except, apparently, it was.

Water squished inside her shoes. The sound made something switch inside Sophie, as if she’d sprung a leak, too. Or more than a leak. A burst pipe. A broken water main. A knocked-over fire hydrant.

Ruthie had given Sophie a wooden baseball bat for protection when the Pooch had first opened. Sophie had bought one for every floor of the building as her tightened security plan met a limited budget. She grabbed the bat from the hook on the wall and descended on the washer.

Sophie had definitely had enough.

How much was one person expected to handle? She lifted the bat over her head like a club.

“Clean underwear. That’s all I requested.” She smacked the bat against the washing-machine lid. The impact vibrated up her arms, jolted through her shoulders, then splintered down each vertebra. But something aligned inside her or maybe some things finally aligned like the rage, despair, disgust and fear she felt. She smashed the lid again.

That pressure valve inside her twisted open another notch. Tears tangled with her eyelashes and splattered against her cheeks. Her attack on the washer continued.

A hit for her family’s betrayal. A crack for her pain. A series of smashes for Ella’s anguish.

Sophie hardly recognized herself, but she didn’t care. The corner of the washer crumpled beneath the bat’s assault.

“Why?” She slammed the bat against the top. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Added one more swing, and shouted, “Why?”

Each breath was more ragged and unsteady than the last. She set her stance, readied the bat. One last hit. Sanity threatened, but she had one final shot inside her.

“You piece of crap.” She swung the baseball bat. The front paneling caved in. A control knob flipped through the air, plopped into the water and sank. Sophie’s anger slowed to a drip as if that valve had been twisted shut. Or maybe she’d used up her emotion and was like an empty well. Either way, clarity and reason finally spilled through her: she had to deal with the water. Now.

She tossed the bat aside and dropped to her hands and knees to search for the drain that was somewhere in the middle of the room. She’d replaced the plastic drain cover after it broke several months ago. Soapy water splashed her face. One more hit of cold reality.

How was she going to fix this? She had to fix this so she could have clean underwear on when she found her father. She needed clean underwear on when she walked into Beth Perkins’s corner cubicle at Pacific Bank and Trust and paid off her loan in full in less than four weeks.

She would not be defeated by an ancient washing machine or her father.

She crawled through the suds, skimming her hands over the cement floor, keeping her search for the drain in the forefront of her mind and the panic at bay.

Sophie had been in the fourth grade when her parents had abandoned her sister and Sophie to their one-room apartment. Sophie had returned from school and found a handwritten note taped to the refrigerator where schoolwork and kids’ drawings should have hung: “If you girls are wise and careful, you can make the groceries last two weeks until we return.”

Sophie had managed the two weeks without panicking. She’d panicked on day twenty-one when all of the food was gone and her parents still weren’t home. She’d panicked on the twenty-fourth day when Ms. Dormer, her fourth-grade teacher, had knocked on the apartment door after following the girls home from school. She’d been nervous when Ms. Dormer drove her to the pawn shop to sell her mother’s gold necklace to buy the bus tickets from Tahoe City to San Francisco. And she’d worried during the first hour of the bus ride that the authorities would separate her and her sister before they’d arrived at their grandmother’s house. She’d finally contained every molecule of anxiety when her grandmother had stepped out of that fog surrounding the bus station and wrapped one thin arm around Sophie’s small but stubborn shoulders.

Sophie hadn’t truly panicked since then.

She refused to panic now. A broken washer had nothing on her past.

She’d overcome this, too. She had to for another, more important child.

CHAPTER SIX

BRAD JAMMED HIS finger against the buzzer to Sophie’s upstairs apartment. Everything remained dark inside the Pampered Pooch. The store had been closed for almost an hour. That wasn’t his concern. It was the violent thudding that seemed to be coming from Sophie’s basement. Sophie might be a con artist, but he didn’t want her hurt until after he’d discovered the truth. Even then, the thought of Sophie suffering made his skin feel a little too tight. He really had to get the woman out of his system.

Another bang vibrated the night air. It wasn’t the crack of gunshots or glass shattering. Still, he wanted inside.

This was the only access to her upstairs apartment other than the wooden fire escape at the back of the building that exited to the doggy play yard. There was an entrance to the alley leading to the yard with a back door to the Pampered Pooch and a door to the basement. This he’d learned from a quick text to Matt.

He rang the buzzer again and hit the call button for Sophie’s cell number, also supplied in a text from Matt. Her voice mail picked up. Silence ricocheted between the buildings and that doubled Brad’s urgency to get inside.

Just then a young voice echoed through the intercom. “Yes?”

Brad pressed the button. “Ella, this is Brad. We met this morning in the pet store.”

Static coated Ella’s voice. “Did you find more kittens?”

“Not this time.” Brad inhaled, forcing himself to slow his words. “Ella, where’s your aunt?”

“Hold on, Brad. Ruthie is calling and I have to answer or she’ll worry.”

Brad closed his eyes and rested his head next to the intercom, which Ella hadn’t clicked off. She exchanged a rapid series of nonsensical words that he quickly deduced was a sort of code. He admired their concern for Ella’s safety.

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