A Little Bit of Trouble (2 page)

Who You Gonna Call? Call Lucas!

     My new
fucking motto. Whether it’s to deal with a junkie, or lick stamps for hours, or if you need to host a low calorie cake party for
females only
but don’t have a venue… who you gonna call? Call Lucas!

     “Pass me the fudge sauce,” Summer demands
. Is she fucking serious? It’s right between us both. I look at her in disbelief and fold my arms across my chest, meaning NO, in case you didn’t catch that. With an eye roll she grabs it herself and starts decorating the chocolate cake before her. My kitchen looks like it has been attacked by a tornado of flour and eggs. Fuck, this is so stupid.

    
So many cakes, so many colors. I need to slip away, this is a
girls only
thing yet guess who gets roped into helping… and again… who you gonna call? Call Lucas!

     “Lucas, zip me up,” Maya asks and comes out of MY bedroom wearing a tight black dress with a long zip up the back.

Why me?

   
There are twelve other females here. TWELVE! I feel like I’m in the center of an episode of ‘Sex and the City’ on steroids. With a grunt I fumble with the tiny zip and pull it up, following the dip of her spine.

     “I’m going,” I say and step around her.

     “Lucas!” Maya whines and gives me the big eyes and pouty lower lip. “You promised you’d help.” Fuck my stupid promises, fuck that cute look on her face. She sees me relent and smiles… stupid, stupid, stupid.

     Sometimes I despise myself. This moment clearly being one of those times.

     “Done!” Summer suddenly shouts, startling us both.
She wipes her arm across her forehead, smudging the chocolate sauce that was already there and adding flour to it too. “Shower time!”

      “She looks far
too happy for someone who has been baking for ten hours,” I whisper to Maya who nods slowly in agreement.

     “She’
ll crash soon. When we were in College together, she’d always do this. And then suddenly,” she clicks her fingers. “Gone for about twenty hours. She once stayed up for three nights and was fine until she started hallucinating.”

     “Oh my god, that was so funny,” in comes Marie, she takes one look at the mess in the kitchen and takes a step backwards out of the door.
Apparently she’s going to stay there. “She kept shouting at us in a half awake half asleep like state. Apparently, if you leave a house wearing a jacket it’s called…”

      “Driving a truck,” Maya finishes and they both start cackling. I feel like someone just pierced my ear drum with something sharp.
Ouch. They need to tone down their laughter a few notches. “And… and we have to… oh god I can’t breathe… so funny! We have to take the light bulb out and feed it to the plant.”

      “What did you do?” I ask, out of interest and maybe so I don’t have to clean this mess.

      “Took her to bed and watched a movie,” Marie responds with a shrug. “What else would we do?”

Possibly attempt to feed the light bulb to the plant, I’ve seen you all do weirder shit.

     Someone knocks on the door and rings the bell three times. “Why couldn’t you do this at your place?”

     “Who was going to look after Evelyn?” Maya says as if I’m stupid. “And James for that matter.
Where’s he going to go with Evelyn?” Umm… here? I’d rather have my niece and my brother than… this.

     Who you gonna call? “I would have
had Evelyn, if you’d explained what would happen if I didn’t say yes.” Not that I would have said no. My niece is gorgeous, and so happy. Always giggling and smiling. “Look, I have to go to a bar and drink beer and shit. Make sure this is tidy by the time I get back.”

     “But…”

     “Let the man go, there’s plenty of us here,” Marie says with a wince as more screaming girls enter my apartment. I give her a grateful smile, kiss Maya on the cheek, ignoring her hand on my ass. She does this a lot, especially in front of James who just rolls his eyes. The best thing to do is ignore her, if you react… you give her fuel to do more. Actually even if you don’t react it’s pretty much the same either way. As I step past Marie she pinches my ass, I bat her hand away, grab my jacket, keys and wallet off the desk by the door and run.

    
Finally. Freedom!

     I feel ready to go and get some dinner, some high calorie, full of grease and bad shit, food. The options in this area of food are endless unfortunately which makes it harder to choose what I feel like having.

    
Amelia is with Sylvia at some charity function, Sylvia is my brother’s adoptive mother, James is probably sleeping and if he’s not he won’t want to take Evelyn out anyway unless it’s to the park, that man has it bad for his little girl. It’s almost sickening how smitten he is with her.

    
Why do I have no friends outside of James and Maya and their group? Of course I’ve met people at work but nobody I’m close enough with to call and ask to lunch without them thinking I’m gay or weird.

     Crystal and I used to go to lunch together every Thursday, just time
alone for the two of us. The girls went to nursery while we worked, so we’d take an extra-long lunch break every Thursday if possible and just sit and eat and catch up without the stresses of home and kids and life. It was our little escape from reality. It’s funny that those stresses, which seemed so bad at the time, now that she’s gone… they seem so tiny and idiotic.

     Now I’m just being fucking morbid, burger time it is.

     My cell rings not long after I finish my fast food lunch. I answer without checking the caller ID. I really should stop doing that. I’m not used to being so popular, the calls I get sometimes are just weird. Last week someone called, offering to pay me just under sixty thousand dollars for information on what Johnson’s, Maya’s pharmaceutical company, is currently working on. I hung up. I’ve had teenagers contacting me with conspiracies, asking if it’s true we create chemicals to be used in war.

     That was the funniest because in all honestly, Johnson’s is just a normal pharmaceutical company… I think. Either way, I don’t ask.

     “Hello?” I ask and finish my last fry. “Hello?”

     “Lucas, buddy!” oh fuck off. “It’s Patch!” Yeah, I can fucking tell. “Have you seen Dana?”

     “Nah, I haven’t seen Dana since the night she escaped from her cell.” Her cell meaning the room she stayed in whilst attempting to go cold turkey.

     “Ah, shit man. That puts me on a real downer. If you see her. Call me.”

     No fucking way. I hang up without replying. Patch, a stupid ass name for a stupid ass guy that I never want to see again. He’s a freak, although he’s also a really nice guy. But overly nice in a weird way, he met me one time for ten minutes and went on about how cool a guy I am. He was high and is also one of Dana’s drug party buddies.

     I can’t help but wonder what the hell kind of shit Dana has gotten herself into now. A part of me wishes t
hat I’d never gone round to her apartment when I was evicted with Amelia, this was just after meeting Maya. I didn’t know how bad she’d gotten and figured she’d let us crash at hers. Let’s just say I couldn’t get out of that mold infested shithole fast enough. It was disgusting, she had empty drug packets laying around, moldy food and old newspapers strewn about. Even a rat has better standards of living.

     Dana used to be Crystal’s closest friend through High School. We all hung out together and often as we shared the same group of friends. She was there when Crystal was pregnant with both of our girls and there up until Crystal and Annie died. So I feel obligated to her in a way, even though I’ve helped her already and it has amounted to shit, I know Crystal would want me to keep on trying. My respect for my Wife and the memory of the old Dana before she turned to heavy drugs are the reasons why, when she contacted me over a year ago asking for help, I went to her aid.

    Last I heard after that little debacle, she was clean. I haven’t seen her since I caught her after she came to me for cash. By ‘caught her’, I mean I threw her in the trunk of my car, fixed a couple of more locks on the door to her empty bedroom and even added a cat flap so Patch could feed her without causing injury to himself or her.

     This was not
kidnap by the way, she wanted to get clean, and so the room and such was all her idea. Unfortunately though, during the process of cold turkey your desperation for a hit overtakes your willpower to succeed in becoming clean.

     I hope she’s dealing with her shit okay, I know she got away from Patch and his weird buddy Peanut… don’t ask… they’re still high ninety percent of the time and she needed to get away from that temptation. Definitely a smart move to make. Fingers crossed they don’t find her and fingers crossed she doesn’t relapse. If she hasn’t already that is.

Sylvia
: Amelia says she’s staying here tonight. I’ll take her to school in the morning.

Lucas
: Okay then. Have you got her uniform?

Sylvia
: Marie is dropping it off in an hour or so. After their cake thing.

Lucas
: Tell Marie I said thanks. And thanks for having her Sylvia.

     Now what am I supposed to do? Everyone’s busy doing something! I won’t go home, not whilst that stupid ass low calorie cake party is going on. Who actually throws an event like this? I’ve never heard of it before… not that I’ve ever been in the right kind of social standing to have an invite to one before.

James’ it is.

     “Hey,” James says a little breathlessly as I enter his apartment. “Welcome to hell.”

     What? “What?”

     “I dunno, she has colic or something. She hasn’t stopped screaming,” my ears twitch at the sound of the high pitched wail coming from the child in his arms. Evelyn wriggles and squirms trying to get away. “I’ve tried hugging her, playing with her, winding her, feeding her, etc. I’m
going crazy here.”

     “Have you tried putting her down?” I chuckle and snatch the little squealer from his arms. I carry her into the room like one would carry a football, she loves it. See? Giggling already. In a couple of minutes I have a play mat on the floor for her and a bunch of toys for her age scattered around. Once I sit her down, she instantly starts gnawing on my finger. “She’s teething.”

     “She’s not crying!” he gasps in disbelief.

     “You cuddle her too much. We get it, you don’t want to let her out of your sight but give the poor kid some freedom.”

     “I let her play in the bouncer,” he grumbles.

     “Dude, she’s confined in the bouncer. She’s Maya’s kid… freedom is something that runs through her blood… ouch. She just bit me,” and then she laughs, and by god she looks like her
mother. “Dear god. What have you spawned?”

     James rolls his eyes and sits beside his daughter on the floor. She completely ignores him. He’s obsessed, just like he is with Maya. She’s indifferent, just like Maya. It’s the funniest relationship I’
ve ever seen between parents and their child. This kid has mischief written all over her, hiding behind innocent beauty.

     “James,” I grab him by his arm and lift him up.
Grunt. Dude’s heavy. “Let’s go do some grownup shit and leave the baby to do her baby shit. Okay?”

     “DADADA
DADA,” screams the chubby little girl happily from the floor as if saying goodbye in her own language. Damn she’s clever.

     “Told you so,” I snort and pull a dejected James from the room. It’s rare he gets her all to himself and she’s a
Mommy’s girl so when Maya is home she wants her mommy all the time. He hates it, it makes him jealous. Evelyn apparently doesn’t let him tuck her in after her mom, he has to kiss her goodnight before so Maya is the last person she sees before sleeping. She doesn’t let him feed her, or change her or even play with her if Maya is there and even when she’s not there the kid just makes it difficult. I feel bad for the guy but it’s still as funny as a dancing dog in a tutu. Or maybe that kitten with tubes on its legs making it walk like a robot. I’m trailing off…

     “Hungry?” James asks around a yawn, he’s stood in the doorway, one eye on his daughter at all times.

     “Just eaten.”

     “So, what do you need?”

     Straight to the point. “Actually, I just came to visit. Your
Wife is trashing my house. Sylvia has Amelia at a charity function. You have Evelyn on your own so I figured you’d be the best bet.”

     “Cool,” his eyes are still on the baby. We head back through to the room, I force him to sit on the
sofa and watch instead of interacting with her. She rolls a few times, grabs a teething ring from the ground and starts chewing. She rolls back, her chunky little legs are stuck out poker straight, and starts hitting her teddy on the head with the same teething ring. “She gets more and more like her mother every effing day.”