Every Other Saturday (2 page)

One of many reasons Julia hated being the PTA president was that public speaking terrified her. It made her irritable and awkward; even more so when people like the Bernsteins were front and center. At least the biggest meeting of the year was over. Now there would be a bazillion smaller meetings, emails and phone calls, all filled with complaints and suggestions, which—Julia had learned—were pretty much the same thing.

She stopped by the girls’ restroom to splash water on her face and change into her work clothes, surrounded by pictorial hand-washing instructions and the Hebrew names for all the bathroom fixtures. Julia stowed her PTA Mom Outfit in her bag and put on the work boots and t-shirt she would wear to the hardware store. On impulse, she kept on the chunky metal necklace: one of her favorites. She’d welded it herself from some leftover chain and an old spigot at the store.

With her face dried and glasses replaced, she re-braided her dark hair and thought how surreal it was to be here. In her own school days, she’d been the artistic, punk kid whose primary extracurricular activity had been skipping class to smoke in the senior courtyard. Back then, Julia never would have imagined herself as a mother, much less president of the preschool PTA. “You’ll find you do what you have to do,” her father had told her once. “Especially when it comes to the people you love.”

In the hall, she passed the irritatingly graceful Debbie Bernstein, who was pacing with her phone and gave a quick wave. Julia hoped she hadn’t been too snarky with her this morning. Being a non-Jewish, struggling store owner at a fairly affluent religious preschool was hard enough, but Dave and Debbie always seemed to add to her irritation. They’d all been parents in the same class for three years, and she could never get past the feeling that they were flaunting their charmed life.

Even their divorce had been absurdly smooth and easy. They still showed up together for every school function and never showed signs of awkwardness. Just this morning, Julia had seen Dave Bernstein looking at his ex-wife in a way that was almost…loving. She couldn’t imagine having that kind of relationship with Adam. Hell, she could barely imagine a civil conversation with Adam.

A few kids were still on the playground, their parents lingering in conversation near the main door to the building. Julia spotted Mia first, playing intently with Lyric Bernstein in the shade-covered sandbox. Even under the shade tarp, Mia’s face—pale like Julia’s—was rosy with effort. Her short, straight black hair was plastered by sweat across her forehead in stark contrast to Lyric’s halo of light, kinky curls.

Julia’s son Brandon, who had graduated from Tree of Life preschool three years before, sat at the nearby picnic table with everyone’s favorite teacher, Ms. Elizabeth. They were playing some kind of card game. To her astonishment, Brandon—who had forced Julia to drag him crying and screaming into the school two hours earlier with the promise of a new Minecraft book—was now laughing and pumping his fist as he slammed down a card on the table in front of Elizabeth.

“Hey, Bran.” Julia put a hand on his shoulder. He jumped, startled, and Julia moved her hand away. She glanced at Elizabeth, who gave her a sympathetic smile.

“Hi, Mom,” Brandon said. “Elizabeth taught me a new game called math blackjack.”

“Awesome, buddy. Guess pretty soon I can take you to Vegas.” She called toward the sandbox. “Hey, Mia-Bird, ready to go?”

Mia did not look up from the pie tin she was filling with sand. “Five more minutes, Mom? Pleeeease? I’m pretending to be a cake cooker like Aunt Caroline.”

“Five minutes,” Julia conceded. Why rush? Weekday mornings were rarely busy at the hardware store, especially in the summer. The kids would be bored and whiny the minute they got there. She gestured for Brandon to get up so she could take his place on the bench. He crossed the play yard to sit experimentally on one of the larger tricycles, a good bit too small for him.

“How are you feeling?” she asked Elizabeth, inclining her head toward a large clear bottle of ice water dripping sweat rings onto the table. “Still having nausea?”

“It’s pretty much gone. I’ve been in the second trimester for a couple of weeks now.” The petite teacher sighed and touched her tiny belly reflexively, though there was nothing yet visible there as far as Julia could tell. “I’m just ready for cooler weather.”

Elizabeth was a slight, lively Asian woman of twenty-eight, who looked twenty-two: a distinct advantage working with children. She was one of only two teachers at the preschool who, like Julia, was not Jewish. And until her baby came in late January, she was one of few teachers who did not have her own children or grandchildren to keep her tied up on weekends. This, along with her obsession with finding projects and games for the kids on Pinterest, made her a favorite teacher during school and coveted babysitter on weekends.

Fortunately for the Mendel family, Elizabeth had also trained for a while in a therapeutic home for children with mental health issues, which meant that she understood Brandon’s OCD in a way most people did not.

“Did the meeting go okay?” Elizabeth asked.

“Stellar.” Julia glanced behind her and leaned in. “The Bernsteins are doing the Hanukkah auction.”

“Together?” Elizabeth grinned. “That should be fun.”

“I sort of forced them into it. I hope they won’t kill each other or anything.” Julia was admittedly fishing for a little preschool gossip. She was never home to watch soap operas, and the constant bickering between her two employees at the store was hardly riveting.

Elizabeth shook her head. “They’re so great. My husband and I just love Mr. Bernstein’s blog.”

“Really? You didn’t strike me as a sports person.”

Elizabeth’s cheeks got a bit pinker. “It’s not just sports. He talks about all kinds of…guy stuff. It’s obnoxious sometimes, but he can be really funny. Insightful, even.”

Julia must have given her an incredulous look, because Elizabeth shrugged and reached for her water. “I don’t read it every week. Mack tells me when there’s a good one.”

“How does Mack like the new job?”

“Loves it,” Elizabeth said. “Honestly, after six months out of work and with a baby on the way, he doesn’t have much choice.”

The doors opened from the building, and Debbie emerged to collect Lyric. The other parents were also wrapping up their conversations, and began dumping sand out of their children’s shoes and making plans for lunch.

Julia and Elizabeth both stood, collected their things, and shepherded the kids back into the school. “See you Monday, girls!” Elizabeth called down the hall, as Mia and Lyric skipped hand in hand toward the exit behind Debbie, who made far better time in pretty shoes than Julia ever could.

They walked together for a few yards, and Elizabeth ruffled Brandon’s hair before turning off toward the teachers’ lounge/kitchen. “Good luck in third grade, dude. You’ll be great.” Bran did not cringe from Elizabeth’s touch, which made Julia both relieved and a little sad.

As they drove to Milton Iron and Feed, Julia’s text notification dinged on her phone, announcing the third text of the morning. She didn’t have to look to know what Caroline wanted. “I’m driving,” she said to the phone.

If nothing else, the half-hour commute to the store was beautiful. Located in a renovated farmhouse on ten acres, it had been a hardware store since the 1970s, serving the patchwork of small farms north of the Atlanta suburbs and south of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Except for a brief period during Prohibition when it was a highway for illegal bathtub whiskey, the area had always been quiet and self-sufficient, insulated from the bustle of Atlanta.

By the time Julia took over for her deceased father three years ago, however, the farms had been slowly disappearing, replaced by million-dollar homes in secluded, gated communities. Unfortunately for Julia, it seemed the local celebrities and professional athletes who inhabited these neighborhoods weren’t big on DIY nor did they see the local hardware store as their social center.

Julia had just turned the minivan onto Moonshine Road and was singing along with Tom Petty on the radio when the phone gave up alerting her to texts and rang instead. “Hey, Care—I’m driving. Can I call you back?”

“That depends,” her sister said. “Are you actually going to do it?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Julia feigned innocence.

“You’ve been avoiding me for days. I know you think I’m a horrible, cruel big sister, and the idea of working with me is the worst thing you can think of. Besides selling the damn store.”

“You’re not…
always
horrible.”

“Call me back when you get to the store, Jules. And don’t even try to pretend it’s too busy. We both know better.”

Julia returned the phone to the passenger seat, dreading the conversation.

She topped the hill at the way to the four-way stop. Milton Iron and Feed stood in its picturesque valley just beyond the intersection—flanked by a dog kennel and homeschool resource center that had once been the main farm’s outbuildings. The store was a rustic, old-fashioned general store with wood plank walls stained dark like a log cabin, an expansive front porch displaying charcoal grills and hand-painted rocking chairs, and an honest-to-God corrugated tin roof. Behind the store was a small gravel lot and what had once been a twenty-stall horse barn, a less imposing but bigger structure than the store itself.

Julia’s dad had bought the store from the original owner when Julia was thirteen, shortly after her parents’ divorce. He had replaced the old tin roof, removed the stalls from the barn, and remodeled part of the stables into a loft, leaving the rest for storage. He had lived there and run the store for more than two decades. Julia worked with him summers and breaks during art school. She even helped him restore the “Drink Coca-Cola” sign that took up an entire side of the building.

No one fully understood why, when he died three years ago, her father had left the store to both his daughters
and
their husbands. This meant that she, Adam, Caroline, and Ben all owned a quarter each. The other three had been in favor of cashing out from the start, but Julia had dug in her heels and begged them not to sell, promising she could run the store so they would never have to think about it. She’d been holding it together with duct tape and chewing gum ever since. She owed herself months of unpaid salary, drawing only what she needed to hold onto her house. No Louis Vuitton bags in her future, even if she wanted one.

“Can I go for a ride on the tractor today?” Mia asked from the back seat.

“Let’s see if Mr. Hugh is busy today. If not the tractor, maybe you can play with the old typewriter.”

“Can I play my DS?” Brandon asked.

Julia’s heart sank. It was a beautiful day in the last week of summer, and Brandon had almost ten acres of farmland and creek, not to mention tools and old wood, at his disposal. He wanted to sit on the floor in the back office and play video games.

“We’ll see,” she said.

“Dad always lets me play when we’re at his house,” Brandon whined.

“Dad and I have differing opinions on this issue,” she said, carefully. Did Dave and Debbie Bernstein argue over stuff like this? Probably not.

They got out of the van and Julia waved to Myra. Her longtime employee was on the porch, ineffectually trying to sell a Big Green Egg to a man Julia recognized as one of the local berry farmers. Hugh was out by the barn, working on the old blue tractor. Mia handed Julia her lunch and ran to him.

“Don’t be a pest!” Julia called after her. Hugh dismissed this with a wave of his greasy old John Deere cap and knelt to greet Mia.

Inside, Julia turned on the office light for Brandon, dusted the glass countertop where various hunting and utility knives were displayed, and counted the receipts in the register. They’d barely sold enough this morning to cover Myra and Hugh’s modest payroll, much less any other expenses.

Unable to put it off any longer, Julia picked up her phone and dialed Caroline.

“I need to know today if you’re going to be helping me on Saturday nights,” her sister said without preamble. “Louie has a friend who wants the waitressing job if you’re not going to take it.”

“I don’t think I have a choice.” Julia moved carefully out of Brandon’s earshot before going on. “I’m in the red and Adam hasn’t made a payment on time in months.”

“Exactly the excitement I love in a new employee. A real go-getter attitude.” Her big sister owned a catering business, Caroline’s in the City, which specialized in weddings and parties. She was so intensely organized that she often served as the event coordinator as well as the caterer, saving clients both time and money. This, and Caroline’s specialty liquor-filled cupcakes, made her famous among brides and bat mitzvahs all over town.

“What do you want me to do, Caroline? Beg? I’m supposed to be excited abowaiting tables again at thirty-seven?”

“I’m forty-one. I don’t think this work is beneath me.”

“But you own the… I didn’t mean…” Julia took a deep breath and willed herself not to throw the phone against the wall of power tools. “You’re right. Of course. I am grateful and thrilled.”

“Great. I will put you down for Saturday nights—it’s pretty much all evening weddings in the fall. You shouldn’t have to leave the store too early. Are you still a size twelve? I’ll see if we have an extra vest. You’ll need black dress pants or a straight, knee-length black skirt.”

“Okay. I’m a fourteen now,” Julia said. “Stress eating. And you mean every other Saturday, right? I can’t work nights when I have the kids.”

“You have to,” Caroline said. “I’m sorry, but it’s not fair to everyone else. Especially since Louie is already going to be mad that I’m hiring you instead of his niece or whoever.”

Julia seriously doubted this last part. Louie was one of the kindest people Julia had ever met. “What about Bran?”

“Hang on, I’m at Starbucks,” Caroline said. Julia heard the muffled sound of her sister ordering two soy lattes with extra shots, exchanging pleasantries with the barista. Then she was back. “If you really need money, we should sell the damn store so you can get a real job that actually pays.”

“We’ve talked about this. I can’t—”

“And I’m fine with that. If you need money, I’m happy to help. But I need you every Saturday, at least at first. The tips are the best then, and I can pay you a little extra. But if you breathe a word of that to my regular staff, we’re done. Got it?”

Julia got it. Caroline had always been the cruise director of their family. Raising two teenage boys and becoming queen of a small catering empire had not made her less so. They had a good relationship as adults, and Julia was grateful for her kindness. But it would be lying to say she was excited about being Caroline’s lackey every Saturday for the next God knew how many months.

“I’ll call Elizabeth and see if I can line her up to babysit. She’s having a baby in January, but…”

“Sounds great,” Caroline said absently. The conversation in the coffee shop grew louder in the background.

“Can I start next weekend? Adam has the kids so I know I can do that.”

“Sure, sure. That works.”

“Thanks. I know I don’t say this enough. I really appreciate you.”

Caroline wasn’t listening. “Uh-huh. Love you too. Bye.”

In the moment of silence that followed, Julia heard nothing but the soft click-click-clicking of Brandon’s Nintendo DS in the back room, and her own exhausted breath.

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