One Less Problem Without You (9 page)

So even though Leif wasn't biologically hers, anyone could see that she tried like hell to love him, and forcibly pull him closer in to her as a mother, and her daughter as his sister.

It's just that anyone could
also
see that he was never going to let it happen. Not one cell in his body had any interest in having a close and loving family around him.

And, presumably, that family he did have didn't want to know the truth about him, or they would have seen it long before Elisa was haplessly trying to convey it to them while getting the bum's rush out of the house and her job.

Which left her with her own problems to worry about. Like figuring out how she was going to pay her rent next month when she had only three weeks of work with the Tiesmans behind her and unemployment took forever to process.

Oh, yeah, and how she was going to eat?

She really,
really
didn't want to go back to exotic dancing. She'd sworn she never would. It was demeaning; it went against everything that she believed in. She'd sworn it was only a temporary way to fund college, but the money had been so good she'd let it go on a few months after college while she looked for the perfect position.

So to speak.

That was what she thought she'd found in the Tiesman household.

Not so.

Now, thanks to her previous career, she had about one month's worth of expenses saved up. But that wasn't going to get her very far if she didn't find more work tomorrow.

Or more like yesterday.

The entire thing was so maddening. How dare that punk risk her livelihood and career, just to save his own spoiled, mean-spirited ass?

Someday he'd pay for this, and, if he kept going on the path he was on, probably a whole lot more.

Karma was a bitch.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Prinny

“Should I do it in an Irish accent
?
”

“Irish?” Prinny reeled in her patience. “Why? Why an Irish accent? Why?”

Chelsea straightened her spine and, clearly, her resolve. Her acting chops were chomping. “Because, Prinny,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “the Irish were among the first to get into this, you know, Celtic Druid woo-woo stuff. People look for that here, just like they're always looking for Enya music in our record selection. So.” She shrugged, as if she'd left Prinny in checkmate. “It just makes sense.”

“So maybe you should just record the message in Gaelic?” Prinny asked, feigning innocence. “Let everyone assume that if they don't understand, it's
their
shortcoming, not ours?”

Chelsea's eyes lit up, and she raised an index finger. “You think you're kidding, and I did
not
miss your sarcasm there, but you may be right! You said you wanted to set us apart from the rest. Why not do something radical? Just let me see if anyone else is doing it.” She took out her phone and started tapping on the screen.

Prinny sighed. It was the end of the day, and she didn't have the energy to be exasperated. “Stop. Look, let's just do it in the neutral newscaster sort of voice we agreed on. It's a phone system, not a Meryl Streep movie. Do it like we talked about.”

“We
just
talked about cultivating business. How are you going to do that by being generic?”

“It's a way to statistically track the percentages of calls for each given topic,” she said. “We can tell what people want by which number they hit, and when we know what people want from us, we can grow the business in the right direction.”

“They will only opt for what we offer them, and as we already discussed, we're not offering that much.”

“So we offer a few things that maybe we're not doing so much of, to see if there's a market for them.”

“Is this one of Alex's ideas?”

Prinny was embarrassed to admit that, yes, it was. It was a way to validate the business aspect of the store and ward off the never-ending threats of her stepbrother, Leif, who wanted to take control of every asset their father had left them.

But Prinny was hard-pressed to admit all of that. So instead she simply said, “It's one of those dotted-i, crossed-t things, yes.”

Chelsea cast a suddenly compassionate look at her, then started the recording. “Press one,” she said, in a perfect neutral female accent, “to fall out of love.” She looked to Prinny with an eyebrow raised.

Prinny nodded. “I think that's good.”

Chelsea sighed. “I know what he wants. I don't think it's going to do much to bring in business, but I get what you're saying. All right. So is there anything else?”

“I think you need to say the option first. To give them an idea of what they're here for. You know?”

“No.”

“To fall out of love, press one.”

“What difference could that
possibly
make?”

A normal employee would never be this difficult. An actress? Virtually every interaction went like this. But the store needed her there to play the role of a safe, reliable psychic: one that would read the cards accurately—as Prinny had taught her—then let the clients come up with their own answers and never advise anything objectionable.

One didn't need to be
psychic,
per se, to read cards. The cards told the story whether the person could intuit anything further or not. So the reason she'd hired Chelsea was to read well and deliver advice convincingly and in a comforting manner. With fate being as flexible as it was, it was important to let people make their choices clearly.

Chelsea kept her eyes on Prinny, waiting for an answer.

“A lot of people would just hang up after hearing ‘press one' because every day we get that with our banks or our utility companies or whatever other drudgery we have to deal with, you know? So ‘press one' sounds like you're being rerouted, whereas starting with ‘to fall out of love' immediately grabs the attention of both people who want to fall out of love
and
people who want other such options.” Honestly, she couldn't even believe she had to say this kind of thing with a straight face, but she did. This was her work, and this was an employee she was in charge of, doing a job she had created, so there was no out.

“Got it.” Chelsea gave a nod. “But I still think you need a more exotic accent.”

Prinny felt her shoulders sink. “No.”

Chelsea reached up and twirled a finger in her blond, beach-waved hair. “But people are calling for fortune-telling, gypsies, magic. They want something
romantic
! I use an accent just about every time I do a reading, and they love it.”

“You
do
?” Readings were private. Fake as Prinny knew them to be, the party line was to give good, sound advice that anyone on any daytime talk show would give. Chelsea had been hired as the store gypsy because she could give those supposed readings with a straight face, but Prinny had had no idea she was trying out a variety of accents on clients. “What happens if people Yelp that they liked or hated the Irish psychic and someone else says the psychic is French? Or Spanish? Or Polish? Or whatever else you decide to be that day?” Lost revenues circling the drain whirled in her mind.

“I keep track,” Chelsea said, waving the nothing away. “What, you don't think I have notes on everyone who comes to see me? Once I establish their issue—love, money, health, or family—all I have to do is nudge them and they spill it all and I record it and write down all the names and situations to reference when they come back.” She gave a purposeful dramatic pause. “And they always come back.
Always
. So I guess I don't suck too bad at this.”

Prinny pinched the bridge of her nose to try to stave off what she had come to think of as the Chelsea Headache at times like this. “Fine. Fine.” Chelsea wanted to use her acting chops, so fine. “But how about something just vaguely exotic. Not wholly foreign, not something that people with hearing problems might have trouble understanding, for example, but just the vaguest…” She searched for something Chelsea could hook on to. “Gabor sort of accent?”

Chelsea frowned for a moment, then looked up to the left, then to the right—all of which was clearly unstaged, which made it that much creepier—then said, “Okay, I've got it.”

“You do.”

“I do.”

“Can I hear it?”

“Let's just go.”

Prinny shrugged and nodded.

Chelsea closed her eyes, took a long breath in through her nose—as if she were about to belt out an aria at the Met—and said, “To fall out of love, press one.” Her eyes remained closed for a moment, and she touched her thumbs and index fingers together as if she were meditating, then opened her eyes and looked at Prinny. “Okay?”

The truth was, it was pretty good. A vague, unidentifiable accent, exotic enough to be intriguing, but not so much that it was confusing. Maybe Chelsea had been right; maybe what they needed was some gypsy in the phone messages, even though all of Prinny's business education had supported the idea that neutral was best.

This was no ordinary business.

“Okay, go on.” Prinny gave a cautious nod.

“For financial abundance and prosperity, press two,” Chelsea said, and did not look to Prinny for an opinion.

Prinny did not object.

“If you have family difficulties, press three.”

At this point, it was not the accent but the content that was driving Prinny crazy. It was wrong to let people think they could just call up and get solutions to all their complicated life problems. Even a real psychic could only clarify: show them where they'd been, where they were now, and—sometimes— where they were headed if they didn't change course. But the thing was, most people knew where they'd been and, even if they didn't admit it, knew where they were now. And the future was liquid; it could always change. Predicting it with certainty was like jumping into someone's car on the highway and deciding which exit they would take. If you didn't influence them, they would take the exit they'd been heading for the whole time, and there was no way that even the best psychic in the world could predict that. Anyone was capable of swerving off course at any moment.

That was one of the
good
things about life.

Most people didn't see it that way, though.

So Prinny had to support the business and what they were presenting and people were receiving. And that was prognostication in all forms: purchasing tarot cards and oracle cards, buying books on witchcraft with which to
force
their future intentions, and, most of all, coming in for a reading with Chelsea—Miss Ada, to the masses (so she could be replaced, if necessary), unless she'd been giving other names in other accents—in order to find out that their dreams would come true.

No one ever wanted to know that their lifeline was short, or that they should up the life insurance on their husband, or that the niggling little suspicion in their belly now and then was legit, or that, yeah, their kid was experimenting with pot and dunking the Amazon-purchased drug test into the toilet water to dissolve the results.

No one wanted to know that stuff.

So Prinny stood back and let Chelsea do her thing.

“For revenge, press four,” Chelsea said, with a slight but unmistakable edge to her voice.

She looked to Prinny with a question in her eyes.

Prinny gave her thumbs-up.

Good.

Chelsea continued. “For intense stress relief and/or weight loss, press five.”

Prinny shrugged inwardly. That might be the best bet for the power of suggestion they could provide. Believe you have willpower and are not craving junk food, and so it shall be.

Hopefully.

“To get a promotion or otherwise improve your professional life, including getting rid of a bad boss, press six.”

Okay, yes, that was wordy, but it covered a lot of ground that wasn't interesting enough to stand on its own in three parts. Prinny herself had consolidated that collection, because the romantically forlorn did
not
want to listen to a long laundry list of boring business problems; they would hang up long before the last digit was proposed. So this worked, awkward as it was. It would speak to the people who were calling with job problems.

“For love spells, press seven.”

That was it. That was bank right there. And they had to leave it at seven because
so
many people who were calling wanted someone to fall in love with them, and they'd waded through all the other options to get there. And anyone who was already into the hoodoo of calling for help like that would be totally sensitive to which number they had to press to achieve it.

Prinny held up her hand. “Chelsea, can we somehow hit harder on that one?”

“What do you mean?”

“Elaborate on it.” Then, seeing Chelsea's slightly confused expression, she said, “Make it more clear. More … sexy.” She knew that would ignite Chelsea's imagination.

And it did. Her eyes grew bright. “You mean, like, ‘For love spells to enchant and win that person you have been loving from afar, press seven…” She raised an eyebrow.

Prinny thought about it. It was basically everything she'd been thinking they should say. Except … “And to live happily ever after.”

Prinny didn't believe in that. Seriously, how many people end up with that?

Chelsea squealed and laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh my God, Prinny Tiesman, you are
brilliant
—to live
happily ever after,
that is exactly what everyone who calls for a love spell wants. Believe me. I've talked to hundreds. Maybe thousands. They want dramatic results.”

Yes. Of course. Love was the most compelling thing of all. That was one reason they were waiting for those callers to wait until seven. They'd be back; to fall out of love, to get revenge, for whatever they remembered from the earlier part of the menu that they might need or want later.