Take a Chance (16 page)

About an hour later Jem was sitting at the breakfast bar indulging in her second hot chocolate for the day. The
marquee sat like an unwanted UFO outside the window beside her and she was still amazed that Jeremy and Aidan had helped themselves to chocolate cake after eating the number of pikelets that Eben said he had given them for breakfast.

The children were now obligingly carrying their toys to their rooms with the promise of being allowed to have
“party” food for dinner. Eben had disappeared to buy snack food in case the catered meal wasn’t to their liking and as a bribe for good behaviour.

Jem
rolled the mug of hot chocolate between the palms of her hands and used the brief interlude while he was gone to mull over what he had said earlier. She had just decided that he couldn’t be considered serious when she heard the garage door rolling up.

She took a final sip of her drink then rinsed the cup and put it in the dishwasher before going to help Eben carry everything in. He met her in the hallway with
several reusable grocery bags hanging from his hands.

“I think we have a problem,” he said.

Jem followed him into the kitchen where he set the bags on the kitchen bench.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The grass out the front is boggy from all the rain. I don’t think it would be a good idea to park cars on it tonight.”

“I hadn’t even thought of that,” Jem said “Do you have any suggestions?”

“Are the SS Petersens at home?” Eben asked.

Sonia and Sam Petersen were Jason and Jess’s teenage neighbours. Their mother joked that she gave them the same initial to save overwriting name tags in their clothes when they were younger.

“What do you have in mind?” Jem asked.

“Maybe Sam and Sonia would be happy to make a few dollars being car valets and parking people’s cars along the side of the road.”

“That’s a good idea, I’ll phone them,” said Jem.

Her cell phone rang from
her shoulder bag sitting on the breakfast bar.

“
I’ll be just a moment,” said Jem as she took the phone out of the room to answer it.

On the other end
was Garth Smith, the CEO of one of the companies expected that evening. His company was in the process of rapid expansion and Jem knew they had competition for the lucrative contract to provide their software. She found him open and easy to deal with and would be willing to do almost anything to have his company as a client.

Garth came
quickly to the point. “I apologise for leaving this to the last minute but we can’t attend the presentation as my mother-in-law has the ‘flu so we have no one to look after the children tonight.”

Jem knew his wife Amy chose to be an at home mother and hadn’t worked
as his PA since the birth of their daughter four years ago. With the recent arrival of twin boys whom she quickly calculated would be about nine weeks old Jem wondered what had happened to Amy.

“Is Amy all right?” she asked.

“No,” said Garth. “But it isn’t what you think. My PA had a family celebration to attend tonight and when Amy found out she offered to be her stand-in so that my PA could go to her family get-together. My mother-in-law was going to babysit for us and it is a shame she is ill because Amy had been looking forward to getting out of the house. It would have been great for us to have an evening out discussing something other than children for a change.”

“That won’t be a problem,”
Jem told him as she crossed her fingers. “There will be other children here tonight so we have hired a responsible baby sitter to look after them. You are welcome to bring your three; the more the merrier. I’ll even set up a portable cot in the guest room so all you need to bring are their special blankets and the usual baby things.”

“Are you sure it won’t be too much trouble?” asked Garth.

“Absolutely not,” said Jem with conviction. “So will we see you tonight?”

“Yes. Thank you for doing this for us. I’m looking forward to seeing what Sachs Wall has to offer.”

After they said their goodbyes Jem slid the phone into her shoulder bag and looked at her crossed fingers.

“I’m just popping next door to ask the SS Petersens for their services tonight,” she told Eben
as he removed two different flavours of ice cream from one of the bags.

“I thought you were going to phone them,” he said.

“I thought the personal touch would be better and it’ll be harder to turn me down while I’m clinging to their legs begging.”

Eben laughed.

When Jem returned she found Eben in the marquee. He noticed she was looking a lot more relaxed than she had been when she left.

“Did everything go okay?” he asked as he unfolded table legs and snapped them into place.

“Even better than I hoped,” said Jem as she took one end of the table and helped him set it upright. “Sonia was a little reluctant until I said that she could sit on Aidan if she had to and the baby twin boys clinched it. I don’t think she realises they’re too little to do much other than sleep.”

“Twin boys?”

“Yes. That was Garth Smith, a prospective client on the phone earlier. He was intending to cancel because his wife was going to come as his PA but their babysitter is sick. I told them we’d have someone to look after the children and to bring them too. I just felt trying to get their contract would be worth a few concessions,” she explained.

They set up the second table and Jem fished in a box for tablecloths. She waved them with her hand.

“Do you think I am tempting fate by putting these on now?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Eben. “What about Sam? Is he happy to be
the car valet?”

Jem set the tablecloths
back in the box and moved to help Eben set up the next table. He had been busy in her absence and it was the last one to do.

“Sam is rather excited about it. He only got his restricted licence a few weeks ago and is keen to practise his hill starts.”

“He’ll certainly get good practise here,” said Eben as they turned the table upright. “Do you think he will be okay on his own doing this?”

“That’s the good news,” Jem told him as she started
unstacking chairs to go around the tables. “A couple of his friends were over and they were keen to help. They don’t even want to be paid as they think it’ll be great driving expensive cars up and down the street.”

Eben started
unstacking chairs too so Jem began placing them around the tables.

“Do they have their licences?”

“I’m sure they do,” Jem said “But we’ll check before we let them get behind the wheel.”

“It was rather cute really,” she said, leaning on
the remaining stack of chairs. “The boys were talking about wearing similar clothes to look like they had on a uniform.  Crash wanted to have black jeans...”

“Crash?”

“He had trouble learning to ride a bike and the name stuck. I think his real name is Simon so we can call him that tonight.”

“Might be a good idea,” said Eben wryly.

Daisy came into the marquee carrying her kindy bag.

“Aunty Jem! There’s a note in my bag to give to you.”

Jem went to Daisy, unzipped the bag’s big pocket and fished out Daisy’s lunchbox which was blocking the view of the interior.

“I must have forgotten to check your bag because Mark turned up,” Jem said and rattled the lunch box. “Hmm. Sounds like something you wouldn’t want to eat now.”

She reached into the bag again and pulled out a knotted plastic supermarket bag filled with something green, sparkly and squishy.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Playdough!” Daisy exclaimed happily. “They make it new on Monday and on Friday someone good gets to take it home. This week it was me!”

“I’m glad that you have been a good girl at kindy,” Jem replied as she dropped the playdough back into the bag.

She put her hand in the bag again and extracted a piece of paper. Jem skimmed over the contents.

“It says here that I need to check you for head
lice as kindy have had a few cases.” Jem looked at Eben. “What do I look for? What do head lice look like?”

Eben shrugged.

Just thinking about head lice made her head itchy. She caught herself bringing her hand up to scratch her head and lowered it. Jem sighed. With everything else to be done the last thing she wanted to do was sort out head lice.

She removed
the hardened sandwich from the lunchbox, went outside and threw it onto the lawn for the birds. At least the weather was finally nice, she thought distractedly.

“Daze,
come out into the sun so I can take a look,” she called back into the marquee.

Daisy obediently came to her side
and looked a little anxious as Jem repeatedly parted her hair to look at her scalp.

“I think you have a bit of dandruff,” she to
ld Daisy and tried to brush out white specks with her fingers but they refused to budge from Daisy’s hair.

“That’s funny,” said Jem
, then startled when she saw a speck near the colour of Daisy’s hair move across the part she had made.

“It looks like
you have them,” she said regretfully, pulling her hands away.

Daisy’s bottom lip trembled as she
looked up at her aunt.

“I don’t want head
lice,” she said and burst into tears.

Jeremy
appeared on the patio in time to hear the news. He put his arm around Daisy and Jem was touched to find him being nice to his sister. Then he opened his mouth.

“Does your head itch yet?” Jeremy asked. “If it does then that’s
because they’re sucking your blood.”

Daisy cried harder.

“That’s enough Jeremy,” said Eben as he came outside and plucked Daisy up to give her a hug.

Jem noticed Eben made sure he kept his head clear of hers.

“We’d better check everyone else’s hair while we’re at it,” Jem sighed.

A short time later
in the kitchen Daisy wasn’t at all happy to wait for the smelly treatment on her head to work. Jem set the oven timer to follow the pack directions then tried to think of something she could get Daisy to do so she wouldn’t wander off.

“Would you like to help me make some dip and salsa for the p
resentation tonight?” Jem asked, figuring they could use it if the caterers got low on supplies and became desperate.

“Yes. Can I make cheese dip? I know how. Mummy let me make it last time we had friends over.”

“Sure,” said Jem. “I’ll put the ingredients over here and you can mix them up.”

Daisy pulled a little apron out of a drawe
r and put it on then climbed onto the kitchen stool as Jem assembled the ingredients on the bench. Jem looked at the block of cheese.

“Do you want me to melt the cheese for you?”

“No. I’m good,” said Daisy.

She started pouring ingredients together in a manner which indicated she may actually have done this before. Even so, Jem made a mental note to taste the dip before
offering it to anyone.

While Daisy mashed her concoction together, Jem
, unwilling to trip again, squeezed her feet into Jess’s gumboots and went into the garden. She snapped off a few heads of parsley, some chives and used Jess’s trowel to loosen the dirt from several carrots.

You can’t get fresher than this,
she thought.

It was lovely out in the sun after all the gloomy days of rain and Jem was tempted to stay put. She wouldn’t let herself though because she had work to do and people depending upon her to finish everything in time. Reluctantly, she stood up and went back inside.

Jem heeled off the gumboots at the door and replaced them with her ugg boots. Back in the kitchen she dropped the carrots in the sink to wash and cut up later then started making guacamole. She had just wrapped the bowl and put it in the fridge when the oven timer went off.

She pressed the timer off and looked to see Daisy stirring a smooth creamy yellow mixture.

“You’ve done a great job there. Now it’s time to comb your hair.”

Jem covered Daisy’s dip and put it in the fridge while Daisy took off her apron. Jeremy heard the timer and came running into the kitchen with a piece of paper from the printer tray.

“Wipe the comb on this,” he said. “That way I can do a body count.”

A
s Jem wiped the comb after clearing the ends of Daisy’s locks Jeremy gleefully kept a tally of the little dark specks accumulating on the paper. Then he put his thumbnail on the paper and twisted it back and forth.

“What are you doing?” Jem asked.

“That one was still wiggling,” said Jeremy.

“You play far too many violent games on the computer,” Jem said. “You need to play more games involving
cute things.”