“And it looks like a pretty cool thing to have,” Jake said with a smile. “Caydee and I can use it to shoot rocks into the ocean once she’s a little bigger.”
Phil and Dana, the hippies, agreed to clean up their mess and leave the slingshot and its frame behind. The deputies all left before the job was done, but Elsa dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater and went out, armed with a six cell Maglite, to personally supervise the cleanup and make sure that every last dirty diaper was put back in the lawn and garbage bag and taken away. Phil and Dana were quite intimidated by Elsa, who lectured them the entire time about common law property rights, the fallacy of using vandalism to advance one’s radical environmentalist causes, the philosophical basis of the sanctity of a man’s castle and why that sanctity should be honored above all but the family unit, and the coming breakdown of western civilization that the hippies and everyone like them were currently fomenting.
“And make sure you do not show your faces around here ever again,” were her parting words to the couple as they climbed back into their rancid smelling microbus with their bag of dirty diapers.
Phil promised they would never show their faces there again and they drove off just before sunrise, their microbus belching out a stinking cloud of hydrocarbon exhaust that lingered in the still air for the better part of thirty minutes. Elsa walked slowly back to her quarters and then took a shower and changed into her working clothes. She then made her way over to the main house to start the Monday duties. Mondays were the worst, and not just because the whole week was stretched out before her. Though Jake and Laura took care to keep the house clean, the laundry done, the garbage emptied, the dishes cleaned and put away over the weekend, they still could not keep things up to her standards of cleanliness and order. Thus, she would spend a good portion of each Monday spot-cleaning all over the house to bring things up to her standards. And now, she was going into a Monday morning after missing her last three hours of sleep thanks to those uncouth ruffians.
She entered the kitchen door and saw that Jake, now showered and dressed, was at the stove. The smell told her that he was cooking omelets—vegetable and cheese omelets to be exact.
“What is this?” she asked him, surprised. Jake never cooked breakfast during the workweek.
“I thought I’d give you a little break since you had to deal with the hippies,” he told her.
“Oh ... well ... thank you,” she said, surprised and pleased.
“I’ll even clean up before I go,” Jake said. “Of course, I know you’ll just come behind me and clean everything again, but at least I’ll get the first layer knocked down.”
She smiled. “That is very thoughtful, Jake,” she said.
“Go sit down,” Jake told her. “I’ll bring you your omelet and you can eat at the kitchen nook with us.”
“But it wouldn’t be proper,” she said.
“Don’t give me that crap, Elsa,” Jake said. “You just spent almost two hours outside in the cold with a couple of dirty diaper smelling hippies. You are going to eat breakfast with us.”
“Well ... okay,” she said. “If you insist.”
“I insist,” he said. “Where did you put that slingshot?”
“I dismantled it and put it in the garbage where it belongs,” she told him huffily.
His face fell a bit. “Aww, man,” he whined. “I told you I wanted to keep it.”
“Yes,” she said, “so that you and Miss Cadence can one day use it to shoot rocks into the ocean. Ridiculous. I will not hear of such shenanigans. That device has been cut into little pieces and rendered harmless.”
“What a rip,” Jake said, shaking his head.
Elsa went into the kitchen nook and found Laura there. She too was showered and dressed for her day. She had her blouse open and the little flap on her nursing bra down. Caydee, still dressed in her footie pajamas, was suckling on Laura’s left nipple. Elsa smiled at the sight, making a point to enjoy it because she would not be seeing it much longer. Caydee was down to only nursing from the source in the mornings now. The rest of the day she was fed with bottled breast milk and sometimes formula. At night, they added a little bit of rice cereal to the bottles to fill her tummy a little more and encourage more sleep time.
“Good morning, Laura,” Elsa greeted. “And good morning Miss Cadence.”
Caydee, hearing her name (the name that virtually no one but Elsa routinely called her) let go of the nipple and looked over at her. She smiled, cooed a little, and then went back to her breakfast.
“Were you and Jake able to get any more sleep after the deputies left?” Elsa asked.
“I got a little,” Laura said. “And I can sleep on the plane. Jake didn’t get any more though. He stayed in the computer room to watch you and the hippies on the monitors.”
“Wanted to make sure you didn’t kill them,” Jake said, bringing two plates with omelets on them into the nook.
“I did not want to stand close enough to them to perform violence on them,” Elsa said. “They were rather aromatic.”
“Because of the diapers?” asked Laura.
“There was that,” she said, “but also a strong underlying odor of humans who do not engage in regular hygiene practices.”
“BO,” Jake said with a nod.
“That is what I just said,” Elsa replied huffily.
Meghan came into the nook a moment later. She was now dressed for the day as well, wearing a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a sleeveless blouse. Her brunette hair was still damp from her shower. She grabbed a cup of coffee from the machine and then sat down just in time for Jake to present her omelet to her.
“Thanks, Jake,” she said tiredly. “It looks delicious.”
“It is quite palatable,” Elsa said, “although I would have cut the broccoli up into smaller pieces.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for the next time you have to go supervise the cleanup of dirty diapers out by the gate and I have to make breakfast for you,” Jake said.
“You do that,” Elsa told him.
They finished their breakfasts and Jake took their plates back to the kitchen and cleaned up everything the best he could. Caydee finished feeding, was burped, and then handed over to Meghan, who carried her into the entertainment room so she could lay on her blanket and play with her toys for a bit. Caydee was not mobile yet—she was still two or three months away from being able to crawl—but she could roll over in both directions and often did so.
At 7:45, Jake and Laura kissed their daughter goodbye, told her that they loved her, and then headed out the door. They got in Jake’s BMW—he still had not so much as touched the Toyota Sienna, let alone gotten inside of it—and drove to the airport. By 8:25, they were airborne, heading south to Whiteman Airport. Another workweek had begun.
Though they still had no MD&P agreement for Celia’s and Matt’s new CDs, they were proceeding under the assumption that they would eventually secure one and that both artists would go out on tour. As such, they had begun the process of putting those tours together. Matt and his band were working out of the warehouse that KVA had leased for their workups. Celia and her band were working out of the KVA studios for now, but knew they would eventually have to move to a bigger facility. Laura was not going to go out on tour with Celia this round—she wanted to stay home and be a wife and mother for the immediate future—but she was helping with the beginning stages of Celia’s workups. One of the items on the KVA to-do list was to secure another touring quality saxophonist.
Jake’s plan for the day was to drop Laura off at the KVA studio and then drive over to the warehouse so he could work with Matt and his boys for the first day of the week. So far, the peace between himself and the guitarist continued to hold. The only real point of contention was the fact that they still had no agreement and therefore Matt had no income to look forward to for the quarter.