"Brad," Andy yelled. "That's enough of a break. Get back out here and help me lower this."
Dopey slammed down the carton of OJ. Before he could stalk from the room, however, I stopped him with a polite, "Excuse me?"
Because he wore no shirt, I could see the muscles in Dopey's neck and shoulders tense as I spoke.
"All right already," he said, spinning around and heading back toward the juice carton. "I'll put it away. Jeez, why are you always on me about crap like - "
"I don't care about that," I interrupted him, pointing at the juice carton - although it had to have been making the counter sticky. "I want to know what that is."
Dopey looked where I'd moved my finger. He blinked down at the dirt-encrusted oblong object.
"I dunno," he said. "I found it buried in the yard while I was digging out one of the posts."
I gingerly lifted what appeared to be a metal box, about six inches long by two inches thick, heavily rusted and covered in mud. There were a few places where the mud had rubbed off, though, and there you could see some words painted on the box. The few I could make out were delicious aroma and quality assured. When I shook the box, it rattled. There was something inside.
"What's in it?" I asked Dopey.
He shrugged. "How should I know? It's rusted shut. I was gonna take a - "
I never did find out what Dopey was going to do to the box, since his older brother Sleepy walked into the kitchen at that moment, reached for the orange juice carton, opened it, and downed the remaining contents. When he was through, he crumpled the carton, threw it into the trash compactor, and then, apparently noticing my appalled expression, said, "What?"
I don't get what girls see in them. Seriously. They are like animals.
And not the cute fuzzy kind, either.
Meanwhile, outside, Andy was calling imperiously for Dopey again.
Dopey muttered some extremely colorful four-letter words beneath his breath, then shouted, "I'm coming, already," and stomped outside.
It was already seven forty-five, so Sleepy and I really had to "motor," as he put it, to get to the resort on time. But though my eldest stepbrother has a tendency to sleepwalk through life, there's nothing somnambulistic about his driving. I punched in at work with five minutes to spare.
The Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort prides itself on its efficiency. And it is, in fact, a very smoothly run operation. As a staff babysitter, it's my responsibility, after punching in, to ask for my assignment for the day. That's when I find out whether I'll be washing strained carrots or burger fixings out of my hair after work. On the whole, I prefer burgers, but there's something to be said for strained carrots: generally the people who eat them can't talk back to you.
When I heard my assignment for that particular day, however, I was disappointed, even though it was a burger-eater.
"Simon, Susannah," Caitlin called. "You're assigned to Slater, Jack."
"For God's sake, Caitlin," I said to Caitlin, who was my supervisor. "I was stuck with Jack Slater yesterday. And the day before."
Caitlin is only two years older than me, but she treats me like I'm twelve. In fact, I'm sure the only reason she tolerates me is because of Sleepy: she is as warm for his form as every other girl on this planet ... except, of course, me.
"Jack's parents," Caitlin informed me, without even looking up from her clipboard, "requested you, Suze."
"Couldn't you have said I was already taken?"
Caitlin did look up then. She looked at me with cool, blue contact-lensed eyes. "Suze," she said. "They like you."
I fiddled with my bathing suit straps. I was wearing the regulation navy blue swimsuit beneath my regulation navy blue Oxford T-shirt and khaki shorts. With pleats, no less. Appalling.
I mentioned the uniform, right? I mean, the part where I have to wear a uniform to work? No kidding. Every day. A uniform.
If I'd known about the uniform beforehand, I never would have applied for the job.
"Yeah," I said. "I know they like me."
The feeling isn't mutual. It isn't that I don't like Jack, although he's easily the whiniest little kid I have ever met. I mean, you can see why he's that way - just take a look at his parents, a pair of career-obsessed physicians who think dumping their kid off with a hotel babysitter for days on end while they go sailing and golfing is a fine family vacation.
It's actually Jack's older brother I have the problem with. Well, not necessarily a problem ...
More like I would just rather avoid seeing him while I am wearing my incredibly unstylish Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort uniform khaki shorts.
Yeah. The ones with the pleats in them.
Except, of course, that every time I've run into the guy since he and his family arrived at the resort last week, I've been wearing the stupid things.
Not that I care, particularly, what Paul Slater thinks about me. I mean, my heart, to coin a phrase, belongs to another.
Too bad he shows no signs whatsoever of actually wanting it. My heart, that is.
Still, Paul - that's his name; Jack's older brother, I mean: Paul Slater - is pretty incredible. I mean, it isn't just that he's a hottie. Oh, no. Paul's hot and funny. Every time I go to pick Jack up or drop him off at his family's hotel suite, and his brother Paul happens to be there, he always has some flippant remark to make about the hotel or his parents or himself. Not mean or anything. Just funny.
And I think he's smart, too, because whenever he isn't on the golf course with his dad or playing tennis with his mom, he's at the pool reading. And not your typical pool book, either. No Clancy or Crichton or King for Paul. Oh, no. We're talking stuff by guys like Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard.
Seriously. It's almost enough to make you think he's not from California.
And of course it turns out, he's not: the Slaters are visiting from Seattle.
So you see, it wasn't just that Jack Slater is the whiniest kid I've ever met: there was also the fact that I wasn't really all that enthused about his hottie brother seeing me, yet again, in shorts that make my butt look roughly the size of Montana.
But Caitlin was totally uninterested in my personal feelings on the matter.
"Suze," Caitlin said, looking down at her clipboard again. "Nobody likes Jack. But the fact is, Dr. and Mrs. Slater like you. So you're spending the day with Jack. Capeesh?"
I sighed gustily, but what could I do? Aside from my pride, my tan was the only thing that was really going to suffer from spending yet another day with Jack. The kid doesn't like swimming, or bike riding, or Rollerblading, or Frisbee tossing, or anything, really, to do with the great outdoors. His idea of a good time is to sit inside the hotel room and watch cartoons.
I'm not kidding, either. He is, without a doubt, the most boring kid I ever met. I find it hard to believe he and Paul came from the same gene pool.
"Besides," Caitlin added, as I was standing there, fuming. "Today is Jack's eighth birthday."
I stared at her. "His birthday? It's Jack's birthday, and his parents are leaving him with a sitter all day?"
Caitlin shot me a severe look. "The Slaters say they'll be back in time to take him to dinner at the Grill."
The Grill. Whoopee. The Grill is the fanciest restaurant at the resort, maybe even on the entire peninsula. The cheapest thing they serve there costs about fifteen dollars, and that's the house salad. The Grill is so not a fun place to take a kid on his eighth birthday. I mean, even Jack, the most boring child in the world, couldn't have a fun time there.