Story To All Things There Is A Season

Deeb

Member
So excited to find updates to this story and by extension, this forum. I love Leah, Mateo...their smarts, couple dynamics and challenges. I converted through Ch 13 from fanfiction.net to MOBI and uploaded it to my Kindle several years ago and started reading it again recently. Am having to resist the urge not to peek ahead!
 

Remedy

Member
Part One - 2

During this time my Dad had what everyone thought was the flu but it turned out that it was a recurrence of pericarditis like he had had before I was born. He got well but it took time. Mom mentioned that he was stressed out that his daughter was cleaning houses for a living. I finally sat down and told Dad that I was cleaning houses because he set the example that any job worth doing was worth doing well, regardless of what that job was. And that I didn’t plan on cleaning houses for the rest of my life but that right now that is what there was and it was better than no paycheck. He still wasn’t happy, but he understood, and I guess I grew up a little bit in his eyes that day.

The day I finally met the boss was not a good one for him. I was folding the linens like I always did on Fridays when in through the front door stumbles a man that looked like he was just about to let loose until he spotted me. He cursed under his breath and said, “I … you need to leave.”

“Excuse me sir but until my employer …”

“I’m him … I mean I’m he … your employ … er. Look, you just … there was an accident. I … I don’t know what to do with a baby. I …”

Long story short, I was meeting Mr. Jakob for the first time. He was so distraught because he’d been at the hospital all night and most of the day. His older sister, brother in law, and their daughter were killed in a car accident on their way home from Disney World. The baby was his sister’s granddaughter and he was now her guardian since the child’s father abdicated responsibility before little Nydia was even born.

I got the baby out of the car and brought her inside and did what I could while my boss tried to pull himself together and make a few phone calls. I’d grown up babysitting the neighborhood kids and working in the nursery at church so it wasn’t a chore.

“Could … could you stay a little longer today? I have to … the arrangements … I have to …”

“Of course.”

The baby didn’t have anything but what was in the diaper bag … a little bit of powdered formula, three diapers, and a small package of diaper wipes. I called Mom, explained the situation to her and she and a couple of the ladies from church brought enough stuff over to last Nydia through the weekend. They also made sure that there were enough casseroles to choke a horse in the freezer. There was even a Jell-O mold from old Mrs. Norvicci. I asked Dad if I could borrow one of the handmade cradles that he sold until my boss could figure out what all the baby had.

Mr. Jakob was pretty well blown away. It was a long time before I knew exactly what he made of the speed that things moved that day. But that’s how I went from being a part-time housekeeper to a full-time housekeeper and nanny during the day.

The paycheck was bigger and I appreciated it but it sure didn’t hurt that Nydia was a cute little stinker. Occasionally I would even watch her on the weekends when the boss had business he had to attend to and the night time nanny couldn’t fill in. The night nanny was named Carmen and was actually some relation to Nydia’s biological father. I didn’t care for her very much but she took care of Nydia like she was her own so I never let my dislike of her show. I can’t say the same for the reverse. It was détente and that is about the best I can say of our working relationship.

Things were going along fine for a while and then the season began to change yet again. The economy was not improving; in fact it was getting quite a bit worse. My parents had to work three times as many craft fairs to bring in the same amount of money and then the government started taxing every little thing they could which hurt people in my parents age bracket especially hard. Sales tax went up, various users’ taxes and fees went up, and tax deductions were quickly disappearing. It got to where if the state or federal governments owed you money you were put on long waiting lists and it took months (up to 12 in some instances) before the check was cut and the news had even reported that a few of those checks were getting kicked back for insufficient funds.

The world economy wasn’t doing much better. The US was the consumer nation that a lot of the developing countries counted on to grease their economic wheels. As the US began to cut back international trade and began to charge tariffs on most imports whatever cancer was eating at us began to metastasize and spread to the rest of the world.

Strange how the term cancer entered my mind because one morning while I was at work, listening to one of the conservative radio broadcasts on WFLA radio, Daddy called and said Momma had collapsed while she was working in the church library. She’d been rushed to the hospital and that I needed to come right away. I couldn’t get in touch with Mr. Jakob and was forced to leave a message with his secretary. I took Nydia with me and despite everything conspiring against me was at the hospital in record time.

One of the reasons why I was such a late-in-life baby for my parents was because my mom had a history of female problems. They would come and go over the years and generally correct themselves. Mom rarely went to the doctor anymore because they always told her the same thing, tried the same remedies, and it was always just a matter of time before things cleared up. The last couple of years she hadn’t gone at all. One, she figured she was too old to need an OB/Gyn check up and two, the expense was something to be avoided. Only this time it wasn’t cysts or a hormonal imbalance; it was cancer … and she was eaten up with it. It had spread to so many major organs that there was absolutely no chance. The doctors weren’t talking weeks or months at that point, they weren’t even talking days; it was a matter of hours and minutes in their opinion.

My dad was completely devastated. I was doing my best to get information from the oncologist and we had stepped outside for some privacy. Dad was sitting with my mom and had closed his eyes. The nurse came in, asked him a question and when he didn’t respond … he’d had a massive heart attack. The pericarditis had done a lot more damage than we had known. The grief over my mom was just too much for his heart, he’d closed his eyes and was just gone in the few moments it had taken me to leave the room. It was ironic that Daddy passed before Momma did but Mom never knew – or maybe she did because she never regained consciousness either, didn’t even try.

I was holding Nydia and trying not to cry while they wheeled both my parents from the last room they would ever share together. That’s when Mr. Jakob showed up … with Carmen. One of the few things I can say about Carmen is that she was kind that day when I needed her to be kind. The next couple of weeks passed in a blur. The only thing that helped me to keep my head above water was my job and the fact that I knew what my parents would have expected of me under those circumstances.

During the day I kept house for the boss, took care of Nydia, and at night I would go home to my parents’ lonely and empty house to slowly box things up that I wasn’t donating to charity. All of my parents’ siblings had died when I was a kid. They were late in life babies themselves and all of my cousins were more than a decade older than me and we weren’t close. I was all alone and facing a ton of decisions that I had to make in very short order. But every item I picked up had a story behind it that I had to take the time to remember. The memories slowed me down more than I should have let them.

I couldn’t afford to keep the house. Because the housing market was so bad I had to let it go for about half what it would have gotten a few years earlier; it wasn’t even to someone who was going to live in it but to some type of investor who planned to rent the place out. The mortgage had nearly been paid off so that wasn’t a problem but it was still very sad for me. I had considered keeping it and renting rooms out myself but the taxes, insurance, and utility bills would have made that a losing proposition. I also had to find a way to pay for the funerals and burials because Daddy’s life insurance had only been designed to cover his … and I was burying both my parents.

Mr. Jakob took enough interest in my welfare that he helped me with some of the estate arrangements. He didn’t see it as any big deal because it was what he did day in and day out. On the other hand, I thought it was a huge deal and one day I got the opportunity to tell him so.

“Don’t read into it something that isn’t there Miss Hambrick. I knew there would come a day when I would get to repay you for what you did for me the day my sister died. I’m sorry it is under these circumstances, but I consider it a debt repaid.”

I told him I appreciated it anyway regardless of his motivations. That’s when he approached me with the fact that Carmen had decided to move back to Costa Rica to be with her widowed sister who needed her. That meant that he had exactly two weeks to find, interview, and hire a night time nanny for Nydia.

“But I have an idea that I would like you to give serious consideration. You have to be out of that house in a week when the new owner wants to move in his tenants. You haven’t been able to find another place to live yet that is in your price range. Nydia really needs a full-time nanny and I need someone that I can trust her with on the weekends as well. I would like you to consider moving in here – you would have the suite next to the nursery - as Nydia’s full-time nanny.”

Now that was definitely something that I had never considered. But I prayed about it and it felt all too providential. Almost so much so that I began to second guess myself on the wisdom of accepting his offer. But accept it I did and life continued on. So many doors were slamming shut in my face that the unexpected window opening looked like a mirage until I walked up and actually stuck my hand through it.

Momma and Daddy’s stuff that I kept was put in storage except for what I brought with me for my own use. That was another thing that Mr. Jakob had to help me with. So many places would only do business with you if you had a credit card and I’d never gotten one. I’d never needed one and my dad was always on about the evils of being indebted to others. Problem was that now that I was on my own I actually needed one of those evil little boogers but no one would approve me. Mr. Jakob put the storage facility in his name, paid for it, and then took the monthly fee out of my paycheck. Some people may have thought the boss was cold and unemotional, but the reality was that he was extremely private and cautious. I still didn’t know a lot about my boss but the longer I worked for him the more I realized that he was not cold, simply restrained in his dealings with others.

Once I accepted the new position my responsibilities around the boss’s place increased exponentially. My pay increased but since it included room and board, it didn’t show quite as much. With fewer expenses I was able to continue to save my money and add it to the nest egg I had been building. The boss advised me to take what little was realized from selling my parents’ home, cars, and all but a few pieces of furniture and split it between various investments and in just three months I was realizing a profit that increased my nest egg. It felt like blood money but at the same time my parents worked hard to get where they had been, a vast improvement over the poverty of their childhoods, and I wanted to continue that if I could. Not because I disliked where I came from but because I think it is a natural inclination in the human spirit to strive for more.

It took a little getting used to living under Mr. Jakob’s roof on a full-time basis. It was also enlightening. He is an extremely private man and I realized he never brought guests over to the house. Any socializing he did was at restaurants or similar places. He asked that I didn’t entertain my boyfriend at his home and I had to laugh and ask if he had seen one hanging around recently. He looked at me and asked a rather personal question about my leanings and I told him that it was none of his business. He replied yes it was since I was taking care of his niece and living in his home. I conceded that point and told him that I was a bit turned off by the dating scene after the breakup of a long-time relationship that didn’t end well and that he was unlikely to have to worry about me bringing anyone into his home anytime in the near future. And the way I was feeling at the time probably not in the far future either. All he did was snort in disbelief at the last statement and tell me that young, pretty girls always were thinking about weddings and such. I told him that he obviously didn’t have many dealings with young women my age then. His rather rude response to that was, “Thank God.”

Mr. Jakob did make a concession that I was quite grateful for. During the time that I had been working for him whenever my church had a children’s activity that was age appropriate, he had no problem with me taking Nydia. My parents had met her on numerous occasions that way and strangely that brought me comfort. But now that I was working as a full-time nanny I needed some flexibility if I was to maintain any of my old life. I approached the boss and he agreed, so long as I worked whatever class she was in, which was fine because I worked in the nursery anyway on most Sundays.

This past year was a perfect storm … literally. It was 2005 all over again with eight named storms hitting Florida shores, five of them major hurricanes. Worse, one those – a Cat 5 named Dorian barreled into St. Petersburg from the south driving waters from the Bay further into Tampa than they had in generations.

After the first storm of the season hit just north of Tampa Bay the boss came to me and said, “You know what to do for hurricane preparation?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, here’s a book. Read it. Study it. Go through the house and make an inventory using the appendix in the back. Whatever we are short of I want you to purchase over the next week. Anything costing over a hundred dollars for a single item, come to me first. Use the house funds and I’ll replenish it as needed. Keep your receipts … and key them in every day. I’ll be checking daily to see your progress. I want to meet in a week and have this accomplished before prices start skyrocketing.”

That was a pretty good example of our working relationship. He made his wishes known but gave me some leeway to accomplish them, but there was always oversight and follow up … and often money was the root of his reasons. I didn’t mind that at all however. My parents had been extremely budget conscious and had raised me to be the same. One day the boss was complaining about the cost of the food bill and when he broke it down found most of the problem lay in the fact that he ate out … a lot. I asked him if he wanted me to start packing him lunch. Mr. Jakob, penny pincher though he was, hesitated. He had a certain reputation that he had to maintain as a VP at his firm. He decided to give it a week but the week passed and he never said to stop. Every so often he would come home with his lunch uneaten but not often, and when he did he just ate it for dinner instead.
I don't remember reading this one. New to ME!!!!:rofl::eleph:
 
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