The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past Read Free Page B

Binny.”
    “ Zach and Cassie are being
jerks. Cassie keeps going in my room and stealing stuff. And Zach
told me he invented a dumbass detector and that it proves that I’m
a dumbass.”
    Jay sighed with resignation, “Are you
a dumbass, Binny?”
    “ No.” Binny said, her
voice mostly confident.
    “ Then why do you care in
the least what he says?”
    Sensing he should offer an
explanation, Zach said, “I didn’t say she was a dumbass, I just
said that the detector went off.”
    Binny exploded. “He’s lying! He did
say those things. And he’s a huge jerk.”
    “ I’m not lying. I’m not
lying,” insisted Zach, now starting to get upset.
    “ Yes you are,” Binny
insisted. Binny yearned for a world in which people followed the
rules, and nothing made her angrier than lying.
    “ Binny please…” Jay begged
her to calm down.
    “ I’m not lying, Binny,”
and then after a pause and in a more conciliatory voice, “and the
machine never lies either.”
    “ I HATE YOU!!!!!!!” Binny
screamed and stormed out of the kitchen.
    “ I’m done, can I be
excused?” Zach asked, already out of his chair, shoving the last of
his sandwich into his face.
    Jay, resigned to the disaster the meal
had turned into, shook his head in disbelief. Zach took that as an
affirmative reply and escaped from the kitchen.
    Jay rested his forehead on the table.
Cassie, seemingly oblivious, munched her sandwich happily. She
spied someone in the doorway and suddenly screamed,
“Mommeeeee!!”
    Jay looked up at Julie Jordan, who had
just arrived on the scene. Her sharply put together business
clothes looked almost identical to when she’d left 12 hours earlier
for the office. “Where is everyone?”
    Jay put his head back down on the
table with a groan.
    Cassie punctuated the silence between
her parents, “More grilled cheese please.”

    §

    Julie, her dark brown wavy hair
framing her face with a more adult and more professional version of
Cassie’s bouncy curls, looked tired. The few tiny lines that had
recently started to appear at the corners of her eyes were in full
bloom this evening. The chaos of the house had subsided, but the
toll of her endless day of meetings as a Vice President at a large
local technology company was visible.
    Sometimes she thought that
managing a team of 300 adults was about equal in terms of the
complexity and demands of raising 1/100 th the number of children. But
if there were a competition between her employees and her kids to
see who could tire her out more quickly, her money was on the kids.
At least the people that worked for her seemed generally satisfied
with the attention they got. The kids seemed to never get
enough.
    Whether by necessity or as an
expression of her creativity, (or both,) Julie had adapted to
getting pleasure from the tiniest moments and rituals that she
could fit into her cramped schedule. And each night it was a cup of
Uji green tea. She’d discovered it on a business trip to Japan a
few years earlier. The caffeine it contained was an exception to
her generally caffeine-free existence. She never failed to fix
herself a cup when she arrived home from work, and most nights her
cup of tea made up the majority of her dinner.
    Sipping from her mug, feeling fidgety,
Julie wandered around the first floor of the Jordan house. Dinner
had mercifully ended, Zach and Binny were upstairs in their rooms,
and Cassie and Jay were snuggled together watching E.T. in the
family room with the lights lowered. Julie liked movies just fine,
but the two hour commitment wasn’t often a possibility for her
these days.
    Jay’s responsibilities as a freelance
illustrator left him plenty of time to introduce the kids to the
canon of his childhood – super hero comic books, science fiction
and fantasy TV shows, and of course – movies. Right now, the movie
was getting intense. The government agents had taken over and E.T.
was dying. Julie hadn’t seen the movie in over 30 years, but her
memory was