The World's Best Dad. Valerie Taylor

Make some changes so it looks like you were listening when they told us what they wanted, and give the project to Carla. Believe me, she can do everything I can do.”

      He grumbled some more, but he let her off the phone. Just in time, too, because the movers were coming up the walk with her box spring. In the rain. As she watched, they walked through the muddy flower bed—well, weed bed, really—scraped the box spring across the porch railing, and just managed to avoid stepping on the plastic runner they’d spread out to protect her living room carpeting.

      Not that she liked the stained mauve carpet, but a coating of mud was not the answer.

      Mrs. Malloy, Julie’s enormously fat tiger-striped cat, lumbered into the living room carrying the carcass of yet another of the mice she was helpfully hunting in the basement. She deposited it on the living room window seat next to the others. She seemed to be arranging them by size. Julie suppressed a shudder and tried not to think about it.

      The burliest of the three movers nodded at her, the wet box spring balanced in his muddy arms. “Where to, lady?”

      “Master bedroom, please. Upstairs.” They turned and manhandled the box spring upstairs, knocking hard into a railing as they negotiated the turn in the stairs. Julie reached over to check it. Yep, loose. Of course, it had probably been loose before. Everything in the house was either loose or painted shut. Her new home was a handyman’s special.

      Unfortunately, Julie barely knew which was the business end of a screwdriver. She made a note to herself to find a book on home repairs.

      “Julie? Where’s my stuff?” Marisa—the reason for all of this, for everything Julie had done in the past month—hesitated slightly at the top of the stairs before starting down, as if she weren’t sure what she was doing was okay. The five-year-old had been bounced from foster home to her mother and back again for the past four and a half years. But now she finally had a forever family: Julie.

      Marisa blushed. “I mean, Mom.” She looked down, and Julie felt the little girl’s embarrassment. “Sorry, I forgot,” she said on the barest whisper.

      Julie squatted next to her. “Marisa, it’s okay if you forget. It’s hard to remember at first. I keep forgetting, too. Then I remember—I have a daughter!” She smiled in delight and Marisa smiled back. Julie pulled her into a big hug. The too-skinny little body stiffened for a moment, then relaxed. Marisa wasn’t quite ready to hug back, but in the days since the adoption papers had been signed, she’d been getting more comfortable. Julie knew Marisa still didn’t quite believe it was for real, but the hope, heartbreaking in its fragility, was always in her eyes.

      Marisa pulled away slightly, looking over Julie’s shoulder into the living room, and Julie let her go. Her eyes widened, and her lips drew back in distaste. “Mom! What’s that?”

      Julie turned around. Mrs. Malloy’s mice, that’s what that was. “Oh, that’s just a mess I’m getting ready to clean up. Don’t look, honey.” She hurried into the kitchen to find some paper towels and an empty grocery sack.

      When she returned, Marisa was leaning over the window seat. “Gross!”

      Julie turned her away from the sight. “Don’t worry, honey, I’m going to take care of it.”

      “Mary wouldn’t take care of it. Mary would make George take care of it.” Mary and George had been Marisa’s most recent foster parents. “Mary says daddies do that.”

      “Well, in this house, I do that.” Brave words, but the familiar anxiety hit Julie in the pit of her stomach anyway. It seemed as if every time she turned around there was yet another message that kids needed both a mother and a father.

      When Marisa didn’t appear to be convinced by Julie’s words, Julie patted her on the shoulder reassuringly. “Honey, if daddies can do it, so can mommies.” That was what Julie kept telling herself, anyway. It didn’t stop her stomach from rebelling as she picked up the dead mice and dropped them into the sack.

      After Julie had disposed of the bodies, Marisa apparently remembered her original errand. “Mom, my stuff isn’t here!” She looked up into Julie’s eyes anxiously. Her “stuff”—the pitifully little amount that there was—was in two cardboard boxes in Julie’s car.

      “That’s okay, I know where it is. It’s in my car, safe and dry.”

      Marisa screwed her face into a doubtful frown.

      Julie smiled, resigned to getting wet. “Okay, let’s go get it.” She stood and took Marisa’s hand, and they walked out onto the porch. “Ready?” Marisa nodded. “Okay, let’s go!” Still holding hands, they ran out into the downpour and across the front yard to the car.

      Julie yanked open the hatchback of her elderly navy-blue Saab and dragged out a cardboard carton. “Here, you take this one, I’ll get the big one.” She grabbed the other carton and balanced it on her hip while she jerked the hatchback shut. The two of them hurried back through the rain to the porch, laughing as they got drenched.

      They carried the boxes upstairs to Marisa’s room. Marisa dived into the first to check her most treasured possessions, her battered, much-read books. Julie smiled at her intensity. It was one of the things she’d loved first about Marisa. For a moment, before getting back to work, Julie simply watched and enjoyed her daughter.

      Wringing water from her brown hair, Julie trotted back down the stairs and into the living room just as her friend Carla Hartshorn came through the front door, her own short blond curls dripping. The two of them probably looked worse than Mrs. Malloy’s mice.

      Julie raised her eyebrows. “Ed let you leave? I just got off the phone with him, and he was panicking.”

      Carla grinned. “I’m on my lunch hour.”

      “At four in the afternoon?”

      “I didn’t get lunch earlier, due to him freaking out. Good idea of yours, having him go through an old presentation and mark it up. That’ll keep him busy all night.”

      “Yeah, but it’ll leave you with the cleanup tomorrow.”

      Carla shrugged her dainty shoulders. “I know what you wanted for Cinci Eagle, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Now, what can I do to help?”

      Julie gave her a grateful look. “Bless you, my child. You can call the plumber and find out why he still isn’t here even though we had a nine-o’clock appointment and every time I call they say we’re the next stop. And you can call Cincinnati Power & Light and find out why we still don’t have electricity even though they were supposed to turn it on this morning.” She handed Carla her cell phone and the list of calls she’d made. “And Cincinnati Telephone, too, while you’re at it, to find out why the phone hasn’t been turned on. All these cell calls are going to break me.”

      Carla clicked the phone. “No, they won’t.”

      Julie shot her a questioning glance.

      Carla held up the phone. “Battery’s dead.”

      Wonderful.

      BEN HARBISON TURNED from his four-year-old son in the bathtub to grab the portable phone on the sink behind him. “Hello?”

      “Ben?”

      He sighed to himself. Maggie. A nice woman, a wonderful grandmother, but she’d been trying to run his life and Joe’s ever since Rose died two years ago. “Hi, Maggie. What’s up?”

      “Ben, I’m concerned about Joey.”

      No surprise. Maggie was always concerned about Joey. Ben glanced at his son. “Just a minute, Maggie.” He covered the mouthpiece for a moment. “No splashing, understand?”

      Joe frowned. “Cats don’t splash. Cats don’t like water.”

      A cat. Well, a cat was better than a rabbit, which Joe had been for three carrot-filled days last month. Ben had worried the kid would turn orange.

      “Excellent!”