After staying there for a year, it was looking lived-in and cozy, and—if Del was honest with himself—a little rundown in a few places. He didn’t have the energy for the upkeep for an old, sprawling 3,000-square-foot house. He needed to hire someone, but somehow, he hadn’t.
He told himself that he was focusing on the cookbook right now, but that wasn’t exactly true. He still felt unanchored after leaving Clyde and Trim behind, like he was just drifting through life.
Paul’s words rang in his mind. What did he really want from life?
Right now, he didn’t know, so he soldiered on, trying to come up with new ways to spin some old recipes for fine dining food that could be made at home. Trim had been a success because of him. Hell, just before he’d left, there had been murmurings of a Michelin star in the imminent future.
The thought of returning to a restaurant kitchen seemed daunting at the moment. Especially if he wasn’t the owner of the said kitchen. He hadn’t worked for someone else in a decade.
He’d had a short-lived cooking show on cable too, a handful of years ago. That had been fun, sort of, even though he’d hated being directed and how it all was about the “right angles” and how he looked. Maybe that had come through, the way he didn’t like that the producer had wanted to concentrate on him more, and that was why they’d axed the show after ten episodes.
The cookbook had been Bernie’s idea. She loved celebrity chef cookbooks, and when Del had asked Paul to help out, he’d found a great potential publisher that was very interested. Del just had to find it in himself to write the fucking book first, though, and he wasn’t…inspired.
* * * *
Del fell asleep on the couch. His body was long ago used to not being nourished the ways he should’ve been. He’d lived too long on whatever he tasted as he cooked and scraps from this or that.
Not eating caught up with him when he jolted awake at the pounding on his door some hours later. The TV was on low, but the wailing sound of a baby would’ve pierced a higher volume for sure, based on how efficiently it cut through the heavy wood of Del’s front door.
He got to his feet, instinctively alarmed, and then swayed wildly when his low blood sugar caught up with him. “Whoa…” He managed to make it to the door, his brain still scrambling on to what might be going on. When he opened the door, he suddenly had his arms full of a wailing baby.
He stared in confusion at the scene in front of him. Two more little kids and a young man that all but collapsed on his porch, pleading for help and apologizing in a tone that could only be described as defeated.
“Okay,” Del said, automatically feeling the toddler’s forehead which was burning up. “All right, it seems like we have an emergency here.”
He turned and walked into the house, calling after his shoulder. “Can someone tell me what’s going on?” he asked as he looked around for his car keys. The baby was hot enough for it to be alarming, and he needed to get her into a car and to the hospital as soon as possible.
“The baby’s sick and Justin’s piece of shit car didn’t start,” the oldest of the little ones, a girl with horribly unkempt natural hair said in a tone that was surprisingly aggressive for a kid.
“All right. You’re—” He thought for a while but couldn’t remember the name of their mother, so he went with “The O’Dwyer kids, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m Del. What are all your names?” he asked as he maneuvered on his shoes while holding the baby.
“I’m Harper, that’s Wyatt, and the baby’s Scarlett.”
“And Justin is your big brother?” Del guessed, making Harper nod solemnly. “Okay. Let’s get my car, it’s in the garage.”
Harper grabbed the little boy’s hand and kicked Justin’s sneaker pointedly.
Del didn’t stop to wait and see if Justin could collect himself enough to get up. Instead, he took the lead and hoped everyone would follow, because now Scarlett had gone quiet, and that wasn’t a good sign at all. 3
Streetlights slid up the windshield of their neighbor’s car as they drove through town. Justin sat in the back of the car, holding a whimpering Scarlett, as the neighbor drove. They didn’t have a car seat—another thing for Justin to feel like a failure about, since he could have brought the one from his shitty car—but at least they were on their way to the hospital now. Wyatt and Harper were in the back with him. Harper was staring resolutely out the window at the closed up storefronts they passed.