It’s A Plunderful Life Read online

  Toni’s cheeks flushed with delight, but she wisely chose to bite her tongue. I grumbled under my breath as I poured syrup all over my waffles, but I was an adult and knew that a free stay meant I was going to have to earn my keep.

  But I didn’t have to like it.

  After breakfast, I volunteered to do the dishes, but Toni assured me—with no small amount of satisfaction—that she had it all under control. Still grumbling, I headed outside toward the bank of golf carts employees used to move around the park. I had almost reached them when my mother’s voice stopped me. “Cass, what are you doing?”

  “I’m…” I gestured at the golf carts. But even as I did so, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  No. Oh, no.

  Because my mother wasn’t heading toward the golf carts. She was, instead, walking toward the long, low shed where we had, when I was a child, kept the other means of park transportation. “We’ve got guests on the trails,” she said. “You know what that means.”

  A lot of things had changed since I had worked at the park last. Was it too much to hope that this one thing was different too?

  But, no. My mother threw open the doors of the shed. And there, in all her glory, was Mother Goose.

  I know some people name their cars, and I really, really wish that I was about to describe a cute little beat-up truck that my family affectionately referred to as Mother Goose.

  Nope. This was an actual goose. Well, not a live goose, but a giant white vehicle in the shape of a goose. Wearing a bonnet.

  She’d obviously gotten a fresh coat of paint recently because her body gleamed as the sun trickled in through the open doors. I’d always thought her eyes looked a bit maniacal, and that hadn’t changed at all. If anything, she looked more insane than ever.

  I’d actually learned to drive in Mother Goose when I was sixteen. I mean, I hadn’t used her to take my driver’s test. With a top speed of fifteen miles per hour, she wasn’t exactly street legal. But I had spent hours with Kurt beside me in the front seat, knuckles white on the wheel, guiding that massive bird over the park’s trails.

  “Really?” I said to my mother.

  She smiled at me. “Really.”

  I sighed. Might as well get this over with. I headed for the door in Mother Goose’s side.

  “Baby?”

  I looked back.

  She held up one hand, a set of keys dangling from her fingers. “Baby girl, I’m driving.”

  I glanced back at the door. “Okay, but—”

  “I don’t think we’ll both fit in the front.”

  “We did when I was—”

  “Yes, yes. But you’re a bit…” She trailed off, clearly trying to find the right words to tell me what I knew perfectly well—that I weighed more at forty-nine than I had at seventeen. “I just don’t think it will be a comfortable fit,” she finally said.

  I stared at her, suddenly understanding what she was telling me. “No.”

  But she nodded. “It’ll be fun!”

  Did I mention that Mother Goose didn’t trundle down the trails solo? Nope, she had her brood with her—two yellow ducklings and one black one, with a longer neck. That was supposed to be the Ugly Duckling, I suppose. All three were attached to the back of Mother Goose, and it was how we transported people when necessary—guests, mainly, but also sometimes employees during park hours. To preserve the magic, my mother insisted.

  Also to humiliate her soon-to-be-divorced daughter, apparently.

  There was no use in arguing, so I walked down to the first duckling and climbed in, watching my seventy-two-year-old mother nimbly climb into the driver’s seat and get the goose going. She swiveled in her seat to look at me. “Seatbelt, please.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Seriously?” Yes, the ducks had seatbelts. But they were really just for liability purposes. As I said, this goose didn’t go very fast.

  “Safety first,” she chirped. And waited.

  Again, no point in arguing. I pulled the seatbelt around my waist and clicked it into position. Then I lifted my arms, making a show of the fact that I was all buckled in. She gave a quick nod, turned around, and steered the goose out of the shed.

  It was far too early in the morning, and I was sitting in a vehicle shaped like a baby duckling driven by my mother, heading out to clean cottages. Even so, the magic of the Enchanted Forest began to do its work, lifting a bit of the weight from my shoulders as we slowly putt-putted between two rows of azalea bushes. There was a stillness in the woods, even with the purr of Mother Goose’s motor and the crunching of sticks beneath her tires.

  A turn to the right, and we went down a hill, crossing a stream and coming into a clearing with a playground made to look like Cinderella’s carriage. A giant ball made up of silvery bars held a winding slide, while the wheels offered a filigree version of climbing walls and a set of monkey bars stretched between two massive resin horses. A little girl, her hair in braids, lay sprawled beneath a set of swings, studying the ground in front of her and making notes in a journal. Nearby, a woman sat in the grass with a little boy, weaving daisy chains with clover flowers.

  My mother lifted her hand in a cheery wave to the family, and then we were sliding through a dark tunnel of close-growing trees, their branches sporting sinister thorns. A flash of color caught my eye, and I turned just in time to catch a glimpse of one of the elusive parrots that lived at the park. Mr. Mancuso said there had been a parrot population in the area for hundreds of years, although no one knew where they had come from. Kurt had merely shook his head when I mentioned the mystery of the parrots. “Not much of a mystery,” he’d said. “They’re just some former pets. Probably been around for a couple decades, at most.”

  I liked Mr. Mancuso’s version better, although now I knew that Kurt was probably right.

  The tunnel opened up to the Toadstool Garden, an area of the park where immense resin mushrooms towered over the guests, their undersides painted a variety of colors. At night, phosphorescent paint made them glow in the blacklights hidden strategically in other artificial plants.

  Yes, it was good to be back, despite the ache in my heart. And the fact that I’d had to get up early.

  The park offered guests several small cottages they could rent for multi-day visits. It was still early when we arrived at the first set of cottages—we called this set the Elf Houses, with their curved rooflines and over-sized doors—but there was something about the Enchanted Forest that inspired people to rise early and get out on the trails. And with a small housekeeping team—i.e., my mother and me—we needed to get a jump on things.

  My mother grabbed two buckets of cleaning supplies, and handed one to me. “You start on the right, and I’ll start on the left, and we’ll meet in the middle. Sound good?”

  It felt small to say what I was thinking, which was, “Not really.” So I just nodded.

  She slipped a frilly pink apron over her head. Of course my mother was going to clean bathrooms wearing a silk suit and heels. “You remember what you’re doing?” she asked.

  “Despite years of therapy, I have never been able to forget my housekeeping experience here.”

  She chuckled, turning toward the first cottage.

  “That wasn’t a joke,” I muttered, heading for the cottage she’d asked me to start with. I knocked on the door, waited a few beats, and then opened the door. “Housekeeping,” I called into the little space. But no one was there.

  I may have been joking about the therapy part, but apparently I really hadn’t lost my memories of cleaning those cottages. My muscles seemed to remember exactly what to do, my hands moving over the sheets as I stripped them off the beds, putting new ones on and fluffing the pillows. The vacuum was right where I expected it to be, in a small supply closet padlocked shut at the back of the house. The combination to the lock was, as it had been the last time I did this, Kurt’s birthday.

  In the kitchen, I made sure the small supply of dishes was clean and put away. I wiped down the counters,
humming a little to myself as I worked. If I was going to do this regularly, I was going to need some headphones so I could listen to a podcast while I worked.

  Maybe I could find one about how women can get back at their ex-husbands.

  Finally, I moved to the bathroom, which had always been my least favorite part. Look, I hated cleaning the bathroom the people I loved used. Cleaning up after strangers was never going to be something I liked. Still, I thought I was moving pretty efficiently until I emerged from my first cottage and saw my mother leaning against Mother Goose’s side, nibbling on a candy bar. “Took you long enough,” she said.

  “What…” I stopped walking. We were going to meet in the middle. If my mother was chilling by the goose, then… “Did you finish the other cottages already?”

  “Sure did.” She pushed the last bit of candy into her mouth, and turned to open the goose’s door. “Come on. We have more to do.”

  I looked back at the little set of cottages. There were four, and I had assumed we would each do two. Not that I was complaining, but…

  How had she gotten it all done so quickly?

  Maybe I didn’t remember as much about housekeeping as I thought I did. Was there some trick to getting everything done in a third of the time?

  I trudged over to my duckling, settling the bucket of cleaning supplies between my feet. My mother turned to look at me, her eyebrows raised, and I sighed, already reaching down to buckle my seatbelt. “Happy?”

  “I’m always happy, baby girl.”

  And she was. Especially when she was tormenting me.

  On we went, stopping at cottages as we reached them. And every time, I would stumble out of my first cottage, my shoulder aching from the unfamiliar work—I might have kept my house reasonably clean, but I certainly didn’t take care of half a dozen bathrooms in the span of a couple hours—only to find my elderly mother relaxing in the shade of Mother Goose, stuffing her face with candy.

  It was enough to make anyone grumpy, and I was already on edge. Because, you know, my husband had dumped me and the whole world was laughing at my totally justified outburst and also I lost half the money from the sale of my business and maybe, oh, that’s right—my mother made me ride around in a duckling like I was a child.

  “Everything okay?” my mother asked as we walked away from yet another set of cottages. I’d done one. She’d done four.

  “Maybe you should try to take it a little easier, Mom. You’re not as young as you used to be.”

  Her laugh was like bells. “Oh, baby girl. Getting older doesn’t mean you have to get old.”

  I muttered some words I hadn’t been allowed to use when I was growing up. But I said them very quietly because I was pretty sure I still wasn’t allowed to use them.

  It happened on our fifth set of cottages. It felt like this was never going to end, that we were going to keep driving around and cleaning an endless chain of empty guest houses. Also, the sun had gotten high in the sky, and that little yellow duckling was reflecting the sun’s rays at me, making everything hotter than it needed to be. I hadn’t worked like this—physically, I mean—in years, and that gingerbread waffle was long since forgotten by my stomach.

  And my mother hadn’t offered to share any of her candy.

  So I wasn’t in the best mood when I entered that last cottage. This one may have actually been occupied by bears—they seemed to have moved everything that could be moved, used every towel, left trash scattered all over the place. I stopped just inside the door to take it all in, breathing deeply and telling myself we were almost done.

  The breathing and positive thoughts worked pretty well.

  Until I got to the bathroom.

  Now, look. I don’t want to shame anyone. I realize that stuff happens in the bathroom. It’s where stuff belongs! And it’s not a guest’s job to clean the bathroom when they’re on vacation.

  That said, I was shocked by exactly how much stuff had happened in that bathroom. I won’t describe it here—it wasn’t pleasant to experience the first time, and I’m not about to force anyone to relive it with me—but let me just say this: Something very, very terrible happened in that bathroom.

  And the unfairness of it all hit me. I was supposed to be enjoying my empty nest years with my loving husband. I had done everything right—I’d worked hard. I’d invested emotional energy into my marriage. I’d joined a gym when the pounds started to accumulate a little faster.

  And none of that saved me from this moment, when I was living at home again, being chauffeured around in that stupid Goose-mobile, the heat of the day making me sweat like crazy but somehow sparing my mother despite her impractical clothes and the speed with which she was tearing through her work—and now, faced with a super gross bathroom.

  I can’t say exactly what happened. One minute I was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, all of my anger and frustration and disappointment bubbling up inside me as I stared at what a guest had left behind for someone else to clean up, all my positive thoughts shredded into so much useless confetti…

  And the next minute I was on the floor, huddled in a ball, my entire body shaking and the bathroom sparkling clean. Every surface gleamed, and the whole thing smelled like a lemon grove at sunset, all traces of stuff gone.

  And I felt like I might die.

  It was all I could do to drag my body to the front door of the cottage. “Mom,” I croaked, the sun hitting my eyes like a spike to my head. My mother ambled toward me, a lollipop stick jutting from her lips like she had all the time in the world and this wasn’t an emergency. “Help.”

  “That was fast, baby girl.” She reached my side and crouched down, resting one hand on my cheek. “You’ll be okay.”

  I closed my eyes, grateful for her cool hand on my skin. I felt feverish and chilled and sucked dry, all at the same time. “Not okay,” I whispered.

  “Well, maybe not for a bit. But you will be.” She got her arm under my shoulders. “Come on, baby girl, you can stand up. You just don’t want to.”

  She was right—I did not want to. But with her help, I managed to drag myself into something of a more vertical position, my back hunched, my limbs like water. “I don’t feel good.”

  She chuckled, which both soothed and annoyed me. I assumed, given her laissez faire reaction, that I wasn’t really dying. But I definitely felt like it, and a little sympathy would have been nice. “No, I imagine you don’t. How bad was it?”

  “How bad was what?” She was helping me hobble toward Mother Goose, each step making me more certain that I was, in fact, going to puke.

  “The bathroom.” She paused. “It was the bathroom, right? That’s what sparked you? You always did hate cleaning a bathroom.”

  We reached the duckling, and she got me into the seat. “Bad,” I whispered through dry lips. My hands fumbled with the seatbelt, and she finally took over, clicking it into place.

  “Safety first,” she said.

  That was the last thing I remembered.

  5

  I woke up in the guest room, the duvet—which definitely did not look like it had just been washed—spread out over me. The sun still streamed in through the windows, and I still felt like something I’d scraped off my shoe. But less so, which was something, I suppose.

  “Oh, you’re awake.” My mother stood just inside the doorway, her hands on her hips, still wearing that frilly apron. “Toni, would you go down and grab that tray?”

  I heard my stepsister grumbling on the stairs, and then my mother moved closer, settling herself on the edge of the bed. “I’m impressed. I wasn’t sure it would happen right away. Or at all, to be honest.”

  I pushed myself into a sitting position. “What would happen? Me dying?”

  “No, baby.” She looked away, at the print of the castle that hung on the far wall. “I wasn’t sure you still had it.”

  Before I could ask what the heck she was talking about, Toni walked in carrying a large tray. My mother stood to take it from her
, settling it over my lap.

  “Wow. You look awful,” my stepsister said, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet.

  “You look awful,” I shot back, but I didn’t have enough energy to sound even close to sincere. Also, it wasn’t true—Toni’s cheeks were pink, her aquamarine eyes bright, and she looked all of twenty-seven. Judging by the smirk on her face, she knew it, too. I shifted my attention to the tray in front of me.

  It was candy: a small plate with squares of fudge in a variety of flavors, saltwater taffy, a bowl of sour cherry hard candies, and a single rainbow-colored lollipop in a small crystal vase.

  “Eat,” my mother said. “It will help. Trust me.”

  I didn’t want to complain about being offered an entire tray of sweets—by my mother, of all people—but this wasn’t going to do my figure any good. “I don’t think—”

  My mother held up a hand. “Eat, and then I’ll explain what just happened.”

  Good enough for me. I picked up a piece of peanut butter fudge, pleased to find that I did feel a bit better with each bite. “Okay,” I said. “Spill it.”

  My mother sighed. “Cass, you’re an enchantress.”

  I polished off a second piece of fudge. “Mom, that line didn’t work on me when Jimmy Chase used it after prom, and it’s certainly not going to distract me now.”

  But Mom shook her head. “No, baby girl. Like an actual enchantress. You have special abilities.”

  I’d been expecting to hear about some genetic disorder that hit members of our family when we reached middle age. Possibly some type of biting insect native to South Carolina that made someone feel like their skin might fall off and their bones were dissolving inside their bodies.

  Instead, my mother was talking nonsense.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “This would be so much easier if you remembered, but I think we did too good a job when you got married.” She wrung her hands, the diamond on her left hand winking. “You won’t remember this, but once you knew all about your abilities. You weren’t allowed to use them, of course, not when you were a child. And then you met Brad, and…Well, he’s what you wanted.”