His friends were enjoying the fact that Richard had no kitchen skills.
“You gotta peel the thing.”
“Seriously. Just pick it up and start cutting.”
“Dude. It won’t bite you.”
Faye had a hand reached out to help him when Jeremiah swooped in with a cutting board, spouting instructions at a million words per minute.
“Y’all, Richard’s going to cry. He just is. That’s what onions make you do. Nobody look. He’ll be okay.”
A few minutes later, Richard was setting a platter of chopped onions beside the relish, and Jeremiah was chatting up a woman about Richard’s age. Her head was crowned with spiraling braids that made Faye catch her breath at the thought of Frida.
“Stephanie,” Jeremiah said, “don’t you laugh at Richard and his onions. We’re having burgers tomorrow and we’ll need onions again. You’re next!”
Jeremiah’s nonprofit hired young people with challenges and helped them develop marketable skills. For this job, he’d brought community college students, ages eighteen through twenty-two. Ordinarily, Faye would be muttering about the wisdom of training anyone to be an archaeology field tech with some misguided notion that it would be a path out of poverty. The job didn’t pay so very well, to put it mildly, not when you considered the wear-and-tear on the body. In this case, she wasn’t as crotchety about the effectiveness of this program, and the reason was Jeremiah.
She’d seen the curriculum for the training session he’d just put her new hires through, and she approved. He’d taught them how to handle the tools of her trade, but he’d also taught them basic workplace skills. She remembered one line from his syllabus clearly: “Show up on time. Don’t yell at anybody, especially your boss.”
Before she’d started her own business, she wouldn’t have thought anybody needed to be told that. She would have been wrong. Faye had fired a lot of people whose background would never have been labeled “disadvantaged,” just because they couldn’t manage those simple things. If Richard, Stephanie, and the others listened to Jeremiah, they’d be ending their summer with a glowing recommendation letter from Faye. And so would Jeremiah.
Jeremiah had even taken them to a bank and helped them open bank accounts where their paychecks would be deposited. He’d done a budgeting lesson that had taught them how the money for their project flowed, but Faye had been able to read between the lines. Jeremiah was also teaching them to handle their own money.
In every interaction the man had with these young people, there was only one message: “Succeed and prosper!” Faye liked that approach very much.
When it came time for marshmallow-toasting, Jeremiah’s charges grew quiet, focused on bringing their marshmallows to the perfect shade of brown, then sandwiching them between graham crackers and chocolate for optimum gooeyness.
“You’re gonna get ’em sugared up. They’re younger than we are. I’m not sure we can keep up with them,” Faye said.
“We can’t. No doubt about it. But I worked them hard today,” Jeremiah said, raking a string of dried marshmallow off his cheek. “They’ll sleep.”
She pointed at each of the techs in turn. “I see Richard. And there’s Stephanie. You can’t miss her with that gorgeous hair. What about the woman talking to her, the one with the red buzz cut? Is that Ayesha?”
“You got it.”
She pointed at the woman next to Ayesha. “The tall woman with the amazing green eyes is Yvonna, right?”
“Yep.”
“And the young man with the muscles and the tattoo on his hand that looks like a knot? Remind me of his name? I remember that it’s almost like David, but not quite.”
“You have a good memory. His name is Davion. He says the tattoo is a west African symbol for wisdom.”
“Nice choice! If I were ever going to get a tattoo, I might get that. To be honest, though? I’ve been moving dirt for so long that my shoulders are wrecked and my neck isn’t much better. Tattoos hurt and I hurt enough already. I’m probably going to stay ink-less.”
Faye bit into the s’more and the world took on a rosy glow. She could have sworn she felt the pain in her neck ebb a little. Maybe marshmallows should be a controlled substance, but she sure hoped the FDA never figured that out.
“Take a look at these people. They’re gonna do good work for you,” said Jeremiah, holding his arms outstretched at his sides like a minister blessing his flock. “I promise. And when they’re happy, well-adjusted, educated adults, you’ll have the pleasure of knowing that you gave them their first job.”
“Me and the state of Tennessee.”
He raised his no-name brand root beer, purchased cheap so the food budget would allow for the marshmallows that Faye and her aching neck were loving so devoutly. “To the state of Tennessee!”
She raised her own root beer and drank deeply. It had been a long, hard day, and it had taken her an inordinately long time to scrub the memory of Frida’s blood off her body. She was ready to sleep.
Tomorrow was Saturday, and even though it was the weekend, she had planned to spend at least a half-day both days orienting her new crew and getting the project started—and also keeping them busy and burning off their youthful energy. But Detective McDaniel had told her that it would be at least two days before he would release the crime scene, so now she had a problem. How was she going to keep these people busy and productive until then?
The museum director had helped Faye and Jeremiah put together a museum tour that should be fun. It would get them prepared for hands-on archaeology, and they’d get the ego boost that comes with seeing things that mere tourists don’t get to see. That would take care of Saturday, or most of it.
On Sunday, she guessed she could take them to the university library to pore over several piles of books and
