Responsibility

Emil showed Lalli the small notebook in which he had written all he could remember of his advice:
-Did I forget anything you consider important?
Lalli gave it a look:
-No.
Emil closed it and put it in his pocket:
-Good. Let's hope I actually remember I have it if I ever need it. Hey, now that we are alone in a closed room, I need to ask you something: is that thing the seagull man and Juha do with animals really some sort of magic?
-Yes. It's very rare.
Emil let out a sight and ruffled his own hair:
-My parents used to claim that it was some sort of very secret training method that was being passed off as magic to everyone except the chosen students of those who know it. But the two of them work with completely different animals. I've noticed how different animals kept as pets or raised for meat can be from each other. I'd be surprised if there was a training method that could work on any animal. Helena told me that rare powers were usually a blood relative thing. Can Juha's mother do the same thing?
-Yes. With squirrels.
-I also remember that the seagull man is his great-grandfather. Does he have a grandparent who can do the same thing?
-Both his grandparents on that side are dead. I'm never sure which one was the old man's child.
-If it happened before Juha was born, I'm guessing the seagull man has more business being considered his grandfather than any blood grandfather he ever had.
-Yes.
-I'm not sure how to follow up on this, so thanks for the date. I unfortunately need to be back at work in less than half an hour, so I'm going to grab the children and go. Do you want to come with me?
Lalli didn't see a good reason not to. It probably wouldn't hurt to make sure nothing bad had happened to the children who were related to him.

Juha and Mikkel was one thing. But Anne-Mari was at an age at which hair was kept short out of sheer practicality. How had Emil's cousins managed to make her hair look so ridiculous with the quantity they had at their disposal? Lalli also wasn't sure what to think about Mikkel having the portable camera with him. Did he want to get yelled at for not preventing – maybe even encouraging – this hair disaster that badly? Would it be fairer if someone took a picture of Mikkel in his current hairdo, as well? Lalli looked at Anne-Mari again, and decided he couldn't stand to see her hair in that state anymore. He started with one of the many oddly-placed tiny braids, only to both see and hear the tell-tale signs of a photo being taken in his general direction. As soon as he didn't need to blink anymore, he glared at Mikkel.
-Don't worry. Some of the people I spend my free time got the idea that you care about Juha and Anne-Mari much less than you actually do. A photo of you undoing those braids may convince them to revise this idea a little.
-It's your job to watch them. Why didn't you keep the three other children from doing this in the first place?
-It was honestly quite entertaining while it was happening. But now that both the playdate and the actual date are over, it's best to fix those hairstyles before other people see them. It was going to be faster to do once you and Emil were back, so I let the children enjoy themselves in the meantime.
-But she has dumb hair on the photo you just took and said you were going to show other people.
-Good point. No need to worry about that either. Anyone who may see it understands just how easily the only baby in a group of five under the supervision of a single adult can end up in that state. Some of them care for kids who get little-to-no attention from their families. That's the reason for which they think how much you care about the children is any of their business in the first place.
Emil, who had both rounded up and rearranged the hair of his own wards while the conversation was happening, spoke:
-Sorry to be rushing out, but I'll definitely be late for my shift if we stay here any longer. Thanks for everything. How about the three of you say thanks to Mikkel for taking care of you while I was away?
Emil's cousins let out a semi-synchronized "thank you" and the four of them shuffled out of the playroom.

-Is Lalli cheating on Stefan with you?
Emil had to process Anna's question for a few moments before answering:
-What? No! Lalli and Stefan figured out that they weren't working out as a couple and it turned out that we wanted to date each other, so we are trying it now. Do you care to tell me where you got such an idea?
-One of our lady babysitters had a husband who was seeing another woman while she was watching us. We ran into them while shopping one day, they had a fight and she explained what was happening while walking us home.
Emil decided it was best to not pry into that incident too much. There was a lull before Håkan spoke:
-Would… you be able to go out with Lalli more often if we weren't here?
-I managed to spend some time alone with him just this afternoon, didn't I? And to be honest, I was very far from spending all my free time on courting before the three of you showed up, so it would be unfair to claim that the current state of my dating life has anything to do with the three of you being here.
For some reason, all three of the kids were silent all the way back to the Solberg house. By the time a question to ask them was starting to form in his mind, he was leaving them with the person who would watch them during his shift and running slightly late. Just as he was leaving, Sune spoke:
-Thank you for taking care of us. If Mikkel gets a thank you, you should too.
Sune's siblings promptly agreed with him. The early part of the shift was spent at the dishwashing station, as he was unable to keep the neutral expression expected upon taking the food out to the dining room for very long.

When he got to the brothel to pick up Helena, Emil was surprised to see Stefan there. He ended up walking back to the bigger homes with Emil and Helena. Helena whispered to Emil:
-Are you still okay with money? Don't forget your promise to tell me if you get close to running out. Stefan was just telling me he got a bunch of work for one of his easy but seldom-needed jobs out of nowhere and will pay for someone to get some of the load off him. But it's partly because the task is time-sensitive, so he needs an answer fast.
Emil was honestly a little suspicious of Stefan. As far as he understood, most businesses couldn't last long if customers didn't come back, and some of Stefan's trades looked way too easy to make lucrative simply by creating a need for them that hadn't been there before. Even his story-telling sessions were a little hard to attend only once, even though he only had so many of them and could probably comfortably go through all of them in a week if he stuck to a schedule instead of adapting to who happened to be present at a given time. If his suspicions were true, the only way he could escape Stefan's trades for sure was to never have that first free or discounted session for any of them. He had preferred not discussing him with Lalli in part to reduce his chances of letting himself get tempted into giving something a try. He also wasn't entirely sure Stefan's lawyer cousin wasn't conning him by insisting upon meeting once every few months – she fortunately understood that he wanted to postpone the next one until after the children returned to their parents. Those meetings with the lawyer were however the only thing giving him the impression he was doing something to keep what had happened to his family from happening to others. The "doing more" option she had suggested at some point would have been both more expensive and more time-consuming; if he was letting himself be scammed, he could at least keep the money he was spending on it on the low side. Back to the present, while he still had plenty of savings thanks to the size of the installments that were expected on his debt to Helena's father, he had already needed to spend enough of them on the children that it might be a good idea to work on making them last longer, in case they ended up staying with him more than just "a few" months. Besides, if things didn't work out with Lalli, it wasn't entirely impossible that he and Stefan would end up together from a lack of options, so it might not be dumb to build the beginning of a personal relationship with him. He adjusted his pace as to be walking next to Stefan, instead:
-What's the job?
-Someone wants a bunch of high-end handwritten wedding invitations. I've noticed that that you have done a good job in preserving that particular skill.
-How many?
Stefan whispered the numbers of invitations in his ear. Even if for an entire order, it felt like a lot.
-For when?
-A week from tomorrow. If you're interested, I'll deliver the materials to the Solbergs on the way to the Lodge tomorrow morning. You can do them when you want as long as I can pick them up at the Lodge the day before I need to deliver them.
-How much are you paying?
He heard another whisper and liked the number. Even by taking the time to do things carefully, he thought he could manage.

xxxx

One advantage of the card deck was that the children liked it enough to be able to keep each other busy for some amount on time. All he needed to do was check on them regularly while writing down wedding invitations. Between two games, Håkan took a break and came to see what he was doing:
-Who are those for?
-Nobody I know well. They asked Stefan to make a lot of them and he's giving me money to help him. Don't worry, I'm not running out of money. Your father's letter was just unclear on how long the three of you are staying with me, so there are many reasons it won't hurt to have more.
-Did Stefan ask you to use nice writing like that?
-Yes. He came to me in part because I know how to do it.
-Dad said we needed our writing to no be just readable but elegant to be able to work later, but I didn't believe it was true.
-I think you'd need to live in a really big city to find enough people who value elegant handwriting to make a living out of it. Stefan has other jobs that bring money in on a regular basis. His storytelling at the Hunter's Lodge is only one of them.
While not giving Stefan any coin tips for storytelling was tolerated, people coming to hear his stories were expected to spend money on something the Lodge offered one way or another, so bringing the children there had been no more than an occasional treat, usually paid for with the bodyguarding bonus.
-When you say really big, would Mora be big enough?
-I'm not entirely sure. I never actually went there. Listen, I'm not going to get these made when Stefan wants them if I spend too much time talking with you. If you want to ask me something that can't wait until later, do it now.
-It's just that mom and dad tell me it's important to have elegant writing and I just want it to be good enough for other people to read. This is the first time I see having elegant writing being useful.
Emil had somewhat of an idea of where Håkan was trying to go and decided to test his guess:
-Do you not like learning to write elegantly because you think there might other skills that are more useful that you are not learning?
-Yes, something like that.
-It's not an unfounded fear. I knew nothing useful for any jobs I could get after we lost our money because I always thought I would have someone else to do them for me when I would be older. I can't get into every single thing that I'd advise to learn and why right now, but being able to manage your own money is a good start. And for that, being able to do simple math in your head is really important. If you need practice, the card game the three of you have been playing makes you do that.
Håkan nodded and returned to the card game. While Emil had technically told him the math training thing to make him return to the game, it wasn't completely false. As he continued writing down the invitations, he remembered he knew of another card game that worked even better for learning math. Maybe he should teach it to the children once he was done with the job. He then remembered why he knew that specific game in the first place: it could be used for gambling and his parents had practiced it at home in hope of making more money out of gambling. Since there had been evenings on which only one of them was home, he had sometimes been used as a practice dummy of sorts. He faced once again the same dilemma as when the children had shown interest in the raffle tickets: let them have their fun or say "no" to reduce the risk that they will do it on a regular basis when they became older. Luckily, he managed to put that thought on the metaphorical back burner and write all the invitations he wanted to write that evening. To his own surprise, he got to the end of the last batch.

After he helped the children go to bed, he started walking back to his own room. By the time he reached the door, he remembered both his earlier thoughts and the notebook containing Lalli's advice. In the latter, found a statement advising to not act as if telling everything about a problem and telling nothing were the only options about bad things. What one needed to be told to understand what was expected of them was often somewhere between the two options. If he was starting to take on extra work to make sure the children didn't cost him all his savings, it might indeed be the right time to explain why he had accepted to take care of them when he could have simply refused back when they first showed up. He went to sleep, having decided he would tell them the next morning.

A pleasant surprise came with the next morning's mail: whichever endeavor was occupying the children's father, who was aware of his reason for caring for the children on top of having been made aware of his current situation, was making money on his endeavor a little earlier than he had anticipated. He decided that some of the money should go to Emil to reimburse part of what he had probably been spending on the children. According to the letter, the money had been transferred to him at the local bank, but Emil knew all too well such things were best checked in person. Between that, the need to deliver the invitations he had made and the cook suddenly having a meal idea that required items that weren't currently in the pantry yet again, he went into town alongside the children and parted with the them as they walked by the Hunter's Lodge on the way to the school. As he stepped inside the Lodge, Emil found the place virtually empty and Milla talking with two of the younger adult males from her family whom Emil could only manage to identify as "not Stefan". Milla was the first to notice him and waved to him with a hand holding an envelope:
-Hi Emil. I have the money Stefan intended for your work over here. By the way, do you happen to have any idea why Stefan decided to stay at the flower shop last night? The owner would only tell us what we needed to know not to get worried over him not coming home. This is usually the sign he has a problem he thinks he can't tell anyone in the family about, but we don't even know enough to be able to tell whether he's right or not.
The town didn't have an actual florist. Milla meant Helena's workplace. Helena herself was still there, allegedly because one of the employees had gotten an accidental injury that needed several hours of supervision right at the end of the work evening.