“Mommy said he was.”
“Yeah, but sometimes…maybe it won’t work out like she thinks.”
“My mom said he was coming, and that she feels better.” He had been listening on the stairs. I didn’t want to think about what else he had heard. “Are you going to fight with him?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “But I can’t help it that I’m angry. Do you understand that?”
“Because he left us and my mom’s dying,” he stated matter-of-factly.
Oh, holy Mother. “I won’t fight with him,” I told Charlie.
“Good,” he said, turning back to his Legos. “Daddy gets really mad when he fights.”
I watched him for a moment.
“Maybe with Daddy here you won’t have to work at that place anymore,” he mentioned. I knew he didn’t mean the NGS.
“Maybe,” I whispered. I had to go, and I hated leaving Charlie even more than usual that night. I felt physically sick leaving him. I hugged him, and kissed his head, and hugged himagain so tightly he squeaked. I went to the car crying, trying get control of myself, wiping the tears and snot from my face before I went into Roy’s.
As bad as I thought it had been when Mike left, the thought of him being back in the house, ignoring Charlie and being rude to Cassie and kicking her when she was down, picking on me and hating me because he thought I acted like a snob because I went to college—that was worse. Much worse.
To his credit, Roy didn’t ask why my eyes were bloodshot, and my face was blotchy. He just looked at me and told me to straighten up the storeroom for a few minutes. He probably thought I would scare away the customers.
I checked my phone obsessively, hoping to hear from Charlie that he was fine, and frightened to hear from Charlie that Mike had arrived earlier than expected. The entire night I was sick to my stomach.
When I got out to the Bronco, my phone finally dinged and I was so tightly wound that I almost dropped it. I jumped into the car and slammed the door and locked it before checking my message.
LukeText me when you get home.
I started to cry again.
MeI’m in the parking lot at Roy’s. I’m just leaving.
Tears were dripping onto my phone. I took a breath and told myself to stop being a baby.
I was still crying when I texted him that I was in Nana’s driveway, and he responded.
LukeI’m coming home on Saturday.
Instead of going right inside, I pulled off my I Drink at Roys shirt from under my sweatshirt and threw it on the porch. Then I went and sat on Nana’s bench in the moon garden, closed my eyes, and imagined.
∞
By the time Saturday rolled around, Cassie was in a frenzy. I had tried to ask her if she had heard from Mike again, but she refused to answer me. It was like talking to a wall, or an amoeba with no moral fiber. She spent hours sitting on the coach with Nana’s old hand mirror propped up on some pillows, staring at one side of her face then the other, twisting her thin hair into various knots and braids, putting on makeup, lotion, perfume, and pretty much every beauty product we had left in the house. And even though I know the reason for it, I was still glad to see her up and animated. It had been a long time since I had seen her so, well, engaged.
Friday had been another rough day for Charlie at school. At least, that was what I was assuming, as he jumped into the Bronco and slammed the door, and took his snack from me without saying a word. “You’re welcome,” I reminded him, but his face was stony. Tara had offered to drive but I decided to go watch the practice so that Coach Sean would see how important the team was to our family. After it was over, I went to him and offered to help with team emails, or make fundraising calls, or take the tents to the next meet. I would do anything.
Saturday morning I got up early and fixed my hair, causing Cassie to eye me suspiciously when I brought her the breakfast tray. As if I would gussy up for Mike. I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. “Text me if he gets here,” I remarked as I put down her tea.
“Whenhe gets here,” she corrected me.
It had been the same thing after she had Charlie. It had been a rough delivery, and afterwards, coming home with a somewhat colic-y new baby to my studio apartment, she fell pretty quickly into a bottomless pit of post-partum depression. It was a situation that would have tried the patience of the Pope, and Cassie definitely wasn’t the Pope. But the one thing she was sure of, and never wavered about, and hung onto hard, was that Mike would come back. He loved her, and she loved him. So as I paced around my tiny apartment with the five feet of floor space that was still open for walking on, rocking a crying Charlie and praying, praying that he would settle down with a bottle before my neighbors called the landlord on me, she closed her eyes and thought of the shining beacon of Mike. Things hadn’t changed.
I took Charlie with me to the NGS on Saturday morning and kept up our routine, even though he begged to be left at home in case his father arrived. I was on pins and needles, both from the thought of Mike’s arrival, and from the thought of Luke’s. He had texted me again on Friday night to make sure that I got home ok from Roy’s. It had kept me going.
Charlie got his cookie, and he and Frankie went over to the playground as usual. Martha and I were busy with customers at first, but as they slowed to a trickle, she sat down at the broken register and gave me the eye.
“You look very nice today, honey.”
