“Could you just answer the question?”
“Which question are we talking about here?”
“Am I a hatchling?”
“After thirty-two hours of labor, my little hatchling, I pushed you out, exhausted and running on Toaster Strudels from two days before because those vile nurses wouldn’t feed me.” Ice chips, they thought ice chips would satisfy me.
She hums under her breath in satisfaction. My little spawn is just like me in so many ways, and in so many ways, we are two entirely different people.
“What brought this on?” Darn my curiosity. If I were a cat, I’d have died a dozen times by now, thus eliminating my contractual nine lives. I’d have had to barter with another cat for extra lives.
“Before we left the city, Jessica told me that there is no way I’m a real girl and that I crawled from an egg.” I glance over at her for that one-point-five seconds and watch her perfect button nose wrinkle in distaste.
I could tell her that this Jessica is just jealous, but she wouldn’t buy it. My sweet Lark has the analytical mind of Rain Man, so she’d see right through the white lie anyway.
“Jessica probably failed a class, and seeing that the principal just offered you the chance to skip a grade?—”
I fail. That is complete and utter jealousy.
“I’m not sure,” she ponders, her inquisitive little mind whirring. “Jessica only failed that class because they caught her kissing Bobby in the bathroom, and she was so embarrassed that she refused to come back to school for a week.”
Now this is the part where I should insert some kind of motivational speech. It could be about waiting for that perfect kiss, the kind that makes your leg pop up like a faulty spring. Or about how as preteens jumping into those vital teen years, their hormones are going to run the equivalent of an Olympic sprint and keep on going.
Let’s get one thing straight—I am not that kind of mom.
I know Jessica’s mom, the crunchy kind where her kid does no wrong. There’s one in every classroom. The PTO presidentwho never sleeps and always looks so put together, you can’t help but wonder,How? She arranges every single bake sale, and she always stares me down when I show up with my store-bought mini cupcakes. She didn’t like my argument when I told her to name one person who didn’t like those cupcakes.
She couldn’t.
But more than that, she named her daughter after herself. I mean, come on, who does that? And then she called herself Jessie and her daughter Jessica. It creeped me out.
So of course me, being the hot mess mom who can’t do the whole motivational speech, I reply, “Family tradition.”
“Mom!”
“Am I wrong?” I might be, but I’ve got a hunch.
Her grunt of annoyance is all I need to feel validated. “Can we talk about something else?” she asks, dropping the hatchling conversation.
“What’s on your mind, little bird?” I squint out the windshield, seeing the mountains in the distance. The area truly is beautiful, and a part of me hopes I can find a home there. My brother loves Maine, and since he is all we have left, the choice was simple after Eric died.
“Why are we moving?” A pang sparks my heart at the hurt in her little voice.
It’s a question she’s asked me a hundred times, and a hundred times, all I could tell her was that I had to.
The truth of the matter is I couldn’t stay in the city with the reminders around every corner, the service men smiling at me in that pitiful way, or the grocer giving me that look that spoke volumes.
I couldn’t take the looks. The pain. The reminders. There was nothing left for us there. No family, not even Eric’s family, lived there. It was a place we found on our own and made it ours.
Eric wasn’t even Lark’s father, just my partner in crime. He was my best friend who became my roommate and my platonic life partner. He felt natural, and right, and everything that a friendship should be. He was there for Lark and me when we had no one, and then he became our everything. Our friendship reminded me of a fairy tale.
Then,one day, he went to work and never came home. I knew when he became a cop that the possibility was always there. I just never expected it to happen to us.
Our life was perfect, full of love and laughter, and all of it was snatched away because of a senseless crime.
Sure, it’s been two years, so this move was due, but he will always hold a piece of my heart that I will never get back.
Then there is Lark’s biological father. Just the thought of him has me tapping my thumb on my steering wheel. I was pregnant at sixteen and a single mom at seventeen.
