For the briefest of moments, I just knew the doctors were wrong. There wasn’t one thing wrong with my mother. There couldn’t be.
And, while Kyle had always been the adorable boy who brought me my coffee, this was one of those times when I couldn’t help but see him as something more.
NINETEEN
mother’s morning out
sloane
The boat trip with my sisters had done me a world of good. Coming home made me realize what a world of good Vivi did me. I had taken for granted over the past few months how much my sweet niece played with Taylor and AJ.
Now, this afternoon, sitting in my bedroom that seemed to be getting smaller by the minute, I realized I needed to get out of there. Me. The girl who didn’t even want her children to go to school because she was so terrified something would happen to them and it would be all her fault felt like she needed a break.
AJ was sitting on the floor arranging coins from biggest to smallest, and Taylor, whom I was trying to read to, was knocking over each of AJ’s stacks as soon as he finished them. AJ had made a particularly tall tower with probably fifteen coins. I was very proud of his motor skills. I thought Taylor was completely engrossed in a Shel Silverstein poem—until he wriggled in my lap, kicked out his leg, and the stack was gone. “Mommy!” AJ wailed.
“Taylor, that’s enough,” I said, a little too forcefully. “I’ve had it. I’ve told you five times not to do that, and now you’re going to your room.”
“Noooooo!” Taylor screamed, flailing on the floor. I grabbed him by one arm and one leg—I’d learned from experience that during a full-on tantrum, I couldn’t hold him the regular way. One arm and one leg made him madder, but it gave me a safe grip with which to remove him from the situation.
I walked into his room, set him on the bed as gently as I could, and said, as if a mid-tantrum kid could even hear you, “You stay here until I tell you to come out.”
I closed the door behind me, and the screaming continued. He’d calm down. Eventually.
AJ was still stacking when I got back to my room. “Look, Mommy,” he said proudly.
He had completed his task once again. “Good job, bud,” I said. “Now I want you to make a pile of change for me that equals one dollar.”
He nodded.
“One hundred cents is one dollar.”
“Exactly,” I said. I wanted at least one member of the family to be good with money. I smiled thinking again of that zero balance and smiled even bigger when I realized that since my debt had been cleared, despite my stress levels with Adam, Emerson’s illness, and the kids, I hadn’t bought one single thing. Not so much as a juice box, which Mom was handling right now. It would be a good chance for me to build up our savings.
Caroline walked into my bedroom, Grammy on her heels. “Well, hello there,” I said. “Did the screaming bring you up?”
“Something like that,” Grammy said, looking around at the floor. The room was fairly neat, but AJ’s school things were spread everywhere. I thought again how much easier it would get when Taylor was three or four and could do work at the same time as AJ.
I sensed an ambush coming, but I wasn’t sure what sort of ambush it would be. “So,” Caroline started, “I have the best idea.”
“No,” I said.
Caroline crossed her arms, looking hurt. “Not no,” she said. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Right,” I said, “but I can already tell I don’t like it.”
Grammy laughed.
I ran my hand through AJ’s hair while Grammy said, “Wow, AJ, I’m going to bring my change up here and let you sort it.”
He lit up. “OK. That would be so cool. Wouldn’t it, Mommy?”
I nodded and grinned at him. “Hurry up,” I said to Caroline. “I need to go get Taylor out of time-out.”
“I was just thinking that our poor mother has hardly been able to work for months and the last month wasn’t able to work at all.”
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“I thought it would be nice,” Caroline continued, “if we helped her at the store so she could get caught up on all her design projects.”
