So she was going. She was going to push down any guilt over how she always seemed to be grabbing and bringing a bottle of wine instead of making any of the elaborate, beautiful, delicious dishes that her friends often brought to book club meetings.
All of that would wait for a day when she hadn’t worked two jobs, helped with a thousand tiny kid disasters, and worried about five millionotherminor kid disasters that threatened to loom around every corner.
So… when Benjamin went to college. Yeah, she’d pencil it all in for around that time.
“Okay, baby,” she said as she headed into the living room, where Benjamin and Mrs. Richards had pizza and board games set up on the coffee table.
Her son loved book club night, because it was the one night a month where he got to eat dinner in the living room and was allowed as much screen time as he wanted before bedtime. He and Mrs. Richards were apparently both very deeply involved in some kind of kid’s show about dogs in space. June trusted the older woman to set appropriate content limits, so she didn’t ask questions and counted herself lucky. She’d seen enough kids’ television to last more than a lifetime.
“I’m not a baby,” Benjamin protested, not looking away from his game of Scrabble, Jr. “I’m a kid.”
“You’re always going to bemybaby,” she teased him, as she always did, pressing a kiss to his cheek. He made a big show of pretending to wipe it off, but his smile gave him away. “Now, you’re going to be well-behaved for Mrs. Richards, right?”
The elderly woman and the boy both looked at June, clearly offended.
“This little angel?” Mrs. Richards asked. “When is he not?”
“Yeah, Mom!” Benjamin said, grinning his gap-toothed smile. “I’m an angel!”
June pursed her lips. “Okay, okay. Well, you two have fun, okay? I’ll see you in the morning, Ben.”
Her son gave her a vague wave before he placed letters and then began celebrating his double word score.
June jumped into her car and headed toward Eleanor’s house. She was halfway there before she realized that thing that she always conveniently forgot until the worst possible moment: pushing down her feelings didn’t ever work.
This time, it was driving past the diner that did it. She thought back to that day where she’d sung “Lollipop” for Benjamin, the day when Eleanor had complimented her on hervoice. It had feltso goodto sing again. And she wanted that to have been enough.
But it wasn’t.
She missed a million things about having Keith by her side. She missed his laugh, missed watching shows that she loved and he pretended to hate. She missed hearing him breathe next to her at night. There was no ranking to these things, nor was there any counting them. After two years, she’d learned that grief took different forms, and that those forms morphed and were formed anew when different life experiences arose.
Today, it was the support to pursue her passions that she missed. Parenting was tough, but with two people, there was someone to share the load. Now, it was all her, all the time. And it was hard, no matter how much she adored her son, to feel like every single moment of every single day was spoken for. To feel like she never had time for a break, or to take a breath.
With a bittersweet smile, she thought back to those days when Benjamin was a toddler. Once a month or so, she and Cadence would leave Benjamin and Izzy with their dads while they went out for karaoke night. It had been a blast, even if Cadence was more of a cheerleader than a singer herself. When she’d gotten home, Keith would always demand a reenactment of her performance, even if they’d had to conduct it at a whisper so that they didn’t wake up Benjamin.
Every time, he’d declared that her performance was her best yet, that she was destined for stardom, that she was the best singer in the world. He had a million overblown compliments that he had meant with his whole heart.
A gentle honking of a car horn behind her alerted June to the fact that she’d been sitting in front of a green light for goodness only knew how long. She raised a hand to the driver behind her in a quick apology, then wiped her eyes where they’d begun to grow a little damp, and drove the rest of the way to Eleanor’s.She made sure she took a steadying breath before going inside. She didn’t want to bring the mood down.
Indeed, her friends all greeted her with shouts of welcome after she came through the door.
“June, yay!” Cadence called, waving.
“We were just starting to get a little worried,” Eleanor said, crossing the room to trade the bottle of wine in June’s hand for a glass of red that was already filled and waiting for her.
“Youwere starting to worry, you old mother hen,” Miriam said with a wink. “I assumed she was off being young and fun.”
“Calling me old,” Eleanor grumbled without any heat.
“Alas, no,” June said. “I was just living the super glamorous life of… being late for mysterious but kid-related reasons.”
“Oh, yeah,” Cadence said, nodding in commiseration. “They are magical little time warps. You blink and bam, an hour is gone. Or you do something for an hour and weirdly it’s only been, like, two minutes.”
“You people ain’t seen nothing yet,” Eleanor scoffed. “Call me when you sneeze and suddenly they’re in college. That’s the professional leagues, ladies.”
Everyone laughed. June dropped into her chair, feeling a little less weary than she had earlier in the night. Coming to book club had been the right idea. Spending time with her friends was always worth the energy, even when she felt like taking another step was the hardest thing in the world.
“Speaking of,” Eleanor interjected, “how is Benjamin?”
