“Well,” I started. “I just don’t know...”
“Come on, Mom,” Jean pressed. “You know you don’t even look at all this old stuff.”
I peered down into the drawer on my lap and looked at the stack of papers and clippings in my hand. My girls looked in these drawers and saw a bunch of old junk. They didn’t realize that this receipt from Penney’s was for the pram that Dan surprised me with when we first found out I was pregnant with Sally. Or that I could just see Louise’s happy little face when she brought me this kindergarten report card filled with “satisfactory” marks. I glimpsed a photo of Dan and the girls standing in front of our old house in Bath and realized that, as it is with all lives, the memories that filled these drawers weren’t universally happy. But they were universally mine. I pulled out a boarding pass and smiled again, thinking how passionate Dan was about travel.
I looked at my girls, sorting through my possessions on the floor. “Fine.” I exhaled. “Sally, put it all in scrapbooks. But don’t you dare throw away one single thing.”
“Oh, I won’t, Momma. I promise.”
Sally was as big of a pack rat as I was. “Jean.” I glared at my youngest girl. “Now don’t you even think about helping.”
She laughed. “The good news for you is that with the election coming up, all my time will be dedicated to signs, speeches and debates.”
I smiled at her, proud of my boldest girl’s spirit and tenacity. She had lost three times before she was elected mayor. And, as it is in all purposeful lives, the falls taught her just as much as reaching the top. I turned over and looked at my husband, napping in his chair. And it made me think that we ought to shake things up. I knew right well that it made me crazy. But I finally said out loud what I’d been planning the past few weeks all the same. “Girls, I’ve decided I’m taking Daddy to Martha’s Vineyard next week.”
“Momma!” Sally said. “That’s insanity. Why on earth would you do that?”
I shrugged. “He loves to travel and, who knows, a trip might perk him up a bit.”
“Well, I can’t go with you, Momma,” Lauren said. “I absolutely have to work.”
I caught Jean rolling her eyes at Martha. They were always accusing Lauren of acting like a martyr.
“I could probably go, Momma,” Louise chimed in. “I could get one of the other teachers to take my classes next week.”
Louise’s yoga studio was her husband and her child all rolled into one. She had started it before yoga was the trend, and, between the vinyasa classes, chanting meditations and nutrition counseling, her business was bigger and busier than I think even she could have imagined.
Chartering a plane briefly crossed my mind. But then I thought of single Louise and divorced Lauren, and I worried, as I always do, that they wouldn’t have enough one day. And so, as Dan and I had always planned, I mentally penciled it in the savings account register for my family’s future.
“No, no, girls. I’ll take a nurse.”
“A nurse isn’t enough, Momma,” Sally said. “You need one of us to go with you. I’ll see if I can get off of work.”
Martha smiled. “I wish I could go, Momma, but my kindergarteners are just learning to read, and you know that’s my favorite part of the year.” It briefly broke my heart that Martha and John had never been able to have children of their own. But teaching gave her that connection with the children that she loved so much.
I know you aren’t supposed to have favorites, but, when you get a little older, maybe it’s that you quit thinking clearly and maybe it’s that you quit caring so much about everyone’s feelings. But I smiled, knowing that one of my girls didn’t have a thing to do next week. “I think I might ask Annabelle to go.”
“She’s in the middle of moving, Momma,” Jean said, shaking her head.
“What?” Martha asked.
Lauren rolled her eyes. “We all know what, Martha. Come on.”
Louise interrupted. “Y’all don’t know. This might work out perfectly, they might be married for seventy-five years, and you are all going to eat crow.”
Sally smirked but didn’t say anything.
Jean put her head in her hands. “Just pray, all of you, every night, that she doesn’t have a baby with him. If she doesn’t have a baby, then we’re okay.” She pointed her finger at Louise. “And you pray to your Buddha or whatever just in case.”
I rolled my eyes heavenward, thinking that I could have been even more concerned about my daughter’s choice of religion than Jean was about Annabelle’s marriage.
“Momma, what do you think?” Sally asked.
I shook my head. “Nope. I’m not going to talk about the poor girl when she isn’t here to defend herself.”
“But she won’t talk about it when she is here,” Lauren said. “So it’s not like any of us can put in our two cents.”
“It’s because she doesn’t want any of your two cents,” Louise interjected. “They’re madly in love with each other. I don’t know why y’all can’t see that. The way they look at each other...”
