Because why the hell not?
“Mom?”
Chapter 6
Oh dear God.
“How much did you hear, baby?” I asked, wishing I hadn’t decided to do a striptease in the hallway between the kitchen and primary bedroom because now I wore no pants in addition to having my shirt on inside out.
“Enough.”
Curse you, Mitchell Quackenbush, for always weaseling your way out of doing the hard things.
“Well, I’m sorry you had to hear that,” I said, the statement and its tone eerily reminiscent of words my mother had spoken to me on more than one occasion.
“Yeah, me too,” Dylan said, clearly in a daze.
I followed him to the kitchen, where he surveyed my array of baked goods, finally selecting the banana bread. Apparently, he’d gotten his ability to eat in the middle of a crisis from his father, because the thought of eating something turned my stomach.
I moved out of the doorway to put on my pants, which was ridiculous because the child had literally just caught his mother with her pants down. While I was out of his line of sight, I took off my shirt and put it on properly.
I walked into the kitchen as he was pouring a glass of milk. He took a seat at the breakfast table and stared at his slice of banana bread. “Are you going to leave Dad?”
“What?”
“When I got to the front door, he was saying something about another woman.”
I laughed in spite of myself. The poor child had heard only part of the argument. In his mind, I could make all of this go away simply by agreeing to stick with his father.
At least Dylan wasn’t mentioning anything about sex therapists or Mitch’s declaration that he’d get laid less.
“But there’s not another woman?” he asked.
“That’s what your father says.”
“So there’s no reason you can’t, you know, take him back?”
“Dylan, sweetie, your father askedmefor a divorce.”
“Oh.”
I hadn’t seen the kid this confused since algebra, and I had to admit his inability to process that his father would want to leave me was gratifying. He pushed the saucer with the banana bread away and drank from his glass of milk. I especially couldn’t contemplate milk at a time like this.
He drew the saucer back to him and took a big bite. His face screwed up, and he spit it out.
“Dylan, are you okay?” I asked, thinking that he was having a delayed reaction of crying.
“Mom,” he said, his eyes almost watering. “I think you used salt instead of sugar.”
In my mind’s eye I could see Past Vivian reaching into the salt pig instead of into the sugar canister. As it turned out, I couldn’t make anything out of rotten bananas.
What if you can’t make anything out of yourself, either?
My vision blurred with tears, and Dylan, who’d never once seen his mother break down—not even at her father’s funeral—didn’t know what to do with himself. He got up and gave me a hug, a much more awkward one than earlier.
“Um, can I do anything?” he asked.
I shook my head, my throat too painfully closed to get any words out.
