As he eats, he looks at the other kids playing. An ordinary playground with ordinary kids, but the way he gazes out at it is as if it’s the most extraordinary place in the world. And as often happens when Hadley watches him, she finds herself envying him, wishing she could see the world through his eyes.
The pants of his uniform have ridden up on his knees, and Hadley makes a mental note to buy him new ones. Then she checks the thought. Vanessa will need to buy him new ones. Her throat tightens as her emotions rise again.
Mrs. Baxter lets out a wolf whistle and claps her hands three times, signaling for the kids to gather around. She leads them in a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” then lines them up so each can hug Skipper goodbye.
He is extraordinarily well loved. Some of the girls even cry. One kisses his cheek, then giggles and runs away. Katie fist-bumps him, snatches his baseball cap, and then puts it back on his head backward. He smiles. She’s been doing that same thing to him since they were in preschool together. Skipper’s really going to miss her. She is his “bestest friend,” as he likes to say.
4
GRACE
The Honda grumbles but mercifully starts, and Grace pulls from the parking lot onto Laguna Canyon Road, her headache picking up steam as she merges into the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Deal with the devil, and you’re gonna get burned. She imagines her grandmother shaking her head as she says it. You knew who that man was. Don’t know what you were expecting.
She sneers through the windshield at the darkening sky, wishing her grandmother would leave her alone and stay out of it. Of course she knew who Frank was. She had just hoped that maybe, just this once, things would work out.
She looks at the gas gauge, then at the line of cars in front of her, and her stress ticks up a notch. Miles’s day care allows a grace period of fifteen minutes before they begin tacking on exorbitant late fees in ten-minute increments. She is well into the grace period, and the needle on the gauge is moving faster than the traffic.
With no choice, she pulls to the shoulder and ekes past the cars in front of her to pull into the gas station on the corner. The left island is down for repairs, and the forward pump on the remaining island is cash only, leaving only the back pump available.
Grace maneuvers toward it and is a few feet away when a motorcycle swerves in front of her to claim it. She slams on her horn, and the biker turns as he dismounts and gives a shrug, along with an infuriating I-don’t-give-a-shit grin. She is about to blast her horn again when three more motorcycles pull past to park beside him.
The first biker begins to fuel up as the last one saunters toward the minimart. Steam blows from Grace’s nostrils, and it’s all she can do not to slam down on the accelerator and mow over the three bikers who remain, along with their four Harleys.
She rests her forehead against her knuckles on the steering wheel as her eyes fill with her frustration and anger. Crying don’t help nothing. She looks up again at the sky.
In front of her, the bikers goof off, throwing trash at each other and smoking cigarettes. They’re probably around her age but, unlike her, don’t seem to have a care in the world. They are decked out in leather touring gear, and their bikes are loaded with saddlebags and sleeping rolls. They are probably on a road trip, and she hates to admit it, but looking at them, they remind her a little of Jimmy.
Had Jimmy not met her and enlisted in the army, this might have been his life, hanging with his buddies and goofing off. He was always happiest when he was on the road, roaming the country with no particular place to go. Their honeymoon was a monthlong trip on his Harley, traveling up the coast, then down through Utah and Las Vegas, possibly the same trip these guys are taking. The thought softens her anger toward them.
The pump clicks off, but the bikers aren’t paying attention, so she taps her horn, a friendly beep to let them know it’s time to stop screwing around so she can get her gas before she goes bankrupt from the late fees she’s racking up with each precious second they are wasting.
The first biker looks up, squints to see her more clearly through the windshield, then offers three hip thrusts and a tongue waggle worthy of Miley Cyrus. Her anger flares, and she decides these idiots are nothing like Jimmy, and she lies down on the horn, pressing it so long and hard her battery is in danger of going dead.
The attendant glares at her, as do the people on the sidewalk. The biker, on the other hand, laughs, and then his friends join in, all of them having a riotous good time at how angry she is.
The biker from the minimart strolls out, an energy drink and roll of chocolate doughnuts in his hands. He moves the pump from the first bike to his own, and he must feel Grace’s rage because he lifts his face, cocks his head when he sees her gaze skewering him, and then, deciding it’s all in good fun, smiles and winks. The small gesture nearly pitches Grace over the edge, her foot leaping to the accelerator as her hand reaches for the ignition, the desire to bulldoze him almost irrepressible.
A second before ignition, her hand and foot stop, the small voice of reason she almost always regrets not listening to screaming that running over four bikers along with their motorcycles is probably not the best course of action at this juncture in her life. With a deep, shuddering breath, she forces her hand from the keys and her foot to the mat.
After what feels like an eternity, the second bike is finally filled, and the biker puts the pump back in its cradle, and all four get on their bikes and ride off.
Grace pulls forward, jams her ATM card into the machine, and enters her PIN.
CARD DECLINED.
She blinks. Stares. Then blinks again as a feeling of dread creeps over her.
She reinserts the card, slower this time, irrationally thinking or praying that a gentler approach might change things, her chin quivering as her disappointment trumps all the other emotions of the day, knowing, even before the machine rejects her again, that Jimmy has let her . . . them . . . himself . . . down. Again.
CARD DECLINED.
“You going to start pumping?” a middle-aged man says impatiently from the open window of his BMW.
Grace swallows, grabs her purse, and rummages through it to scrabble together four dollars’ worth of coins. She hands it to the attendant, and as she walks back to her car, she wonders how he lost it—poker, dice, a losing spread on a boxing match?
Not that it matters—gone is gone.
5
HADLEY
Hadley chops onions and tries not to think about tomorrow and everything it will bring. Prince Charles lies at her feet, a heavy, warm dog blanket draped across her toes.
Frank named the dog Prince Charles as a joke. He loved the idea of ordering royalty around. “Fetch, Prince Charles.” “Sit, Prince Charles.”
It’s actually very funny. “Stop farting, Prince Charles,” Skipper loves to say when the dog passes gas, and the laughter it creates never grows old.
Even Mattie gets in on it. “Prince Charles whizzed on the neighbor’s mailbox,” she will declare when she returns from taking him on a walk. “Very unbecoming for the future king.”
Hadley wriggles her toes to give the old dog’s belly a rub. Sorry, buddy, I wish we could take you with us. She stops chopping, sets the knife down, and rubs her knuckles against her chest, massaging the knot that’s formed there.
Her eyes catch on the strawberry cupcake on the counter, still in its pretty brown box with the colorful Sprinkles sticker, and her resolve stiffens. There’s no choice. Fifteen years she’s waited . . . prayed for this chance, and now, here it is. “This is it, Prince,” she says. The dog looks up. “Now or never, and never’s not an option.”
She sighs heavily and sets the onions aside. As she pulls the pizza dough from the warming drawer below the oven, the front door opens.
“Hi, honey,” she says as Mattie walks past the archway.
No answer. Footsteps travel away and up the stairs. Prince Charles pushes his old body up and lopes away to follow.
/>
“I got you a cupcake!” she hollers after them. “Strawberry, your favorite.”
Mattie’s voice is so quiet Hadley almost doesn’t hear, but her hearing has always been exceptional when it comes to her kids. “I haven’t liked strawberry since I was twelve. You’d think she’d know that.”
Hadley looks at the box. She did know that, or at least she used to. Too sweet. Her daughter’s tastes evolved when she started middle school and acquired a taste for coffee—chai latte and Cuban coffee the only flavors she likes.
How did Hadley forget? She’s losing it. She really is.
She moves the cupcake to the fridge and returns to preparing the pizzas. She rolls out the dough and adds toppings to each: spicy red sauce, sausage, and pepperoni for Frank; peppers, onions, sundried tomatoes, and marinara for Mattie; Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce and pineapple for Skipper.
She smiles at the finished creations, the familiar satisfaction of cooking for her family washing over her. Making home-cooked meals is a tradition carried on from her mother and one of the few things she is proud of.
She walks to the backyard to start the fire in the pizza oven so it will be heated by the time Frank gets home—and freezes just outside the door. Her eyes fix on the gaping hole beneath the oven, the space where the wood is stored, and her pulse ticks up as her mind spins with the memory of Frank telling her they were out of wood. “Wanted to see how hot it could get,” he said a week ago. “Damn thing cranks. Took all the wood, but I almost got it to eight hundred.”
She forgot.
How could she have forgotten?
Pulse pounding, she returns to the kitchen, turns on the top oven as high as it will go, then slides the prepared pizzas into the lower oven so they are out of sight.
She scrubs the counters until they gleam, dims the lights so they are more flattering, and hurries upstairs to change. Frank expects her to look good when he gets home.
Frank expects a lot of things.
6
GRACE
Miles is screaming and Grace is close to losing it, her breakdown barely held in check as she carries Miles and his diaper bag toward their apartment. Her head pounds as she climbs the stairs, and she is nearly faint from hunger.
Mrs. McCreedy, the only neighbor in the complex whose name Grace knows, peeks her head out her door. “Oh my,” she says. “Do you need some help, dear?”
Borderline eccentric, Mrs. McCreedy is somewhere between fifty and a hundred, and her hair varies in color from magenta to blue, depending on the alignment of the stars. She has at least four cats, makes a living selling things on the internet, and goes by the name Mrs. McCreedy, though there’s no sign of a Mr. McCreedy or evidence of there ever having been one. Jimmy made friends with her when they first moved in. Of course, Jimmy makes friends with everyone.
“No, Mrs. McCreedy. Thank you, but I’m fine.”
This isn’t the first time Mrs. McCreedy has offered to lend a hand, and Grace wonders if Jimmy might have asked her to keep an eye on them while he was gone. A few weeks ago, when Grace was at her wits’ end, afraid she might break something, possibly her skull against the wall, she considered asking Mrs. McCreedy if she could watch Miles for a few minutes so she could run to the store. She decided against it. In Grace’s experience, it’s best to take care of yourself.
The problem with this thinking is that parenting is the hardest thing she’s ever done, and doing it on her own has turned out to be far more difficult than she ever would have thought. Until Miles came along, Grace considered herself tough. She’d survived years in the foster care system, then juvenile hall, even jail, but the moment the nurses placed an eight-pound helpless, wailing baby in her arms, all that toughness ran right out of her, and she turned into a trembling pool of putty, constantly on the verge of losing it and so tired she couldn’t think straight—a very disconcerting state that now makes her certain she’s blowing it and failing Miles miserably.
“Okay, dear,” Mrs. McCreedy says hesitantly, clearly not believing Grace is even close to fine. Miles howls and flails, clearly not believing it either. “I’m here if you need me.”
No wonder parenting is supposed to be a two-person job. Jimmy worried about it when they talked about him reenlisting, but Grace brushed it off. At the time, she believed she would be fine. Plus, there was really no choice. Reenlisting got Jimmy away from the trouble that was chasing him and kept him away from the temptation that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.
Or so they thought.
She shakes her head, trying to clear away the thought of his betrayal and to keep the tears she’s been holding from spilling out. It won’t do to have both her and Miles crying.
Swallowing back the emotions, she pushes open the door, drops the diaper bag to the floor, and pulls Miles against her. “Shhh,” she says, holding him tight. “You’re okay. Hang in there. We’re home now.”
He continues to scream, and she grits her teeth against it.
“Colic,” the pediatrician explained when Grace brought him in at three weeks old, distraught that her baby would not stop crying. “Nothing to do but weather the storm.” The woman said it with a smile, as if having a screeching, inconsolable child were no big deal, a delightful rite of parenthood to be embraced and celebrated like first steps or learning to ride a bike. Grace left the appointment more distressed than when she’d arrived.
She’s wanted so badly to love motherhood, to cherish each moment and relish her time with her son. But she can’t. Since Miles came into the world, it’s been such a struggle, so overwhelming and exhausting, that it’s all she can do to survive one moment to the next.
And she feels like Miles knows it, and that is why he cries. He realizes she is going through the motions with no real joy, that when she comes for him at the end of the day, she is so done in she has no energy left to play or read or sing, and that he knows that what she wants most is for him to fall asleep so she can fall asleep beside him.
“That’s it, buddy, let it all out,” she says, pacing back and forth as she pats his back and as he continues to howl, screaming at the top of his wee little lungs and working himself into a lather until they are both damp with sweat.
This is his pattern. The moment she lifts him from the car, it starts—a whimper, like he is uncomfortable, making her believe he is hungry, has gas, or needs his diaper changed. So, she sets about trying to remedy all those things, only to discover his misery has nothing to do with any of them. And by the time she is done, her nerves are frayed and he is wailing—uncontrollable sobbing that no amount of cuddling, cooing, or pacing can soothe.
The doctor assured her that’s what colic is, a frustrating condition where healthy babies cry for no reason, and she told Grace many times that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. But knowing this doesn’t help. Grace just wants her baby to be happy, and each time he cries, it rips her heart anew.
Her neighbor pounds on the wall. “Shut that damn kid up.”
The three-hundred-pound tub of wasted carbon moved in a week after Jimmy returned to Afghanistan, and Grace knows, when Jimmy gets home, there’s going to be hell to pay. Jimmy might be a hundred pounds lighter than their neighbor, but he’s also at least two hundred pounds tougher, and he doesn’t take to people not treating his family right.
But at the moment, Jimmy is seven thousand miles away. So each night, in addition to dealing with Miles’s inconsolable crying, she needs to put up with her jerk of a neighbor screaming at her through the walls.
Ignoring him, she continues to soothe Miles as best she can, stroking his back, rocking him, and telling him it will be okay.
She can’t believe it was her idea to have a baby. What was she thinking? She remembers the thought process, dreaming how wonderful it would be to bring something wholly hers and Jimmy’s into the world. They’d been married five years, and Jimmy was doing well. He had made it through sniper school and hadn’t gambled since enlisting. So, she figured it was time and that
they were ready.
“Damn it!” the neighbor screams. “I’m calling the landlord. Every goddamn night. Shut that damn kid up.”
What a horrible miscalculation. She wasn’t ready. She might never have been ready. And now, here he is, this little human, totally dependent on her, and she is completely screwing it up.
She kisses his flaming scalp. “You’re okay. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”
She carries him to the kitchen and rummages through the cabinets, so hungry she feels like she might pass out. She opens door after door—salt, pepper, vanilla extract, two cans of expired tomato paste. She considers the tomato paste, looks down at Miles screaming, and decides against it.
With a sigh, she returns to the living room and pulls out her phone. It’s nearly seven, and Jimmy hasn’t called. He always calls on Fridays.
She imagines him in his barracks trying to work up the courage and trying to figure out what he is going to say. He is hungover; she is sure. His slipups always involve alcohol. It was probably a friend’s birthday, and he lost sight of his promise not to drink. Then he got drunk and was suckered into a bet. His downfall is always the same: he drinks, he gambles, he loses—a pattern that destroys him and destroys them, but that he seems powerless to stop.
She looks around their apartment, at the stained ceiling and chipped counters, at the threadbare futon that serves as their couch, at the crate that holds the old television Jimmy’s brother gave them. She’s been poorer, but never has she been so broke, crushed by her disappointment in Jimmy and in herself.
She looks at the photo on the counter of her and her grandmother taken six months before her grandmother passed away. In that moment, they were smiling, nearly twins for how much they looked alike, though her grandmother was near seventy and Grace only fourteen—same copper curls and hazel-green eyes. How disappointed she would be. People don’t change, Spud, and only a fool believes they do.
Hadley & Grace Page 2
