by Jane Porter
“Noooooo.”
“I heard about it on the Internet. This lady in Texas started it, and all we have to do is read the book, wear a tiara, and dress in pink and leopard skin.”
My jaw must have smacked the ground four times while Lucy was talking. “Lucy Wellsley, you’ve lost your mind.”
“There’d be no diet foods,” she continues cheerfully, “just good food, and no negativity.”
“Perhaps,” I say grudgingly, as I’m not ready for another book group, but I like seeing Lucy happy like this. “Do you still love Pete?” I ask abruptly. I don’t know why I ask the question or where it comes from, but I suddenly need to know.
She clasps her coffee and thinks a long moment. “We made three kids together, so part of me thinks I should love him, but I don’t like him. He’s been so ugly. It’s not just that he’s going after custody, but the things he says . . . I’m not a fit mother, that I’m a bad person, a bad woman . . . it’s so unnecessary. It’s as if he can’t help hitting below the belt, over and over. I can handle a lot, but the constant attacks wear me out.”
A shadow passes and then stops. Lucy breaks off, and we look up to see Monica standing directly in front of us with the PTA dad almost right against her side.
“Oh!” Monica exclaims, flushing. She takes a swift, self-conscious step away from the PTA dad. “I didn’t know you two were here.”
“We saw you when we came in but didn’t want to bother you,” Lucy answers.
“We were just having a meeting.” Monica takes yet another step back. “Taylor, Lucy, do you remember Leon Baker? He and his wife moved here from Philadelphia over the summer. Leon’s organizing the Fun Day with me this year.”
“Yes, I do remember you, Leon. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Lucy extends her hand. “I’m Lucy Wellsley, my younger two children attend Points Elementary. My older son is a seventh grader at Chinook.”
“Nice to meet you.” Leon shakes hands with Lucy, then turns to me. “And I remember you from Back-to-School Night. You gave one of the welcome speeches.”
“I did, yes.”
“You’re the auction chair, right?”
“I am, and at this point I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or bad thing. My auction co-chair is moving.”
Monica claps her hand to her head. “Patti’s party. I forgot. We were so busy talking about our ideas for Fun Day that I totally forgot to stop by the Belosis’.”
“I better run,” Leon announces. “I’ve got to get home to the wife and kids. We’re seeing Santa tonight. He’s apparently arrived here at the mall.” He lifts a hand in farewell. “It was nice to meet you. Monica, I’ll be in touch.” Then he’s gone.
Monica watches him leave for a moment before turning back to us. “So . . .” She struggles to smile, but she looks almost bereft. “How are things?”
“Fine,” Lucy and I answer simultaneously. Monica nods, and it’s awkward at best.
“Well, happy Thanksgiving,” she says.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” I answer, with Lucy chiming more or less the same. Monica leaves, and Lucy and I get up to go, too. As I dash through the rain to my car, I reach into my purse for my keys and my phone. Must call Patti. Must make sure she’ll stop by or meet me for coffee in the morning before she leaves.
Patti swings by the Yarrow Point house Sunday morning en route to the airport, with her kids and a tray of lattes and bag of warm, freshly baked bagels. “I got your message,” she says after I’ve introduced her to Mom and Ray and her kids disappear with mine to the now empty bonus room. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t at the Belosis’ when you arrived. But you know I’d never leave without seeing you first.”
I’ve been pretty damn stoic about her move until now, but suddenly I can’t do it. I can’t let her go. Tears fill my eyes, and I just look at her, shake my head. “Don’t go.”
“Taylor!” Tears fill Patti’s eyes, and she’s suddenly hugging me. “I can’t believe I have to leave you like this. Your life has gone to shit.”
I’m crying and laughing against her. “It sucks. It’s a nightmare.”
“You’ll get through it.”
“I know.” I step back, wipe my eyes on the back of my wrist. “Maybe that’s the part that makes me the craziest. I know I’ll survive. I’ve been through too much.”
“What’s the saying? That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?”
We laugh some more and sit with our coffee on the staircase and talk about everything and nothing for a half hour until she has to go.
When we say good-bye this time, there are no tears. She’s my friend. I love her. I’ll miss her. But as women, we do what we have to do.
Mom and Ray leave Sunday afternoon. They have a 770-mile drive back to Santa Rosa. I had hoped they’d leave earlier, but Mom refused to go until all the boxes were out of the house and everything at the new house looked like home.
The kids hug Mom and Ray good-bye, and then I walk them out to their truck. “Thank you,” I say again. “There’s no way I could have done this without you.”
“Happy to help,” Ray answers, climbing into the truck.
Mom stands facing me. I look at her for what seems like forever. I haven’t seen her in a decade. How long will it be until I see her again?
“Sorry it was such a lousy Thanksgiving, Mom.”
She half smiles, her eyes a lighter shade than mine. “It was a good Thanksgiving, Taylor.”
“You had to work hard.”
“I got to see you and the girls.”
“Thank you.”
“Anytime, Taylor. Just pick up the phone.”
I look at her a long time, trying to remember her, trying to remember this. This is a good feeling. No anger, no resentment, no bitterness. “Drive safely,” I whisper.
Her eyes search mine. “We will.” Then she swings herself up and into the passenger side of the truck.
The girls come running out of the house as Ray starts the truck, and the four of us stand on our little lawn and wave them off while Tori blows kisses.
“I like Grandma,” Tori says wistfully as the truck disappears down the street.
“I like Ray,” Jemma adds.
Brooke grins. “I like Ray’s tattoos.”
It’s a battle getting the girls ready for bed tonight. As I make them take baths in the little bathroom with the hideous tub and sink (I couldn’t paint those), they realize for the first time that we aren’t going back to our house.
The rental house is home now. There’s no going back to the big, beautiful house on the lake. This dark, little house with low ceilings and narrow aluminum windows is where we live.
Wrapped in bathrobes, the girls huddle on my bed, crying as I comb out their long, wet hair.
“It’s only for six months or a year,” I say, trying to cheer them.
“But that was our house, Mom. That was where we lived,” Jemma protests.
“I know,” I murmur, carefully working at a knot in Brooke’s hair.
“Will we ever go back there again?” Brooke asks, wincing as the comb pulls on the knot.
I take the comb out of her hair and try to pull apart the knot with my fingers. “I don’t know.” Finally the knot’s out and all the girls’ hair is tangle-free. “Let’s try not to think about that house, not if it makes us sad.”
Brooke turns to look at me. “Does it make you sad?”
I look at their free, young faces. God, they’re still so young. “Yes, if I were to think about it too much. So I try to think about other things instead.”
“Like what?” Tori asks, scooting closer to me so she can claim my lap.
“This house,” I say.
“Ick,” Jemma answers, curling her lip.
“And Christmas in this house,” I continue. “And how the mantel on the fireplace is big so we won’t have any trouble hanging your stockings.”
Jemma’s still not happy. “But what about when Christmas is over?”
I shrug. “
I’ll think of something else then. Something nice to think about, something that makes me feel good.”
“Like what?” she insists.
Struggling to think of something on demand, I look around the room, at the odd putty color I painted the walls in here. The color wasn’t supposed to be putty, it was supposed to be a toasty taupe, but for some reason it didn’t turn out that way. “Well, look at these walls. They remind me of graham crackers—”
“Gingerbread!” Brooke cries.
“Gingerbread, yes, that’s even better,” I agree. “We’re now living in a little gingerbread house. And if we tell ourselves it’s fun, and if we make it interesting, then living here will be fun and not sad.”
“But it is sad,” Jemma says with a shake of her head. “It is, Mom. We don’t have any of our furniture anymore. We can’t have most of our toys. We only have two TVs—”
“We didn’t need all the TVs,” I interrupt.
“Still. I don’t like it. I don’t like not having our own house. I don’t like knowing we have to move again at the end of the school year. I don’t like knowing we can’t have people over—”
“Now that’s just silly. Of course we can have people over. Our friends don’t care if we have a big house or not.” I pause and see the way Jemma’s looking at me, so I hurry on. “And our friends will like coming here for dinner. In summertime we can still barbecue.”
“But how can we barbecue without Dad?” Tori asks.
The girls all look at me and wait for my answer. I wait, struggling to come up with a good answer.
“Dad will be back,” I say at last. “He’ll be here by summer.”
Tori looks happy. Brooke looks hopeful.
Jemma’s just suspicious. “How do you know?”
I think about it, and I listen to that little voice inside me, the one I haven’t listened to enough these past few years.
“I just know.” I look at them and smile, and it’s a real smile. “Daddy loves us too much to not come back.”
An hour later, I finally have the girls tucked in their beds in their new bedrooms. They’re asleep, and I close all the blinds, lock the front and back doors, and turn off the lights except for the light in the hall that connects our bedrooms.
In the tiny bathroom that adjoins the “master” bedroom (an inane description of our minuscule bedroom if I ever heard one), I wash my face and brush my teeth and put on my antiaging lotion, but a thinner layer than I used to since the bottle’s almost empty.
This has been my bedtime routine for years. It’s as much a part of me as chatting with Nathan as he settles into bed to read.
I smile crookedly as I think about Nathan trying to read and me standing in the doorway trying to talk to him at the same time.
He would always put down his book, too. He’d always set aside what he wanted to do to listen.
My smile fades.
I miss him. I miss him so much.
After turning off the bathroom light, I climb into bed, turn off the table lamp, and lie in the dark in my new room and listen to the sounds of an unfamiliar street. A car horn blares outside, and a truck rumbles past. Lights shine through the cheap miniblinds at the windows.
I don’t know this room. I don’t know this house.
I feel like the girls right now. I miss our old house. I want our house. I want that life back.
The losses hit me so hard, I have to fight back to keep from falling apart. It’s going to be okay. Tomorrow it’ll be okay. Tomorrow it’ll be fine. The girls will go to school. Annika will pick them up—
And then I go cold all over. I knew I was forgetting something.
I don’t have Annika anymore. Annika’s gone. I have no child care.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I wake up to find an e-mail from Nathan. He wants to know how the move went and how our first night in the new house went. He hopes the girls’ furniture fits okay in their new rooms, and he wants me to have a locksmith come in and check all the locks and install dead bolts on the front and back doors.
I read his e-mail twice through before answering. The house is fine. Ray checked out the locks when he was here and the windows, too. Maybe you can come see the house this weekend since you missed last weekend?
I spend my lunch researching prospective sitters and screening them before selecting three to interview, and then Marta lets me leave early Monday afternoon to pick up Tori from preschool. I bring Tori back to the office for a half hour, where she colors at my feet before we race back to school to pick up Brooke and Jemma.
I’ve scheduled interviews with the three sitters that evening, and I hustle the girls to their rooms after a hasty dinner of buttered noodles and carrot sticks. It’s a pathetic meal, but they’re kids, they’re full, and for now they’re happy.
The first sitter is a college student, and she seems sweet but arrives late, complaining of bridge traffic. “It’s such a long drive in traffic,” she adds. “Is there always traffic?”
I mentally cross her off the list.
The second sitter is a professional nanny looking for a full-time position. She also charges a minimum of $20 an hour and needs at least thirty-five hours a week.
Basically she wants more an hour than I earn.
I cross her off the list.
The third woman is a tall, large-boned, gray-haired Russian woman somewhere between forty-five and sixty. She’s sat for a lot of the families in the area. She doesn’t mind doing laundry, grocery shopping, or making dinner. She’s happy with an afternoon-only job, as she still takes care of a baby for another family in the mornings. She charges $14 an hour, but she has her own car and insurance.
She also has a mustache and a unibrow, but she’s available tomorrow afternoon to pick up Tori.
“What if we give it a try for two weeks and see what you think?” I say, realizing that maybe I need the two weeks to think.
She’s sitting on the slipcovered couch that I brought over from the bonus room of the Yarrow Point house, and she folds her hands in her lap. “You pay me every Friday.”
God, I’m desperate. “Yes.”
“Cash. No checks.”
I’m so desperate. “Yes.”
“Your girls. Can I meet them now?”
Oh, Lord. The girls aren’t going to be happy about this. “Yes.”
I go to Jemma’s bedroom, where Jemma’s lying on her bed and the two younger ones are on the trundle, watching a DVD movie. “Hey, girls,” I say, switching on the light. “Do you want to come meet Mrs. S?”
Jemma’s nose wrinkles as she sits up. “Mrs. S?”
“She seems very nice, and she’s taken care of a lot of children in Bellevue.”
“Did you hire her?” she persists.
I swallow my sigh. “Just come meet her. Please?”
The girls trail after me into the living room, walking single file with Jemma in front and Tori bringing up the rear. It’s not a long way, but I feel dread weighing on me with every step. Mrs. S isn’t what the girls are used to. They’re used to young and fun, blond and bubbly. Mrs. S is none of the above.
Hopefully the girls won’t notice.
Mrs. S remains planted on the couch as the girls walk in, her brow furrowing as she studies each of them in turn. “Hello,” she greets them soberly. “I am Mrs. S. I am your new child minder.”
“Child minder?” Brooke asks, glancing at me.
“Baby-sitter,” I whisper, but Mrs. S overhears me.
“But I am not a baby-sitter. There are no babies here,” Mrs. S answers, rising and extending her hand to Jemma. “And your name is . . . ?”
“Jemma Taylor.”
“It is good to meet you, Jemma. You may call me Mrs. S.”
“S?” she asks.
“Slutsky.”
“Slutsky?” Jemma chokes on muffled laughter.
I give Jemma a don’t-you-dare look and press Brooke forward for her introduction.
By the time Mrs. S leaves, the girls are th
oroughly unhappy with me.
“Why her?” Jemma demands the moment the door closes.
“She’s available the hours we need, she’s experienced, and she’s . . . cheap.”
Jemma glares at me from across the living room. “You know she’s going to make us eat beets and borscht, don’t you?”
“No, she won’t.”
“Yes, she will. Devanne had a Russian housekeeper, and when her baby-sitter wasn’t there, the housekeeper made Devanne eat all kinds of weird things like cabbage and sausage and borscht.”
I check my smile. “You don’t even know what borscht is.”
“I do, too. It’s potato and cabbage soup with beets and beet juice and sour cream.”
Tori’s near tears. “I don’t want to ear borse. I don’t like borse—”
“It’s borscht, Tori,” Jemma flashes before turning on me. “Mom, you can’t hire her. You can’t. You’ve already ruined our lives enough.”
“I haven’t ruined your lives—”
“You sold the house. You made us give up our things. Kids are already talking about us. They’re saying we’re poor and our dad left and isn’t coming back—”
“That’s not true,” I protest.
“Now we have a hairy old Russian nanny?” Jemma, who never cries, has tears in her eyes now, and she balls her hands into helpless fists. “People will laugh at us even more, Mom. They’ll make fun of her name and her hairy lip and her funny dress.”
“But people won’t see her. She’s just going to watch you for a couple hours after school until I come home from work.”
“People will see her. My friends will see her. Brooke’s friends will see her. She’ll pick us up from playdates, or if our friends come here, they’ll see her here. They’ll smell the borscht and they’ll say our house smells funny.” Jemma takes a huge breath. “Mom, please. Think about us.”
I look at her and then Brooke and finally Tori. They’re children. They don’t understand. There are worse things than having your dad take a job out of state. There are worse things than moving into a smaller house. There are worse things than having a mom who works. There are worse things than having a caregiver who speaks English with a thick Russian accent. There are.
