by Amy Hatvany
She felt his eyes on her. “She’s in our bedroom. She got a call this afternoon from the school secretary. You weren’t in any of your classes after lunch.”
Kelli’s stomach clenched and she looked up at him. She’d never skipped class before—she didn’t even think about the fact that her parents would get a phone call. “Daddy—” she began, but he held up his palm to stop her.
“I don’t want to hear it. You are a disappointment to me, young lady. You are a liar.” He paused and pushed his black-rimmed glasses against the bridge of his nose. “Your behavior is unacceptable and you will be punished for it.”
Kelli nodded, feeling the tears well up behind her eyes again. She longed to be able to ask him for help—to find comfort in her father’s arms—but she knew it was pointless to hope for this. “How much longer am I grounded?” she asked quietly.
“Grounding you didn’t work.” He took a breath. “Go get the wooden spoon.”
Kelli’s breath caught in her throat. He’d only spanked Kelli a couple of times—once when she was four years old, after she had grabbed her mother’s favorite crystal vase to admire it and accidentally dropped it to the floor, and then again when she was six and, in a fit of anger, cut off all the blossoms on her mother’s roses. “Daddy,” she said again. “Please. I promise it won’t happen again.”
He nodded, pressing his lips together into a white line before speaking. “You’re right. It won’t. And this time, you’ll remember why. Get the spoon.”
She was fourteen; he couldn’t do this to her now . . . could he? “Mama?” she called out, and her father took a step toward her. Kelli took a step back.
“She agrees this is the proper punishment.” He stared at his daughter. “Don’t make me ask you again.”
Kelli felt a wave of anger rise up inside her. She clenched her hands into fists at her sides and straightened her spine. “No,” she said. “I made a mistake. I was upset and crying in the bathroom and I lost track of time. I didn’t do it on purpose.” She knew he wouldn’t ask why she was so upset. He didn’t care about that. He only cared that she had broken a rule. He only cared how he felt, not her.
Her father’s dark eyebrows raised. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.” Kelli saw her mother appear behind him. “Mama, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to skip class. Tell him to stop this. Please.” She was so scared, her voice shook. She’d never stood up to him this way.
Her mother looked over to her father, then back to Kelli. “Thomas,” she said. “Maybe it’s too much.”
Kelli’s father turned toward her mother. “You called me at work. You asked me to come home and do this.”
“Not to hit her,” Kelli’s mother said quietly. “Just to talk some sense into her.” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I should have just dealt with it myself.”
Kelli’s father’s body visibly relaxed and she seized the opportunity. “I’m so sorry, Daddy. It will never, ever happen again. I promise.” She began to cry, but neither of them moved to soothe her. After a moment, her parents left the room—her father out the front door to head back to work and her mother to the kitchen to start dinner. Kelli stood weeping in the living room long after they were gone, wondering if anyone in this world loved her at all.
* * *
Over the next couple of months, Kelli stayed quiet. She was quiet at school, quiet at home. She felt nauseous much of the time, tired in a way she’d never been before. All she wanted to do was sleep. She made polite conversation with her parents, accompanying them to church and attending youth group without a fight. She stayed as far away as possible from Jason—she even distanced herself from Nancy. Everyone in the school was talking about her—whispering about what she’d done. One boy cornered her at her locker and asked if she gave blow jobs in the front of trucks, too, and she wished she could simply close her eyes and disappear. She shut herself off from anything that might hurt her, and yet she cried every night in the dark, her face buried deep into her pillow. She wasn’t sure what she wept for, but the tears came whether she understood them or not.
“You’re losing weight,” her mother remarked one morning as they sat at the table for breakfast. Her father had already left for work. Since the day she stood up to him, he’d barely spoken to her at all. It was like he’d have preferred that she didn’t exist.
“I’m not hungry,” Kelli said, swirling her spoon around in her cereal. “I feel a little sick.”
Her mother reached over and placed the back of her hand against Kelli’s forehead. “No fever,” she said. “Have you been throwing up?”
Kelli shrugged. She had, in fact, just thrown up that morning. She’d been throwing up for weeks. Grief over all that had happened, she decided. Like one of the heroines in her novels—she was lovesick, devastated by how Jason had used her. How easily she had given herself away.
“Do you have your period?” her mother asked, her voice so soft Kelli could barely make out the words.
“No,” Kelli answered, and then her breath froze. She looked at her mother, wide-eyed. “It hasn’t come.” Oh no. Oh please. It couldn’t be true. It was only once. It happened so fast.
Her mother’s face went gray and her shoulders slumped forward. She dropped her fork with a clatter. “For how long.” A statement, not a question.
Kelli tried to remember the last time she’d needed the supplies in the blue box under the bathroom sink. It was before Jason. Before her world as she knew it began to fall apart.
Grace
When Melody and I got to the house, Victor was on the phone with the restaurant, talking with his head chef. I pictured Spencer standing in the gleaming, stainless steel kitchen of the Loft. He was the muscular man who’d saluted me the night Victor and I first met. During a conversation with him a few weeks later, I thought he looked more like he belonged in a wrestling arena than a restaurant, but he was actually an incredible cook, blending ingredients in a way that seemed to hypnotize customers into returning for more.
“What did you do?” I asked him once after sampling a particularly decadent cream of wild mushroom soup he’d made. “Sprinkle cocaine in this? It’s totally addictive.”
“No, ma’am,” Spencer responded with a slow smile. “Only love.” For a big man, he was soft-spoken and a little shy—the consummate gentle giant and an excellent reminder that a person’s appearance doesn’t define the truth of who they are.
“Ew,” I joked. “Don’t tell the health department that.”
Now Melody and I unloaded all the food she had prepared the night before into the commercial upright freezer we kept in our garage, keeping out one lasagna and a container of cookies for us to eat today. After that, we put the suitcases in the kids’ rooms and went to go talk with them while Victor finished his conversation with Spencer. I carried the blanket Max had requested and one of Kelli’s sweaters for Ava. When we entered the den, I saw that they were sprawled out next to each other on the curved leather sectional, still in their pajamas. Their glassy eyes were glued to the huge flat-screen across the room, but the TV was off. They were staring at nothing. Ava was loosely holding Max’s hand and seeing this unexpected act of tenderness toward her brother, I choked up again.
“Hey, guys,” Melody said, stepping over to sit down next to Ava. “I’m so, so sorry to hear about your mom.” She reached out and rubbed Ava’s arm, and Ava jerked away. Melody didn’t pull back after Ava’s reaction; instead, she drew Ava closer and gave her an enormous hug. I expected Ava to yank herself out of Melody’s arms—they’d only met a few times when Melody happened to stop by when the kids were with us for the weekend—but instead, Ava began to cry and softened into my friend’s embrace. Melody held her close, rubbed her back, and pressed her cheek into the side of Ava’s head.
Seeing this, Max leapt off the couch and threw himself at me, his skinny arms tight around my hips. I stumbled back a step, surprised by this sudden outpouring of affection, but then found my footin
g and dropped down to the floor and took him into a tight embrace, wrapping his mother’s blanket around him. Neither child spoke a word, but Melody looked at me, tears brimming in her eyes. Ava looked over to me, too, and saw her mother’s red sweater in my grasp. I held it out to her.
“I thought you might like to have this with you,” I said, keeping one arm around Max, who was sniffling into my shoulder.
Ava hesitated, then slowly extricated herself from Melody’s arms. She stared at her mother’s sweater, an unreadable expression on her face. “That was her favorite,” she whispered. “Dad bought it for her.”
“Then you should definitely keep it.” I smiled gently, trying to ignore the slight twist in my stomach that arose with the picture of Victor and Kelli together. In normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have bothered me, but after seeing that book in her room, I felt the tiniest bit insecure.
Ava lifted her eyes to mine, her bottom lip trembling as she took the sweater from me. “She might be coming back,” she said, her voice slightly muffled as she held it over her nose and mouth. “Maybe the hospital made a mistake.”
Max chose this moment to look up at me, his nose running, his blue eyes bright with tears. “That happens, right? I’ve seen it on TV. They think it’s the person who died, but they’re wrong.”
I gave Melody a helpless look, and she stepped in. “I wish it worked that way, honey. But the doctors are sure it was your mom. I’m sorry.” Both kids began crying again, and Melody and I held them close.
Victor rushed in from the kitchen, cell phone in hand. He stopped short when he saw us. I gave him the smallest of reassuring smiles and mouthed the words, It’s okay. He nodded but still sank to the floor behind me, wrapping his own long arms around both me and his son. He pressed his damp cheek against mine and the heat from his body enveloped me.
As Victor held us, I experienced the briefest flicker of hope that I could do this. If I could be here now, in a painful moment like this, I could be here always. Maybe I would learn how to find my way through this with the kids instead of in spite of them. Maybe being a mother wasn’t nearly as scary as I’d made it out to be.
Ava
With most things, there were rules about how to act. I knew how to be quiet and pay attention to my teachers when I was at school; I knew how to laugh with Bree and how to be sweet to my dad when I wanted something from him. I had no idea how to act now. Mama was dead and nothing else mattered. Not how I looked or what I did or didn’t do. I could eat or not eat, cry or not cry, and nothing would change. Brush your teeth, my brain told me. Walk down the hall. Sit at the table. Take a bite of toast. I responded to these thoughts in slow motion—with stiff, stilted movements, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz when he rusted up after it rained. My body tingled the same way my mouth does after a visit to the dentist. There, but not there. Moving, but numb. Empty.
We didn’t have to go to school, so Max and I basically spent the entire week sitting around the house. I colored with him and read him his favorite stories, pointless forms of distraction that did little to make either of us feel better.
“How are you doing?” Dad asked us every day—usually more than once—and I didn’t know how to answer him. How did he think we were doing? I couldn’t have cried again if I tried. I was tired in a hollowed-out way I’d never been. We spent every night with Dad in his room, while Grace made a bed for herself on the living room couch. I don’t think any of us were really getting much sleep. The minute I closed my eyes, Mama’s face appeared and my pulse pounded noisily through my blood. I felt it throbbing in my head, my neck, my fingers—even my toes.
Now it was Thursday, the morning of the day everyone was coming to our house for some sort of weird gathering Dad wouldn’t call a funeral but actually kind of was. I wanted to escape what I had to face today. I wanted to stay curled up in Dad’s bed. He and Max had already gotten up—I was alone. Wrapping Mama’s red sweater tightly around me, I brought my knees to my chest beneath the covers and closed my eyes again.
“Ava?” My dad’s muffled voice came through the bedroom door. “Are you awake?”
I wondered what he’d do if I didn’t answer. Or if I pitched a fit and refused to leave the room. I could scream and kick and bite him if he tried to make me go. Part of me wanted to find out what might happen if I did, but the other, smarter part of me answered him. “I’m up.”
“People are going to be here soon and Grace has to get ready.”
My eyes snapped open. I threw the covers off and rolled over onto my back. “Okay, Dad! I said, I’m up.” I didn’t care that I was being sassy. He could punish me all he wanted and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing could make me feel worse than I already did.
He didn’t respond, so I figured he’d gone back down the hall to tell Grace she could have their room back. I wondered how she was feeling, being kicked out of my dad’s bed. I wondered if she was angry we were taking up so much of his time. She’d given me lots of space this week, only speaking to me to offer bits of food or to ask if I wanted to go for a walk with her and Max, letting Dad be the one to tell us we should shower or put our cereal bowl in the sink. She spent the days talking on the phone with her assistant, working on her computer, and cleaning the house. She was quieter than usual, tiptoeing around, hugging and kissing my dad when she didn’t think we were looking. Maybe she didn’t know how to act, either.
There was a soft knock on the door, and Grace opened it a second later. She gave me a half smile when she saw me still lying in their bed. “Hey there,” she said. “Is it okay if I get showered? You can stay in here awhile, if you want.”
I nodded, and she closed the door behind her after she entered. She was wearing black pajama pants with a loose purple T-shirt and her hair was a crazy mess around her face. She was about to go into their bathroom when I spoke up, my own voice surprising me. “Grace?”
She stopped, turned, and looked back at me. “Yeah?” She said the word softly, and with such tenderness, it almost made me cry. I had to force my jaw to stop trembling before I could speak.
“Do I have to be here today?”
Her mouth twitched into a quick frown. “I think it’s probably best if you are. It gives you a chance to say good-bye.”
I thought about this a moment. “But what if I don’t want to?”
She sighed. “I get why you’d feel like that, sweetie. This all really sucks, doesn’t it?”
I looked at her, eyebrows raised, shocked to have an adult speak so plainly, that someone who I’d been so mean to was being so nice to me. “Yeah, it does,” I said. I sat up, pulled Mama’s sweater closed, and dropped my gaze to the mattress. My insides were bound up in knots, but I knew I needed to apologize. “I don’t really hate you, Grace. I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry.” My voice shook, feeling disloyal to Mama, somehow, with every word. She’d been jealous of Grace, I knew. Jealous of her job; jealous that Daddy loved her. I’d understood that I wasn’t supposed to like Grace, and yet, here she was while Mama was . . . gone. I didn’t know how to feel.
“Ava, honey, look at me,” she said. I did as she asked and gritted my teeth so I wouldn’t cry. She wasn’t smiling, but her green eyes were filled with kindness as she spoke. “I understand, okay? Sometimes we do and say things we don’t mean when we’re upset. So please don’t worry about it. I care about you very much and I’m here for you however you need me to be.”
I nodded briskly, grateful that she wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it. If I had said something like that to Mama, I’d have been grounded for weeks. Grace smiled at me, then went into the bathroom. I lay there a while longer, oddly comforted by the sound of her getting ready—the water running, the hair dryer’s low buzz. It reminded me of listening to Mama get “prettied up” for work. I decided to skip taking a shower and went to my bedroom to get dressed, pulling my hair into a tight ponytail to hide that it hadn’t been washed. I looked in the mirror, reviewing the black skirt and blouse I wore with Mama�
�s sweater. “Dress for yourself,” she always told me. “What matters is how you feel in what you’re wearing, not what anyone else thinks of it.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I rubbed my hands over my biceps. “I hope you can see me,” I whispered. “I’m wearing this for you.”
* * *
Spencer was the first to arrive, looking handsome in a navy blue suit. His dark hair was slicked back and he had a red kerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He shook Dad’s hand, then pulled him into a one-armed hug, and they patted each other’s backs like they were trying to burp a baby.
“Hey there, monkeys,” he said to us, and Max and I both gave him a little wave. We liked Spencer. Whenever we visited the restaurant, he made us a special garlic cheese toast and snuck us bites of expensive desserts. “Can I help set up?” he asked, looking around the living room. Grace had kept the house so clean all week, it barely looked like anybody lived there.
“I still need to move the dining room chairs in here,” Dad said. “So people will have a place to sit.”
“Let’s do it,” Spencer said, slapping his hands together. They made their way into the other room, and Max and I walked over to the couch and dropped onto it together.
“What’re we supposed to do?” Max whispered, and I shrugged. There weren’t going to be very many people coming over—maybe Diane and her son, Patrick, plus a couple of people from Mama’s work. Dad said her parents couldn’t come because their health wasn’t good enough to travel. I supposed if I knew them I’d have been upset, but I honestly didn’t know how to miss someone I’d never met.
Before I could answer my brother, Melody walked in through the front door wearing a simple black dress and matching ballet flats. Her hair was pulled into a bun at the base of her neck, which was encircled by a strand of pearls. She looked like a blond Audrey Hepburn. Grace gave her a big hug, then offered to take her coat. Spencer and my dad emerged from the dining room, each carrying a couple of chairs. Melody saw them, did a double take, then nudged Grace. “Who is that?” she whispered.
