Dad’s days were full of homework and piano practice and chore charts and manners.
But it wasn’t long before her mother found a way to make Wednesday nights Willow’s favorite night of the week. Another adventure, another opportunity for so much love.
Willow tugged her favorite Keith Haring T-shirt over her thick hair until it fell onto her shoulders. She smiled when she looked in the mirror to brush her teeth and saw herself wearing it. She loved that oversize T-shirt with the thick squiggly lines and bright colors. She loved how it exuded excitement all around. How the figures were so simple and so happy dancing around together.
She washed the toothpaste from the edges of her mouth, then wiggled herself under her sheets. And then she waited. She squeezed her eyes shut like she was sleeping. But she wasn’t even close. And then she waited some more. And when Willow’s midnight alarm went off, it simultaneously felt like all the time in the universe—and no time at all—had passed.
With a tingle just under the surface of her skin, Willow tucked her feet into her slippers, picked up her flashlight from her bedside table, slid her pillow under her sheets in case Dad might check on her and walked delicately on her tippy toes all the way down the back stairs. She gripped the railing for balance, but made her way down the steps so naturally. It was a shame that Willow was her most graceful on that dark staircase in the middle of the night when no one would ever see her.
Willow pressed her toes slowly, purposefully into the lush carpeting that covered each step. She crossed the kitchen, slipped out the back door and made her way to the far end of the backyard. This moment, standing on the edge of the manicured grass with nothing but towering trees in front of her, made Willow’s heart tremble. It was just Willow alone in the dark. Nothing but the syncopated buzz of cicadas and faint crackling of the woods. Nothing but the crisp acidity of October nighttime air filling her lungs.
Willow could feel the excitement pulsing through her nerves. She was on the edge of her father’s world and on the precipice of her mother’s. Here was the entryway to happiness.
Willow launched off the thick lawn into the depths of the trees. Only thirty-seven and a half steps, she told herself as she hurried over fallen leaves and flimsy sticks to the tree house. She and her mother had counted the number once. Rosie had even made sure to account for the length of Willow’s stride instead of her own.
And when Willow reached the base of the ladder that led up, she made the signal—three clicks of her flashlight. Then she waited, her eyes big and her heart rumbling. And without another moment of quiet, Rosie returned the signal and popped her head out the base of the tree house floor.
Willow always wanted to zip up that ladder so badly at the sight of her mother, but she knew her loose knees were no match for the rickety wooden rungs. She was barely able to keep herself upright on the smooth ground of the fifth-grade hallway, let alone an old ladder. So she took her time wrapping her fingers around each wooden rung and then gripping her tightest grip as she carefully let her feet climb up slowly, one step at a time.
And when Willow finally got to the top, her mother would lift her by her arms and kiss her so hard, so decidedly, on the cheek. And together Willow and her mother would sing and dance and talk and draw by flashlight. They would paint and have thumb wars and play Twister and spin quarters. They would take turns performing tongue twisters. They would love each other so much.
And when the tree house walls were coated with new drawings, and when their mouths were coated with Pixy Stix sugar crystals and their bellies were filled with cream soda, and when the tree house air was saturated with the sounds of Elton John through her mother’s tiny speakers, Willow would lay her small head in Rosie’s lap and exhale.
Willow’s soft and raspy voice moved through the stillness. “Mom, why did you and Dad get a divorce?”
“Well, do you like waking up to the sun or an alarm?” Rosie replied.
“The sun,” Willow answered. And she was quick to it.
“Me too, baby,” Rosie said calmly as she kissed Willow on the middle of her smooth forehead. And then Willow exhaled again in her mother’s lap.
When Rosie’s watch beeped at 1:00 a.m., Willow and Rosie packed up their wrappers and toys, clicked off the flashlight and shimmied back down the ladder. Rosie with ease and Willow with full concentration.
And when Willow got to the back door of her father’s house, she waited and watched as her mother walked down the driveway away from her. She watched Rosie’s hair bounce weightlessly as her thin arms scrambled to maintain the pile of soda and candy and colored pencils stacked precariously against her chest. Willow watched her mother in all of her coolness, all of her effervescence, until she was gradually absorbed by the darkness.
Inevitably, before she disappeared, Rosie would drop a pencil or crayon or marker from her grip and let it roll along the ground without the slightest motion to pick it up. Her mother didn’t even pause to make sense of the faint clicking sound of the thing as it slipped from her arms and hit the blacktop. Rosie just got into the front seat of the car, where the dim car lights revealed her silhouette once again. And then she rolled her windows down, pressed both hands into her lips and extended her arms out toward Willow. She was sending a kiss all the way through the velvet darkness into Willow’s soul.
Then her mother drove away.
Willow returned to the driveway with her flashlight on dim to retrieve the lost crayon and bring it upstairs with her. She rolled the dark pinkish waxy cylinder in her hands and scanned the crayon label—Jazzberry Jam—then tucked it into her pajama pocket.
On Wednesday nights, as Willow drifted into sleep for the second time, she would replay the image of her mother’s red lips turning into a smile and the feeling of her mother’s long manicured fingers playing with her curls. And just like that, she could fall asleep happy.
It never mattered how tired Willow’s time in the tree house made her feel for school on Thursdays. Wednesday nights with her mom were definitely Willow’s favorite night of all the nights of the week.
* * *
Willow woke up the next morning in her room at her father’s house to the sound of her alarm. She slowly opened her eyes to the blue walls and the white wicker dresser. To the lacy throw pillows on the floor. To the taste of quiet. And then back to the beeping alarm.
Rex had told Willow that the trick to not snoozing through your alarm was to place the clock across the room. “Then, the only way you can stop the buzzing is to get up!” he told Willow one morning when she overslept. He told her this as he moved her alarm clock from her bedside table to the edge of the dresser by the far wall.
Willow slapped down on the clock and started the tasks of the morning checklist her dad had made for her. She also made sure that her little brother was on top of his morning checklist too. But as usual, he wasn’t.
At six years old, Asher Thorpe was always forgetting things. Spilling things. Breaking things. Knocking into things. But he was almost always forgiven for all of it. Because of his full cheeks and round chin, his clear blue eyes and his silky blond bowl cut. And, most importantly, his missing front two teeth and his trouble with the letter R.
It surprised everyone that two brunettes like Rosie and Rex could produce a blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy. But it made sense to Rex, Rosie and even Willow that Asher would have the kindest, most gentle, most nonthreatening features. There was a lightness to Asher that none of the other Thorpes possessed. A lightness that Willow was reminded of every time she reached
