father asked, smiling broadly, his right cheek collapsing into a deep dimple that women loved. Then, leaning in so closely that she could smell sausage intermingled with this afternoon’s beer, he lowered his voice. “You run on home and start packing. I’ll pay and catch up with you in a few minutes. We got a bus to catch at midnight.”
Jenny knew that her father wasn’t going to pay for their supper, but at least he was letting her get out of the restaurant before embarrassing her to death. He was thoughtful that way.
I creep down the hallway, the wooden floor sighing creakily beneath my bare feet. I peek into the kids’ rooms. First Leah’s and then Lucas’s. Leah is tented beneath her thin white sheet, her bright pink comforter covered with multicolored peace symbols kicked to the end of the bed. A faint glow shines through the cotton and I’m hoping that she has a flashlight beneath the covers reading a book like I used to when I was little. But I know my daughter too well. It’s her handheld video game, one that Adam’s parents, Hank and Theresa, gave her a few months ago for her ninth birthday. A confusing game where the avatar goes back in time, trying to save the stolen prince and return him safely to the enchanted kingdom. It’s a lot like what you do for a living, El, Hank told me happily after Leah opened the brightly wrapped package, whooped with joy and called to thank her grandparents.
Now that would be a superpower, I think to myself. To be able to step into a time machine and travel back a week, an hour, a minute, a second before some indescribable thing happens to a child. To stand before a parent brandishing a cigarette, a stepparent with a lurid leer, a caregiver with a raised fist and say, “Do you really want to do this?”
“Hey, Leah,” I whisper, closing the bedroom door behind me and trying not to wake Lucas who, across the hall, is buried beneath his own blanket like a wooly bear caterpillar, even though it’s still eighty degrees outside and the air conditioner is less than reliable. Neither Adam nor I have had the time to call the repairman. I peer beneath her sheet and smile at my firstborn daughter. She looks up guiltily at me from beneath a forelock of dark hair damply pasted against her forehead.
“It’s nearly midnight, turn that thing off,” I chide, holding out my hand for the game. She presses a button and suddenly we’re plunged into darkness but for the star-shaped night-light plugged into the receptacle next to her bed.
“I can’t sleep though,” she protests in her gravelly voice.
“Want me to rub your back?” I ask
“Too hot,” she answers grumpily.
“Sing you a song?”
“Um, no,” she says shortly. I’m not surprised at this response. My singing is a long-running family joke. Still, I hum a few bars of a song that is Leah’s current favorite and wiggle my hips. Even in the dark I can tell that she is rolling her eyes.
“How about a cold washcloth for your forehead and another fan brought up here?”
“I guess,” she says with a jaw-breaking yawn.
By the time I go downstairs, lug up the oscillating fan, wet a washcloth beneath the cold-water faucet and return to Leah’s bedroom, she is fast asleep. I slap the washcloth on the back of my own sweaty neck, plug in the fan and position it so that the marginally cooler air is focused squarely on her sleeping form. I lean over and lightly press my lips to Leah’s cheek and she doesn’t stir. I tiptoe across the hall to Lucas’s bedroom, stoop down to kiss his forehead and he waves a hand as if trying to swat away a pesky mosquito.
I pull the washcloth from my neck, its coolness already absorbed into my hot skin, and I turn to see my husband’s silhouette in the doorway, a sleepy Avery in his arms. “Ellen, everything okay?” Adam whispers.
I put a finger to my lips and silently cross the bedroom, step out into the hall and pull the door shut behind me. “I’m okay, it’s too hot for anyone to sleep.” I lay a hand on his arm and brush Avery’s hair from her forehead and she smiles sleepily up at me.
“Thanks for coming to the game tonight,” he says as we move through the hallway toward Avery’s room.
“Oh, I like watching the boys play. They’re really improving.” Adam is the coach for East High School boys’ varsity baseball team.
“Yeah, they are,” Adam says proudly.
Though I’ve been a social worker for nearly fifteen years, the job weighs heavily on my chest. I’ve thought about quitting, thought about getting a job where I wouldn’t hear the voice of a client shouting in my ear or weeping for the children I’ve taken away from them. One where I wouldn’t hear the cries of children in my sleep. But of course I don’t. I know my job is important, I know I help children.
Adam presses Avery into my arms and, as I hold my daughter, I kiss the fine, silky strands of the dark hair that tops her head. She wraps her plump arms around my neck, and her even, steady heartbeat is a metronome, calming the galloping thud against my chest. I push away all thoughts of the children I work with and focus on the one in my arms and the two that are sound asleep just a few steps away. Despite the craziness of life, the long hours, the endless housework, the sleepless nights, for now all is right in my world and for this I am so grateful.
Jenny sat on the wobbly chair at the bus station, her red backpack at her feet. Inside it held all her worldly possessions: some clothing, a few toy figurines, a cheap plastic wallet and an old birthday card from her grandmother. Closing her eyes, she could almost imagine the swaying porch swing they would have once they were settled into a house in their new town. Though it was nearly midnight and her eyes felt scratchy and heavy, Jenny felt a bubbling anticipation that came with something new. She rocked back and forth in the lopsided chair, punctuated with a satisfying thunk each time the chair legs hit the floor, until the old woman sitting next to her started making impatient clucking sounds with her tongue. Jenny reluctantly opened her eyes to find the tsking woman wearing a red-and-pink-flowered sundress and a scowl. The woman was frowning so deeply at Jenny that the corners of her down-turned mouth seemed to have collapsed into her thick neck.
Jenny pretended not to notice and rocked the chair a few more times for good measure and then hopped to her feet to join her father, who was deep in conversation with a young woman with midnight-black hair, an intricate tattoo that crept up the woman’s arm and a nose ring. Jenny was accustomed to this, her father striking up conversations with strange women. Jenny always knew when he was going to make his move. He would run his fingers through his shaggy, brown hair shot through with copper and rub his palms against his cheeks as if checking the length of his stubble, and there was always stubble. Women loved her father. At least for a while anyway. He was almost movie-star handsome, but not quite, which made people like him all the more. His nose was a bit too prominent and slightly off center. His skin was tanned and deeply trenched lines scored his forehead and the corners of his blue eyes, making him appear much older than his thirty years. In the past six months a parade of women had come in and out of their lives. There was the checkout girl at the grocery store that always slid a pack of gum into their bag for Jenny. “My treat,” she said, not even looking at Jenny, keeping her smile brightly focused on Billy. There was the bank teller, the lady who decorated cakes at the bakery and even the nurse at the emergency room, who spent more time chatting with Billy than attending to the three-inch gash that Jenny got when she ran into the metal frame
