stood and hooked her book bag around her shoulder and was halfway bent over to retrieve the duffel when out of the corner of her eye she saw a tall, weedy, ponytailed man turn the corner just behind her father. She straightened and watched in disbelief as her father emerged from behind the other side of the bus station casting furtive glances over his shoulder. Two more men appeared and her father stopped short, hands up in placation as they circled around him, fingers poking at his chest. Jenny’s first instinct was to rush off the bus and to her father’s side but found that she couldn’t move, could barely breathe. The meanest looking of the men, barrel-chested and shaped like a fire hydrant, grabbed her father’s face between his thick fingers, causing his lips to pucker as if preparing for a kiss.
Just as the bus rumbled to life, the hum of its engine vibrating in her ears, Jenny tried to call out, “Wait,” but words stuck drily in the back of her throat. The bus lurched forward and, off balance, Jenny fell back into her seat just as sirens filled the air. Immediately she slouched low in her seat. Her father hated the police and didn’t hesitate to share his distrust with Jenny. “See the cops coming,” he would say, “go the other direction.”
“Why?” Jenny would probe.
Her father would just shake his head. “Best they don’t find you. You don’t want to end up in foster care again, do you?”
Jenny most definitely did not want to be sent off to a foster family again. Not that it had anything to do with her father. Her stint in foster care was just before she came to live with her father. No, that was her mother’s doing. And the man who stole her mother away from her. Foster care was an experience that she didn’t want to relive, though she was only four at the time and had only scant recollections. Snapshots of half-formed memories that she tried to blink away.
Through the rear window, she saw her father lifted roughly to his feet by a police officer. She could see that he was speaking earnestly to the officer, bobbing his head frantically toward the departing bus. She should holler out to the bus driver to stop. That she needed to get off. Instead, Jenny stayed silent, turned her head the other way, just like her father told her to when it came to the police, and hunkered down in her seat, last row, right side. She pulled her book bag onto her lap, leaned forward and pressed her cheek into the seat in front of her, now damp with her tears, and watched as the buildings, the houses, the streets of Benton sped past.
I awake with a start. The room is too bright, the light streaming across my face much too warm for six in the morning, even though it’s the middle of July and the hottest summer on record in more than a decade. “Adam,” I say, looking over at my husband who, jaw slack in sleep, is snoring. I used to, when I had time, in those brief moments when the children were asleep, when work could wait, watch my husband while he slept. The way his brown hair curled around his ears, the dark shadow that magically appeared on his chin during the night. The way, through the years, his face became fuller, more creased, like a love letter folded over and over and opened to be read and reread.
“Adam,” I say, leaping from the bed. “It’s almost eight o’clock! Get up!” He pops up, eyes wide.
“Jesus, I’ve got practice in a half an hour!” He is already heading toward the bathroom. “Did you set the alarm?”
“I thought I set it!” I say, trying to recall.
“Remember you’re dropping Avery off at the sitter’s and I’ll take Leah and Lucas with me to practice,” Adam says as my cell phone begins to ring. I grab it from my bedside table. Checking the display, I see an unfamiliar number and I ignore it.
“Yeah, okay.” I scramble from the bed. The night before is a haze. All I remember is falling into bed exhausted. “I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. I can’t be late again.” But I’m talking to the closed bathroom door, my voice drowned out by the sound of the shower. I rush to the extra bathroom that the kids use and strip off the t-shirt that is still damp with last night’s heat. I step beneath the showerhead, letting the cold spray envelope my body. I don’t bother to wash my hair but run the bar of soap across my skin, scrubbing the salt of my sweat away. I rinse quickly, avoid looking at my stomach, still slack from giving birth eleven months earlier, and wrap a towel around myself and briefly mourn the loss of my once fit body, uninterrupted sleep, time alone with my husband and evenings out with my friends. “Leah, Lucas, it’s time to get up!” I holler as I make my way back to my bedroom.
Adam is sitting on the bed, pulling on his socks. “The kids are up already. I sent them down to grab something to eat before we leave.”
“Avery?” I ask, pulling on the first outfit I see in my closet as I step into a pair of sandals.
“Leah changed her diaper and got her dressed. She’s in her crib. I’ll bring her down,” he says, rising from the bed and then hurrying from the room.
“Thanks,” I say and run a hand through my cropped hair, once again glad that I keep it short. I finish dressing as my cell phone sitting in its charger on the bedside table begins to vibrate. “Damn,” I murmur, and check the display. It’s my mother. I meant to call her back last night, but between the baseball game and feeding and bathing the kids, I had forgotten. Again.
I think of the morning after my father had died. My mother rose early, as she normally did, and moved quietly from the bedroom to the kitchen, trying not to awaken me and my brothers ensconced in our childhood bedrooms. She didn’t hear me as I followed behind her, silently observing. I watched as she absentmindedly opened the freezer stuffed full of all the things that my father loved best, the foods that he would never be able to eat again. My mother blinked back tears and pulled out the date-nut bread, double wrapped in aluminum foil, the Danish meatballs in Tupperware, and a small container of rice and salmon casserole, and set them on the kitchen counter. Lastly, she pulled out the unopened pint-size container of banana-flavored ice cream dotted with chocolate chunks and walnuts that was my father’s favorite.
“Mom,” I said, startling her, “what are you doing?”
I looked at the open freezer. “Mom?” I said again, a lilt of fear creeping into my voice. “What’s going on?” I heard her stomach rumble in protest, but still she ate, moving on to a Ziplock bag filled with peanut butter crisscross cookies. “Mom!” I shouted, rousing Craig and Danny who by the time they ran down the stairs found me trying to wrestle the plastic bag from my mother, and her dog, Dolly, lapping up the crumbs that tumbled to the floor because of the tussle. We took my mother to the doctor, watched her carefully, encouraged her to get a part-time job, to volunteer. But life goes on. Our own lives resumed, my brothers going back to their own towns and families, me going back to work and my family. She seems better, but I know she is still so lonely and once again I utter a silent vow to spend more time with her.
I ignore the buzz but grab the phone and rush down the stairs, nearly tripping on the pile of folded laundry I had set there the night before to be put away. In the kitchen the TV is blaring, the phone is ringing and the kids are bickering over who gets the last Pop-Tart and who has to have a granola bar with raisins. In exasperation, Adam breaks both the Pop-Tart and the granola bar in halves and gives one each to the Leah and Lucas, who grumble anyway.
“Morning,” I say, ignoring the phone and distractedly tucking my blouse into my skirt. Avery is in her high chair, her eyes still heavy with sleep. Leah has dressed her in one of her Sunday dresses and shoved tennis shoes on her feet. She looks beautiful. I bend over and lay a kiss on the top of her head and do the same to Leah and Lucas. “Thanks for helping out this morning, I gotta go,” I say, and then stop short. “Damn,”
