Whit
“Morning.” Blair’s raspy voice traverses the main floor shortly after seven a.m.
“Jonas!” I shout toward the ceiling, dragging my barely awake body from the couch while cradling a mug of life-sustaining elixir. “Auntie’s here.”
Nothing.
“Sorry, I forgot you said you had to come early today. Want some coffee while—” I shuffle toward the kitchen to find Blair already popping a coffee pod into the Nespresso machine, and my attention returns to my son. “Jonas!”
After another minute of utter silence, I make my way to his room, stepping in close to the thin paneled door and rapping my knuckles across it.
I call his name out again, expecting a snarky response about how I need to exercise patience.
There’s nothing he loves more than taking my canned “gentle parenting” phrases and throwing them back in my face.
When there’s still no sign of life, I swallow hard and give a firm knock before pushing his door open. “Jonas?”
In yesterday’s clothes, Jonas is sprawled like a starfish across the top of his bed, chest rising and falling with the gentle wave of deep slumber.
His soft snores are reminiscent of when he was a baby sleeping on my chest. Warm and snuggly, making tiny snuffling noises against my bare skin.
I hold on to the memory like it still fits in my arms.
He’s right here. And I miss him.
I can’t help myself—my socked feet glide silently across the floor, until I’m reaching out to sweep the hair covering his forehead so I can plant a light kiss on my baby boy.
He mumbles something nonsensical through chapped lips, drool dried to his cheek.
“Morning, kiddo. Time to get up and go with Auntie B,” I say softly, raking my hand through his hair. “She’s downstairs waiting.”
After a minute of grumbling and groaning and acting too much like a sullen teenager for my liking, he peels his body from the mattress and shuffles toward the dresser. When I feel confident enough that he won’t flop back down, I head downstairs.
“Sorry,” I say to Blair, joining her at the kitchen table and picking up my white mug labeled Mama. “It’s a fight to get him out of bed in the morning. Seems we’ve reached the teenager phase early.”
“Phase? You’re still like that.”
I laugh. “Fair point. He’s been permanently exhausted since he went to the ranch the other day. I think he was asleep by seven o’clock last night…. Hope he’s not getting sick.”
“Did he have fun?”
“When I asked him, his answer was a grunt. Which is too bad because Colt said he was welcome back anytime.”
I knew Jonas wouldn’t enjoy hard manual labor from the moment Denny called me to ask, but I said yes because Denny was trying to take some weight off Blair’s shoulders. As somebody who, admittedly, asks a lot of my sister, I jumped at the opportunity to ease her load.
In theory, I can work from home and keep Jonas here with me.
He’s ten. It’s not like he’ll toss himself over a balcony railing if I take my eyes off him for a second.
But given the opportunity, he’d play video games for fifteen hours straight, day in and day out, all summer long.
And mom-guilt eats me alive when he does that for more than a single day.
So I bear the shame that comes with asking my family to babysit, telling myself it’ll be beneficial for him in the long run.
But damn it, I wish I could afford a nanny.
I wish I had a reliable baby daddy. And though it pains me to admit it, sometimes I wish I had an easier kid.
“Colt’s a sweet guy,” Blair muses into her coffee.
“Colt was…” I search for something nice to say about the man who showed up wearing an incredibly offensive T-shirt and bumbled his way through convincing me he was a responsible adult. “He got Jonas home in one piece.”
Just then, Jonas appears at the top of the staircase, thudding his way down each step with a resounding yawn.
“Morning, sunshine,” Blair sings. “Hurry up and eat. We’ve got places to be.”
“Mornin’.” He makes his way to the pantry to grab a box of cereal, then grabs a bowl and spoon and stumbles toward the fridge for milk. He may as well be a sloth in a zoo, the way Blair and I are intently watching every painfully slow movement.
Loose cereal topples over the lip of his bowl, littering the counter, and some of his milk doesn’t quite make it where it’s meant to go. If I don’t find a way to ignore it, I might actually lose my mind, and then he’ll only move slower. If that’s humanly possible.
Averting my eyes before I have a conniption, I ask, “Anyway, how’s Mom?”
“Turns out there’s a limit to how many times I can be asked about my homework before I lose my cool with Mom, and that limit is twenty-seven.”
“You have homework?” The words sound soggy as Jonas spits them out around a mouthful of cereal.
“Thankfully, no. But Grandma gets a bit confused.” Blair gives him a reassuring smile.
My hands prop up my chin. “Rookie numbers. She reminded me to take my clean laundry home with me at least forty times the other day. Was I doing laundry at their house? Nope.”
Blair’s laughter comes out weak, followed by a sigh of understanding.
Mom’s early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis last year hit everyone hard, but Blair has always been the quintessential eldest daughter, so she stepped into the primary caregiver role without a second thought.
Practically shoulder-checked our dad out of the way.
Not that I mind. I’d done my best to help our parents, but Dad rarely called for assistance, and the first time Mom called me by another name, I crumpled to the floor in my laundry room.
While she hasn’t always liked me, at least she loved Whit Hart as any parent loves their child.
The loss of maternal connection feels like smoothing out the last few rough patches, removing the only places we still catch on each other and stick.
The silence that follows is deafening; only the crunching of Jonas’s sugary cereal cuts through the still air. Then the slurping of milk from his bowl.
I yawn. Loudly and for a long time.
Jonas blinks up at me, studying my face. “If you’re younger than Auntie Blair, why do you look so much more tired all the time?”
I take a long drink of hot coffee, doing my best to ignore Blair’s snickering as she places her empty mug in the dishwasher.
“Really funny.” My mug clunks against the table, and I press the pad of my thumb to my temple with a wince. “Bowl. Sink. Now.”
Popping a shoulder, he does as he’s instructed. But not without a little bit of sass, naturally. “Just sayin’. Maybe you should try using all those creams you have in your bathroom or something while I’m gone.”
The slight tension in my skull might become a full-blown migraine before he sees himself out the door. And on a day with more than one hundred résumés and a dozen interviews to get through, no less.
“Want a kid?” I turn to my sister, who’s desperately trying to wipe the smirk from her lips. “He’s free, he’s potty-trained, and he occasionally listens. Please, take him.”
“But then I might look old like you,” Blair quips.
“Oh, you definitely will. Bet you have gray hair by the end of the day. But look at his cute little face—isn’t it worth it?”
Jonas’s lip flips in disgust, making him arguably less cute.
“Yeah, you’re doing a crappy job of selling him. I like looking young”—she flicks the ends of her long brown hair with a dramatic flourish—“and beautiful.”
Jonas slides into his shoes and looks at me with pleading eyes. “See? I have to stay home today so she doesn’t get ugly.”
The last of my coffee goes down in a rapid gulp. The next cup sounds like it might need a shot of liquor in it.
“Good try, buddy.” Blair ruffles the mop of dirty blond hair on top of his head.
“If I stay here, I promise I won’t be too loud while Mom works.”
“Jonas,” I wearily reply. “We’ve talked about the summer plan a million times. You get Mondays and Thursdays at home.”
The summer plan, also known as operation keep Jonas from having fifteen hours of screen time every day while simultaneously ensuring he’s not out with his awful friends causing trouble.
He spends two weekdays with Blair and one with my dad.
I wish I could rely on Alex, instead of my dad and sister, but he’s blown us off twice in the last week.
Last Friday I made the mistake of promising Jonas that his dad was coming—you’d think I’d know better after ten years of this bullshit—and I was left with a sulky preteen for two full days when, inevitably, Alex didn’t show.
Jonas huffs, pushing past Blair to get out of the house as fast as possible. So desperate to prove he’s pissed off, he skipped tying his shoelaces during his irritated escape.
I mouth an apology at my sister.
Slowly shutting the front door as she follows him out, Blair says, “Nothing I can’t handle. I’m gonna need a Sephora gift card sent my way, though.”
The house is silent, save for the melodious percolation of coffee, and though I should get ready for work, I sink into my chair with an alleviating breath.
Once I finally work up the energy to start my day, the morning goes by in a flurry of résumés and job interviews.
Corporate recruiter might not be most people’s dream job, and I can understand why.
The upside is that conducting interviews for a variety of positions in the private healthcare sector means I meet a lot of interesting people.
Plus, I have the flexibility of working from home and scheduling my own calendar, which has proven to be a lifesaver when it comes to Jonas.
Was it my dream job at seventeen? No.