Chapter Twenty-Seven Kiersten
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kiersten
He’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
And I wish I wasn’t married to either one of them.
What would it be like to live in an era when divorce was considered a scandal, with real social consequences for leaving a husband, even an abusive one?
She’d always believed that her mother and grandmother had grown up in a time similar to hers.
After all, they had the right to vote. It’s not like they were Mary Poppins–era suffragettes.
But now she was starting to wonder if she’d taken some things for granted.
Like the right to pursue any career she wanted and to keep working, even after she got married and had children.
Or the right to be Kiersten Cleaver after marriage, instead of Mrs. Garrett Cleaver, with her name and identity subsumed by her husband.
Those old black-and-white Leave It to Beaver reruns she’d sometimes seen on TV had given her an impression of a wholesome, more innocent past. But now she felt like she’d stumbled onto the bad side of the good old days.
She’d done some creative googling that morning after reading the next entry, but she still couldn’t figure out Dottie’s last name or her maiden name.
But if she could find an old newspaper, she could look for local car-dealership ads from 1965.
And she could only find those at the library.
That was the next logical step. That and speaking to Lillian, her eighty-seven-year-old neighbor who was currently in Chicago, visiting her son.
But first she had to make sure the boys were on board with the Experiment. The family room went quiet for a moment as Kiersten’s husband turned off the Monday Night Football game playing on TV. The room erupted in howls of protest.
“We need to talk, guys,” Garrett said. “Family meeting.”
The boys groaned. “Is this about chores?” Matt asked.
“I’ll bet it’s about grades. Mom’s been checking the portal again.” Luke shot Kiersten a resentful look.
“Sit down, boys.” She set a bowl of popcorn in the middle of the kitchen table. “We have some news.”
The boys gathered around the table and began to shovel handfuls of popcorn into their mouths.
She took a deep breath and looked at her husband. He gave her a reassuring smile, and she cleared her throat.
“Okay. So, your dad and I have been talking. And I’ve also been talking with Mrs. Mondello and Ms. Hensler across the street. And we’d like to pull you guys out of school for the rest of the year.”
Silence enveloped the room. Then wild whoops of joy exploded through the kitchen, making her ears ring.
“Are you serious?”
“This is the best news ever.”
“No school? At all?”
Her husband raised his hands in the air to silence the whooping. “Please, guys. Let your mother finish.”
So far so good. Kiersten squared her shoulders and launched into the rest of the proposal, the part they might not be so enthusiastic about. The school-at-home part. The no-sports-or-activities part.
When she finished, Matt shrugged. “I’m okay with that.”
Kiersten couldn’t hide her shock. “You are?” She’d expected an argument, or at least a negotiation of some sort.
“Baseball isn’t fun anymore, since I’m not playing with my friends. And my shoulder aches all the time. I don’t mind taking a break.”
“Me too,” Luke said.
Johnny ran around the table, waving his hands in the air like a joyful berserker. “This is awesome.”
Garrett gently steered him back to his seat. “There’s more. Your mom’s not done.”
“Yeah,” Kiersten said, bracing herself for the reaction to the rest of her announcement. “Wait till you hear the next part.”
The boys looked at her warily. “Are you going to make us do IXL?” Luke asked, naming the hated online “tool” the school assigned in addition to homework.
“Or CK-12?” Matt asked, naming the other online education app the boys most loathed.
“The opposite actually.” Kiersten took a deep breath. “No school also means no electronics. No devices. No phones. No iPads or video games.”
The reaction was swift and outraged. “What?”
“Mom, you can’t do that.”
“That’s like . . . not constitutional.”
Garrett smiled. “There is nothing in the Bill of Rights about an inalienable right to Minecraft.”
“So no video games ever?”
“I talked to the other moms, and you guys can have your devices for one hour on Wednesday nights,” Kiersten said.
“You can use that time to text or FaceTime friends. You can play video games. But that’s it.
The rest of the time we keep all your devices locked up in the fire safe with the passports and the birth certificates. ”
They absorbed this terrible pronouncement with wide eyes.
Then Matt asked, “What about TV? Like, you know, watching shows?”
“We only watch shows and movies together, here in the family room, on Saturday nights,” Kiersten said. “And we have to agree on the show. If we don’t all agree, we don’t watch anything.”
She’d gone too far. A chorus of outrage met this pronouncement.
“Mom. This is wrong.”
“This is uncivilized.”
“This is, like, how . . . cave people lived.”
“Do we have to do this?” Matt asked.
“No.” Kiersten shrugged. “We do not have to do this. That’s the purpose of this meeting. We’d like to try it, but ultimately it’s up to you guys. It’s your childhood and it’s your decision.”
“So we really get to be the ones who decide?” Luke crossed his arms, his voice heavy with suspicion.
“Yes,” Kiersten said. “I’d like to see if we’re happier when we aren’t running around like crazy people. But this won’t work if Dad and I are leading and you guys aren’t following. You have to want this, too, or the Experiment will fail. So it really is up to you.”
A deep line appeared on Matt’s forehead, and Johnny looked the way he did when he attempted to write in cursive, the tip of his tongue protruding, completely absorbed in thinking hard. She could see they were taking the proposal seriously, weighing the pros and cons.
Finally, Luke spoke. “I’m in,” he said, sitting up in his chair. “You can take my phone. I don’t even care as long as I don’t have to sit in school all day long, bored out of my mind, listening to teachers go on and on about stuff I don’t care about.”
Matt looked at his brother with a thoughtful expression. “If we were back in Minnesota, I’d say no, ’cause I’d miss my friends. But I haven’t really made any friends here yet, so I don’t have anyone to miss. And maybe if I take a break from baseball, my shoulder will stop hurting.”
“James? Johnny?” Garrett asked.
“I want to try it,” James said. “But I don’t want to do school with girls.”
Kiersten stifled a smile. “I’m sorry to hear that, but the girls next door are part of the package.”
“Why can’t we just do it by ourselves?” James asked.
“’Cause Mom can’t teach us math,” Luke pointed out.
Unfortunately, this was true. “Mrs. Mondello will teach math and science. Ms. Hensler will do English and history.”
“I’ll do it,” Johnny said. “’Cause then I can be with Mommy all day.” Her heart melted. “Even if she doesn’t know anything about how to be a teacher.”
“Thank you, Johnny. Your confidence is heartwarming.”
“I guess I’ll do it too,” James said.
Garrett gave him a nod of approval. “Glad to hear it.”
“So we don’t have to go to school in the morning?” Luke asked hopefully. “Can I skip my homework?”
“You stay in school for one more week. We’ll get everything ready, and then we’ll stop going to school and we’ll start the Experiment.”
“What’s an experiment?” Johnny asked.
“An experiment is when you do something to see how something works, even if you aren’t sure how it’s going to turn out,” Matt said.
His brothers nodded gravely, and Kiersten’s chest tingled. They had so much faith in her. Even though she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.
“Thank you, Mom,” Luke said.
She looked at him, eyebrows raised in surprise.
Of all her sons, Luke was the most like her.
As a result, they butted heads all day long.
Kiersten was the Bad Cop in his life, the person who made him do all the things he didn’t want to do.
But he had a wry sense of humor and a core of compassion that often made him her secret favorite.
“For what?” she asked.
“For being, like, brave. I don’t think most moms would try something this . . . you know . . . off the chain.”
True. But most moms had not forgotten a child at a truck stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she said, ruffling his blond hair. “Hopefully this will be great. And if it isn’t, you’ll know what not to do when you have kids.”
This year would either go down in family lore as the happiest year of their life, the year their mother made learning fun .
. . or it would be forever known as that lost year when they learned absolutely nothing, making each subsequent year of school harder and harder until they finally flunked the SAT and failed to get into college.
Inspirational dream or cautionary tale. They were about to find out which path they’d chosen.
It was sort of like Dottie’s marriage, she thought as she climbed into bed that night, and reached for the diary on her bedside table. The Experiment could be a dream solution to all their problems . . . or it could twist into a nightmare.