Chapter Seven Maddie
Chapter Seven
Maddie
I roll down my window and poke my head out to see what the holdup is. School let out five minutes ago and the pickup line for the twins is at a standstill.
Ahhh, the culprit is indeed a dad who didn’t realize he needed to have the laminated paper in the window with the name of his child and now he’s stomping his feet about having to pull over so they can get him sorted.
The woman in the minivan next to me catches me looking and rolls her eyes at the petulant father like we are fellow comrades in arms. The rows of her back seat are stuffed with booster seats. “This is why I don’t let my husband pick up the kids. I’d be getting death threats from the room mom.”
I have to stop myself from blurting out that I’m not actually picking up my kids and that Letty and Berry’s father has their every move and routine memorized, but she’s already rolled her windows up and turned her audiobook up to max volume.
Bram gave me very specific directions on how to pick up the girls on their first day or else I’d probably have looked just as foolish as the dad holding up the line today.
As my wait continues, my mind wanders to this morning, when I’d managed to score one of the private shower rooms at the student center.
The steam from the shower clung to the air while I slid my hand between my legs and let myself delight in the thought of Bram in his office.
The memory of his eucalyptus and cedar scent.
My back pressed against his shelves and his words tickling my ear.
My fingers this morning were a pitiful replacement for his, however, and it only left me feeling more frustrated.
I don’t know how I’m going to see him again today. But I also don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t.
The line is frozen again, and I twist to see what the holdup is this time.
It’s wild to me that something as innocuous-sounding as a school pickup can be thirty minutes of idling purgatory, and honestly, I’ve been thinking for the last two weeks that this horrible fucking line is designed with a cloddish attachment to the appearance of efficiency, not actually the spirit of it, and if they’d just—
I don’t know how it happens, honestly, because I’ve spent the last three years—four, if you count the year Gentry and I were hooking up and I was whittling away pieces of myself to keep him coming back—biting my tongue until it bled when stupid shit happened in front of me.
(It’s not the job of a political spouse to have any opinion whatsoever on stupid shit.
We are supposed to be stupid shit agnostic.)
But I’m not engaged anymore and biting my tongue has gotten me nowhere but a rest stop parking lot and also, just—this could be better, there’s no reason for it not to be better!
And that is how I find myself with the car pulled to the side and parked. That is how I find myself walking toward the woman in charge of car purgatory.
“Hey!” I say, my face already transformed into the smile that won me second runner-up in Olathe, Kansas’s annual Sweet Six contest, my voice both hey girl and also a little conspiratorial.
“Oh my god, is that a Wicked lanyard? I love Wicked, I’ve actually loved Jonathan Bailey since Chewing Gum, and have you ever thought about splitting the pickup traffic into two lines?
I know it seems like it wouldn’t help, but I think if you had an extra staff member just there to radio the numbers back to the person at the door . . .”
Fifteen sun-soaked minutes waving cars around later, and the now-split line is rolling forward like a precision-engineered watch.
Berry and Letty race toward my car and then both pile into the back seat.
They sling their backpacks onto the floorboard and the moment their seat belts click, they are a tornado of conversation.
“Silas Reynolds ate a dead worm today,” Letty says.
“Only because you dared him to,” Berry adds.
I glance up to the rearview mirror. “Berry, how was music class today? Any easier?”
She nods once and then twice, her chin dipping into her chest.
“Mrs. Barrett said Berry didn’t have to play the triangle if she didn’t want to,” Letty tells me.
“She let me play the flute!” Berry says.
Berry hadn’t liked playing the triangle because the group she was assigned to included a girl who had made fun of her last year after the girls cut their own bangs, so I’d mentioned it to Bram and he’d spoken with the teacher.
I turn out of the parking lot and into the school zone. “Windows down?” I ask.
“Yes, please!” they both chime.
I turn up the volume and we sing along to a radio-edited Sabrina Carpenter song as we head in the direction of home.
We turn down one of my favorite roads in Mount Astra, a double-wide street with a canopy of oak and linden leaves and extra-long yards with well-kept Queen Annes and Tudors and a Craftsman or two.
Berry points out the window. “Fern!”
And sure enough, just ahead of us on the sidewalk is Fern with her overstuffed backpack riddled with pins and permanent marker doodles.
“Fern!” the twins yell as I roll to a stop beside her.
She stops and turns. For a brief second, a wary cloud hovers above her, brows pinched together and eyes narrowed, but then her expression eases into something familiar when she realizes it’s us. The same even, careful demeanor Bram carries is so present in Fern.
“Hey, Fern,” I say in my friendliest but most noncommittal voice so as not to scare off the teen.* “Where’s your car?”
She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms over her chest, assuming a position I am intimately familiar with.
“Dad is waiting on a part to come in for my car and he said I can just walk home. But it’s eight blocks.
And not eight small blocks! Plus, I wore my new Doc Martens that I got when he took me back-to-school shopping because it was the student-government interest meeting today and I was going to see— Ugh, never mind. ”
“Oh no,” I say, horrified. “Breaking in Doc Martens is a gradual process. Not an eight blocks in one day kind of situation.”
She rolls her eyes again. “Try explaining that to my dad.”
I reach across the passenger seat and open the door. “Well, you’re in luck. Get in! Your feet shall live to see another day. And I can show you a trick to break those in that involves putting them in the freezer.”
“Seriously?” she asks as she slides into the front seat and buckles her seat belt.
I nod. “My brother’s wife’s best friend—wow, that was unnecessarily complicated—swears by this method.”
“You’re so much cooler than my dad,” Fern says.
“Oh, I totally am,” I tell her, and wish Bram could hear me say so. What kind of reaction might that get from him?
(Nope. No thoughts about Bram being super sexy when I’m in a car full of his offspring.)
For a minute, I think about bringing up Nolan and his wife, Bee, just to cement my coolness with the teenage demographic of one in my passenger seat.
My brother was in a super-famous boy band and now he’s making movies on the Hope Channel!
There’s a certain kind of thrill to it, because for so long no one around me cared about something as unintellectual and tacky as a boy band—Nolan’s fame was actually kind of a liability, and my sister-in-law’s career in sex work was a super liability—and so I haven’t gotten to play the famous-sibling card in years.
On the other hand, there’s no putting the former-heartthrob toothpaste back in the tube, so maybe it’s better to stay quiet about it for now . . .
Fern pulls one knee up on her seat and begins furiously texting until we get to the house. The moment I turn off the ignition, she darts out of the car and up the stairs, letting herself in with her own key.
Meanwhile, the twins meander and rummage around the floorboard for things that had spilled out of their backpacks before they slowly make their way inside.
While they run to the living room to check on Porcupine, I dig their folders out of their backpacks to leave out on the kitchen table for Bram.
Then it’s time for after-school snacks. I pile up some cheese and crackers, and after that, I get to work on my mom’s chocolate chip banana muffin batter.
I am nowhere near as skilled at baking as my mom. But I remember finding such solace inside the little kitchen of our bungalow in our run-down neighborhood. Because if Mom was in the kitchen, she was having a good day.
It was just me and her pretty often, which meant a fair amount fell on my plate when her bipolar disorder was in a tough spot.
But honestly, the real hardship was helping her navigate Medicaid and seeing the confused frown from the pharmacy tech when a new medication wasn’t covered, or when an old medication suddenly wasn’t covered, or when a rebate program had been discontinued and everyone forgot to tell us.
Nolan, my brother, took care of us as much as he could, but life changed in a big way when he joined INK.
* And then again, when the band fell apart.
Nolan is fine now—fantastic, even. When he’s not wearing a top hat for the Hope Channel, he’s got a great gig judging Band Camp, the reboot of the show where INK came together.
He has Mom out with him in LA, and she loves the little cottage he has her set up in.
She’s constantly taking pictures of her herb garden and sending them to me.
She even has one of those bird feeders with a camera that identifies the birds for you.
She’s happy. She’s set. She wants for nothing.
But by the time my brother really got back on his feet, I was about to graduate high school.
I didn’t feel like I fell under the umbrella that his newfound financial stability afforded him.
I wasn’t a kid anymore. He did help me cover some expenses that my scholarships to Pepperdine didn’t, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling guilty about that.