Chapter 2
Chapter Two
“ M ama, he hit me!” Serafina, Charity’s two-year-old, ran up to her, grabbing her leg and crying.
She pointed at Evans, her little brother, who toddled along behind her, not really understanding.
He was eighteen months old and probably did not mean to hurt his sister.
Although, after having five children, Charity knew that it was quite possible that in fact he did mean to hurt her, as little and innocent as he looked.
“Mom! You said I could play with playdough! Where is it!” Lavinia, four years old and not very patient, ever, sat at the kitchen table waiting for her playdough.
It was a long time ago when Charity learned that if she wanted to keep the playdough out of the rug and if she wanted it to last for more than one day, she had to have control over it.
But that meant going and getting it whenever one of her children wanted to play with it, or whenever she had given permission. After all, she wasn’t one of those parents who believed that her children should get everything they wanted.
She was, however, one of those parents who believed her children should have a mother and father and be brought up in a home with both of them.
Unfortunately, Clancy hadn’t believed that at all.
Or maybe he had believed it, since he explained it to her before they even got married, promising that they would be married forever, which of course, she supposed every man did.
After all, the wedding vows said until death do you part.
She wasn’t the first woman who had been shocked when the man she married had decided that he didn’t really mean those vows.
Maybe he had meant them at the time. She could never quite figure that out.
Was he deliberately deceiving her all those years?
Had he never really thought about whether or not he wanted to spend the rest of his life with one person?
Or had he just wanted her at the time and knew that he might find someone else better later?
She couldn’t answer those questions. She had never even looked twice at another man after she made those vows and a good while before that.
Once she agreed to marry him, she committed her life to him and had zero intention of getting involved with anyone else, ever.
She still wasn’t the slightest bit interested in getting involved with anyone else, but… her reasoning had changed.
Men were jerks. All of them. She didn’t trust a single one.
She even struggled to give grace to her own sons at times, although she would never admit that to anyone.
It was one of her deepest, darkest secrets.
They reminded her of her husband, and while she loved them with her whole heart, sometimes she wasn’t sure she liked them.
Was that terrible? She thought so. It made her a terrible mother. Unfit to raise children, except…she loved them too much to let them go.
The state foster care system would be more than happy to take them off her hands. And had in fact scared her more than once by implying that they considered her unfit.
A fit mother should be able to pay bills. A fit mother should be able to keep her husband. A fit mother could find a job that would pay her enough to be able to afford daycare for her children while she worked.
“Mom! I’m waiting!” Lavinia banged her hand on the table.
Gifford and Banks, eight and five respectively, wrestled in the living room, which Charity had almost forgotten, except she heard a bang and then a crash and then crying.
No doubt Gifford, who was much bigger than Banks, had thrown him into something and broken yet another lamp.
Charity wanted to put her hands over her face and cry.
That was the last lamp in the house. They did have ceiling lights, thankfully, which the boys had not quite been able to reach, although one ceiling light had been badly damaged by a ball they’d been throwing in the house before Charity had stopped them.
But she couldn’t hardly send her children outside to play. She was unable to supervise them outside when she was inside baking for her business. She could hardly be outside watching her kids and inside baking at the same time.
Her mother assured her that thirty, even twenty years ago, it was perfectly okay to send your children outside and tell them to be back in by the time the streetlights came on.
If Charity did that, child services would have them in custody by the end of the next day. Or maybe Charity was just scaring herself, but she wasn’t going to take that chance.
Sighing deep and long in her soul, she smiled at Lavinia and said in her calmest voice, “I’ll have your playdough in just a moment, sweetheart. Let me go make sure your brother’s okay.”
“I’ve been waiting longer!” Lavinia said, all the while pounding her hands on the table.
Charity should really teach her not to pound on the table and to speak to her mother in a more respectful tone, but Banks was crying like he was truly hurt, and she probably ought to make sure that he wasn’t dying.
Although, part of the reason she hoped he wasn’t was because she couldn’t afford the funeral expense.
No, that wasn’t true. She loved her children, truly she did. Just sometimes, she didn’t like them very much.
She saw blood first. It seemed to be a mother’s instinct to zero in on that life-giving substance and another motherly instinct to try to make sure that it stayed within the bounds of her child’s body at all times.
But Banks was most definitely cut, and it looked like there was a ton of blood. Surely he hadn’t been stabbed by the glass from the lightbulb?
The lamp was in pieces on the floor, and Gifford stood back against the wall, his eyes on her, worried and guilty.
She hurried toward Banks, who struggled to get out of the broken glass.
“Hold still for a second, bud. Let me help you so you don’t cut anything else.”
“He pushed me and made me break the lamp!”
“Okay. One more broken lamp isn’t going to hurt a thing.” It wasn’t like she was going to be sitting in a chair reading to anybody anytime soon. Nowadays, the only reading she did was to her children at bedtime.
Every once in a while, she had them sit at the table and she would read while they ate. But the days of her being able to sit quietly in a chair and read to her heart’s content were long over. She didn’t see them coming back anytime soon either.
“Let me give you a hand,” she said, helping Banks and brushing the bits of glass off him. They must have taken the shade off the lightbulb while they were playing, since it was clear over on the other side of the room.
“Gifford pushed me!” Banks said as Charity felt a tug on her leg and looked down. Serafina. She had totally forgotten about her as soon as the crash in the room happened.
But she wasn’t bleeding.
“I see a gash in your head. I think that’s where all the blood is coming from.
” She spoke almost as much to herself as she did to Banks.
He wasn’t going to care. In fact, as soon as he thought that Gifford was getting his just deserts, he probably would stop crying and be excited about going to the emergency room to get stitches.
Hopefully the gash wasn’t that bad. It was a head wound, so it was going to bleed a lot.
“My arm hurts!” Banks said, almost as though he didn’t even realize that he was crying.
“All right. Let me see it,” she said as she sat down on the chair, no light, and pulled Banks close to her.
Serafina pushed against her, and she put another arm around Serafina.
Not for the first time, she wondered why God hadn’t given mothers five or six arms. One for each child.
After all, if the Lord was going to give her five children, shouldn’t she have an arm for each one of them?
Apparently not, since God had not seen fit to bestow that upon her.
She’d been trusting the Lord for her family size, since it made a whole lot of sense to her to do so, and Clancy had seemed to agree.
After all, if a person claimed to trust God but then decided that they would make the decisions about how large their family was, was that really trusting God?
Were they saying they knew more than He did?
Then of course there was also the idea that God said that children were a reward.
Wasn’t birth control basically spitting in the face of the Lord who might want to issue a reward to His children?
Wasn’t it wrong to say to God, “No thanks, Your reward isn’t my idea of a good thing”?
She shoved all those thoughts aside. It didn’t really matter how she got here. And maybe she was questioning everything she ever knew. Maybe she was wrong about it all. Maybe the world was right, and the Bible was wrong, and she had just been deluded. That’s the way it looked to her anyway.
“Where does your arm hurt, honey?” she said to Banks as she pulled Serafina onto her lap, who promptly stuffed her thumb in her mouth and laid her head on Charity’s chest. Of all of her children, Serafina was the most cuddly, and she would love nothing better than to spend her entire day sitting on Charity’s lap, snuggled up, sucking her thumb, listening to stories, or nothing at all.
Charity wished she had more time to spend holding Serafina. She knew these moments wouldn’t last long, but her life seemed to be such a dumpster fire that she was constantly running from one thing to another and didn’t have time to snuggle the way she’d like to.
“The whole thing hurts. Everywhere,” Banks said, and Charity wasn’t sure whether he was being deliberately unhelpful, or maybe his arm didn’t hurt anymore at all.
“Gifford, go get me a paper towel so we can stop this bleeding.” She should have asked Gifford to do that long before now. As a mom, she learned to prioritize things. Blood and broken bones were at the top of the list, and they were the first things to be taken care of.