Chapter 2 #2
Luna was already in the kitchen, picking at a bowl of dry Corn Pops, staring at her phone.
Alice could smell the dirty dinner dishes from the night before, the frozen butter chicken she had heated up in the oven and managed to dry out.
When she peered in the sink, a cloud of fruit flies rose into the air and she wondered if the maggots were in the drain or the compost bin.
When had she last emptied the compost bin?
She swatted at the flies before turning around.
Easier to forget if she just never looked.
Easier to forget if she was just drunk. Alice patted Luna’s hair, but she twisted her head away, never taking her eyes off her phone. “Mom, stop.”
“Did you put on full makeup already? It’s seven in the morning.”
Luna sighed heavily and flicked her eyes up to her mother’s face.
“I couldn’t sleep and had to pass the time.
Whatever. Who cares?” Her eyeshadow was a blend of yellow, green, and blue, like the stages of a healing bruise, like someone had smeared a wound over her lids.
Alice searched her daughter’s dark brown eyes for any sign of hurt.
Lines of red snaked through the whites. She could see Luna had used an ivory pencil in her waterline to try to hide how tired she looked.
“Did you have a nightmare? Again?”
Luna turned her head away, and her cheekbones glittered with drugstore highlighter. “I guess. It’s no big deal. It’s not like I’m not used to it.”
Since Luna was four years old, she had had regular night terrors, waking up screaming indistinct words and, once, running in circles in her bedroom, still fast asleep.
She claimed to never remember what haunted her in the night, but Alice sometimes wondered if she did know and just didn’t want to give daytime shape to those dream monsters, those dream fears.
Better, perhaps, to leave them unlit and indistinct.
“You can have a nap after school.” Alice touched her daughter’s cheek. “You look nice. I like it.”
“It’s not supposed to look nice . It’s supposed to look like despair .”
Alice dumped yesterday’s coffee grounds into the sink and took a breath before answering. “You do whatever makes you feel good, honey. But I think it looks pretty.”
Luna snorted, which was as close to laughter as she got these days. “That’s such a mom thing to say.” She stood up, leaving her half-full bowl on the table. “Maybe I have some foundation powder that can save this look.”
Alice could see her daughter hesitating in the doorway to the hall, examining her own reflection in the window, her replicated self wavering and transparent, a floating body emerging from the branches of the sour cherry tree in the backyard.
The reflected Luna was sad, almost adult, an insubstantial vision of the future.
Alice knew that all girls inevitably become sad one day, when their boyfriends cheat on them, when a husband ignores them, when the promotion is conferred on the white man named Brad or Mike or Pete.
When they decide they will never be pretty enough or virginal enough or thin enough for the ideal they had been chasing.
But before Alice could say anything to her, Luna turned around and stepped back into the kitchen.
“Mom, did you remember to pay for the class trip? Yesterday was the deadline. They have to book the tickets right away.”
The trip. The celebratory year-end trip Luna’s school had planned for the grade nine drama students to London, where they would attend one West End show and one Shakespearean play.
The trip Luna had been reminding her about every day for the last two weeks.
The trip that cost eight hundred dollars Alice didn’t have to cover the shortfall from the lacklustre fundraising. Shit.
“I was waiting for one of my retailers to pay for a big order and then I just forgot. It’ll be okay, honey, I can call the school this morning and get it all sorted. Don’t worry, I’m sure they haven’t booked the entire trip already.”
Luna’s hands were in tight fists at her sides. “Mom, I literally reminded you yesterday at breakfast. I’ve been reminding you every single day . How did you just forget ?”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I have a lot on my mind, and I can’t keep it all straight sometimes. I’m trying, honey. I’m so sorry.” Alice turned and looked for her phone on the counter. “I can even call right now and see if the school office is open. They have early morning classes, right?”
But when she turned back, Luca was walking in and Luna was gone, the bathroom door slamming down the hall.
Alice dropped two frozen waffles into the toaster.
She stared at the aging fruit in the crisper drawer, at the brown puddle that had collected in the bottom.
Luca wouldn’t eat anything with even a whisper of rot—not a wrinkle, not a brown spot.
The fridge fan rattled and Alice knew that nothing was cold enough inside, but there had to be something that wouldn’t poison her children.
She inspected an apple and decided she could slice around a soft bruise on its side.
The coffee, still dripping. She could still fix this, still fix her daughter’s year at school, still hold on to Luna a little bit longer.
She just needed some coffee first. God, did she ever hate mornings.
While Luca was quietly eating, his eyes glued to the comic book on the table in front of him, Alice walked out onto the back deck with her terry cloth robe cinched tight around her waist. She stared at the buds on the cherry tree, so tight, so round.
They would bloom in days if the weather stayed warm.
Next week was spring break, two whole weeks during which both children would be at home, probably bickering, asking her questions, requesting outlandishly complicated lunches while she tried to work, her hands cracking and dry from breaking down boxes and sorting through piles of cloth diapers. “Why did I start this business again?”
Nine years ago, Alice had left her job as a fundraiser for the United Way to begin her own business, an online cloth diaper shop, which seemed like something she could do while at home with Luna and Luca.
She had used cloth diapers for both of them, she had a basement to store product, she had even learned how to set up online payments when she redesigned the charity’s donation system.
She researched and wrote step-by-step instructions for how to use, clean, and store the diapers.
Some styles, she knew, would be great for chubby babies, but not leaner ones, and some would be better for the nights when parents were sleep training, and some would work well for going out.
She created a quiz, so parents could answer questions about their babies and their lives, and in the end the site suggested a line of recommended products.
She started an Instagram profile, a Facebook account, sent messages to every mom organization she could think of, posted artfully directed photos of her products, sprinkled with ones of her own children.
A long-time friend, now a producer for the local daytime talk show, slotted her in for a morning segment on eco-parenting.
Alice was great, so pretty in her wrap dress and vegan booties, like every other Asian mom in Vancouver but slightly more organized, slightly more polished, aspirational but still achievable.
In her basement, she tore out the long counters her father had used for his darkroom and installed rows of metal shelving.
She organized everything by type: bamboo diapers, hemp diapers, cotton terry diapers, wool covers, nylon covers, all-in-one diapers, swim diapers, training pants.
The day before her shop went live, she straightened the already neat piles, pressed down on the labels she had printed out and stuck on the shelves while the children slept and Grant was working late. It was immaculate.
Her site crashed the first day, with orders piling up in her inbox.
The messages were overwhelming, with new mothers sending her stories of how relieved they were to find her shop, to know that someone else had done the research so they didn’t have to.
By the end of the week, her shelves were empty and every single diaper was backordered.
She sat on the cold concrete floor and cried, in relief but also anxiety.
This business was supposed to fit into her schedule, those pockets of time between preschool and music class, field trips and meal prep, naps and laundry.
All of a sudden, the schedule had to fit around her business.