Chapter Twenty-One
I told them Wednesday night at the kitchen table with the bad leg.
Roz had walked me through it on the phone in the courthouse parking lot, in a voice like somebody reading assembly instructions.
Tell them Wednesday, not Thursday and not in the car on the way.
Tell them the schedule and nothing else.
Do not tell them you’re sorry, do not tell them it’s temporary, do not tell them you fought it, and do not under any circumstances tell them what you think about their father.
If the boy asks you a direct question, answer the question he actually asked and stop.
And Mrs. Kessler. Pack their bags the way you would for their grandmother’s. Nothing extra. That bag is going to get looked at.
So I said: “On Friday you’re going to your dad’s for the weekend. He’ll pick you up at six and bring you back Sunday at six. Then two weekends from now you’ll go again. And on Wednesdays you’ll have dinner with him, four until eight.”
Ruby said, “Both of us?”
“Both of you. Always both of you.”
“Okay.” She went back to the marker. “Can I bring Bun?”
“Yes.”
Jonah put his fork down.
“How long is it.”
“Forty-eight hours.”
“Okay.” He did something in his head. “Two nights.”
“Two nights.”
Then he asked me the one I’d been sitting on all afternoon.
“Do we have to?”
And I had to say yes.
That is the worst sentence I have ever said to my son and I have said a number of them.
Not because it was cruel. Because it was true, and because I’d spent three years being the person in that house who decided things, and I had to sit there at a table with a bad leg and tell a nine-year-old that on this one I didn’t get a vote.
“Yes,” I said. “You have to.”
He nodded once and picked his fork back up.
He didn’t ask why, and he didn’t argue, and he didn’t cry, and I would have given a year off my life for any one of those three.
I packed on Thursday.
Two changes each, pajamas, the toothbrushes I had by then bought four of, Ruby’s rabbit, Jonah’s inhaler that he uses maybe twice a winter, the fluoride rinse, socks. Nothing that would look like a message. Nothing that would look like a mother making a point.
Jonah packed his own on top of what I’d done, and I stood in the doorway and watched him do it, and he put in the plastic frame from the county.
“You don’t have to take that.”
“I know,” he said.
He took it.
At six o’clock on Friday the truck pulled into the gravel lot behind the duplex and I watched it come in from the kitchen window over the sink.
He was on time. That man has never been late for anything in his life that he wanted.
He got out and came up the outside stairs and stopped two steps down from the landing, which put his head lower than mine, and I understood immediately that he’d worked that out.
He was in a quarter-zip and jeans. Weekend clothes. Clean-shaven at six on a Friday.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
“They ready?”
“They’re ready.”
He looked past me into the kitchen. Not obviously. One pass, the way Sandoval had done it, except that Sandoval had been doing her job.
“You get the stove working?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
And that was it. That was the whole thing. No temperature in it anywhere. If you’d been standing in that lot you would have seen a divorced couple being civil on a staircase, and you would have thought, well, at least they’re handling it well.
Ruby went first, down the stairs sideways the way she does, holding the rail with both hands, with the rabbit under one arm.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hey, Ruby-Roo.”
He had not called her that in eleven months. I know because I could not have told you the last time I’d heard it and I would have noticed.
She got in the back and he buckled her.
Jonah came out with his bag on both shoulders and went down the stairs and around to the passenger side and got in and shut the door, and he did not look up at the landing.
He did not look up at the landing on purpose. He’d decided somewhere between the kitchen and the truck that he was not going to look at me, because if he looked at me one of us was going to do something.
The truck backed out and turned onto Bardwell and I stood on that landing in the cold in my socks until I couldn’t hear it.
Then I went inside and shut the door.
The exchange took four minutes. I logged it in the notebook Roz had told me to keep, the way she told me to: date, time out, time in, condition of the children, anything said. No adjectives. Nov 15, 6:00 p.m., father arrived on time, children left willingly, no incident.
That’s the whole entry. It looks like nothing. It looked like nothing to me too, until I understood, months later, that a stack of entries that look like nothing is the most persuasive document a woman in my position can produce, precisely because there’s nothing in it.
Forty-eight hours is a long time.
I have been alone before. I was alone in that house on Larkspur Court for most of eleven years, some of it with two children in it. This was a different thing and I was not ready for it.
The apartment made noises I had never heard it make because I had never been in it without them. Dorsey’s furnace. The maple against the gutter. Somebody’s car door in the lot at ten forty.
I cleaned a kitchen that was already clean. I did four hours of continuing education modules on infant feeding and swallowing and got to eighteen of twenty. I ate standing up twice.
Around three on Saturday I caught myself listening for them. Not thinking about them. Listening, the way you do when a kid is in the next room and quiet, that low-level tracking that runs in the back of a mother all day every day whether she asks it to or not.
There was nothing to track. It kept running anyway. It ran for two days with nothing to do, like a motor with the belt off.
At some point on Saturday afternoon I opened the door to their room and looked at two made beds and shut it again, and then about an hour later I did it a second time, and I am not going to pretend the second time was for any reason.
Priya called Saturday night.
“Are you sitting in the dark?”
“No.”
“Nora.”
“There’s a lamp on.”
“One lamp is the dark.” I could hear a television and a kid arguing behind her. “Okay. Sunday, my house, two o’clock. My mother-in-law’s here and she cooks for eleven people and there are four of us and I need you to help me with this problem.”
“They come back at six.”
“Then you’ll leave at five thirty. Two o’clock. I’m hanging up so you can’t say no.”
I went. She made me carry a dish. Her mother-in-law asked me nothing about myself for two solid hours and told me a very long story about a wedding in 1994.
It was the best afternoon I’d had since October.
The truck came back at 6:04 on Sunday.
Ruby came up the stairs first with a plastic bag from a store at the mall in it and a stuffed unicorn about the size of a spaniel.
Jonah came up after with his bag on both shoulders.
He walked past me into the apartment, put the bag down against the wall by the back door with the straps out, and went into the bathroom and shut the door and ran the water.
He was in there eleven minutes.
I did not ask them anything. Roz had said not to and Tate had said not to and I would not have anyway.
They ate. Ruby talked for forty straight minutes about a movie and a pool at a hotel, which I filed away without reacting, because we do not have a hotel with a pool in this county and neither does he.
Jonah said eleven words all evening and nine of them were about a math packet.
At eight thirty I got Ruby into the bottom bunk and sat on the edge of it, and she was already going, with the unicorn on the floor and the rabbit under her chin the way it always is.
“Mom,” she said, mostly asleep.
“Mm.”
“Daddy’s friend has a baby in her tummy.”
I did not move.
“She let me feel it,” Ruby said. “It’s hard. It doesn’t feel like a baby, it feels like a knee.”
And then she was out.
I sat on the edge of my daughter’s bed in the dark for a while.
Above me, in the top bunk, my son was lying completely still, facing the wall, and I knew for a fact that he was awake, and I knew for a fact that he had heard her say it, and I knew for a fact that he had not been going to tell me.