Chapter Two #2
When the kids were four and six, Annie picked up a vicious stomach bug at preschool and brought it home to her brother.
They spent the next twenty-four hours alternating between vomiting into the bowls I placed in their laps and running to the bathroom like an Olympic relay team.
I was exhausted from laundry, toast making, scrubbing the orange Pedialyte that kept coming right back up out of the carpet, and the fear that my kids would die of dehydration while I took some precious time alone and sat on the toilet with my head resting on the sink, promising myself I’d only stay in there for another few seconds and then I’d slice up more bananas and try to sweet-talk Cam and Annie into sipping some ginger tea by dumping three tablespoons of sugar into their mugs.
By the time Auntie Lily came for a cheer-up visit, they were wrapped in fresh bedding on the couch, the color back to their
cheeks, although their eyes were glassy from the twelfth hour of the Disney Channel. Lily brought Annie a new Polly Pocket
Happenin’ Pet Pals set and Cameron a Return of the Jedi Boba Fett action figure and sat far enough away not to catch any cooties but close enough to rile them both up after I had
a moment to sit at the kitchen table with the cup of coffee I’d made that morning and reheated in the microwave six times.
“Such angels,” Lily had said.
“At the moment,” I answered, but my smile belied my sarcasm. They were wonderful—vomit and all.
She lifted her chin and spoke with the determination of a twenty-one-year-old who had no apprehensions about her future. “This
is what I want, Big. I want what you have. All of this.”
She was thirty-five when she finally met a man who could hold her attention. By the time she convinced him that he really
did want children, it wasn’t as easy as her twentysomething self had imagined.
Every month, every year that went by without results weighed on her. I’m sure it weighed on her marriage too. How could it
not? After a few years they talked about IVF, but it didn’t go anywhere. All their money was tied up in the store. When Tim
suggested they use a line of credit, Eric insisted it had been maxed out, and we all believed him. I’m not saying Eric lied
about their finances, but tonight’s news sheds an interesting light on my brother-in-law’s motivations.
My sister would make a great mother. Her joie de vivre is infectious.
My kids adore her. A baby of her own might have grounded her.
It could have been the string on a bright and colorful helium balloon that can’t help itself for wanting to bounce and fly off in the wind.
Now Eric’s screwed that all up. She’ll never forgive him. Nor will I.
I wake up with a headache and go down to the kitchen, where I can tell right away Lily and my mother are about to make it
worse.
“Mom, I didn’t start anything. Why do you always think it was me?” my sister yells from the couch, the sheet and comforter
still twisted around her, at my mother, who is trying to put a K-Cup into the Keurig upside down. Again.
“You’re the one on the couch. Aren’t you?” asks my mother. She tries again to shove the pod into the coffee maker, and when
it doesn’t fit, she throws it into the garbage, takes another one, and starts the upside-down process all over again.
“Mom,” I say, stepping into the fray. “Give that to me.” I grab the plastic pod and click it in right way up. I don’t need
her throwing out perfectly fine, unused K-Cups and making me feel even worse about my lack of sustainability and the size
of my carbon footprint. I make a mental note to add reusable Keurig filters to my list.
“Why is your sister sleeping on your couch?”
“I’m sure she already told you,” I say.
“I don’t like her answer. I want to hear yours.”
Ruth Ackerman is ninety-seven pounds of pure bulldog. When she latches onto something, she’s not going to let it go.
“I—I—I . . .” I don’t know what our cover story is. With a lifetime of experience being Lily’s spin doctor, I should have
insisted we not go to bed last night without our cover story.
Lily throws back the bedding and stomps into the kitchen.
She walks up to the coffeepot, takes the mug my mother was preparing for herself, and sloshes milk into it.
My mother rolls her eyes. My sister flips her hair.
Tiger, who has appeared out of nowhere, jumps on the counter and laps at the spilled drops of milk. My head, as predicted, throbs.
“Good morning, all!”
Tim strolls into the kitchen, still in his pajamas and slippers, beaming in the way a guy who still can’t believe he doesn’t
have to go work this morning, after thirty years of having done otherwise, beams. He reaches over my mother and takes another
mug out of the cabinet.
“I didn’t come here to get the third degree,” my sister growls at my mother.
“Then why did you come here?”
Tim’s brows rise as he finally reads the room. I make the face, the one he knows well after years of finding himself, through
no fault of his own, in between my mother and Lily and me on more than one occasion. I’m sorry, the face says. Save yourself. He twists his mouth into a weary half smile and shakes his head.
“And so early in the morning too.” He sighs.
“I’m late! I’m late!” Annie thunders down the stairs, also still in pajamas, and throws herself into the mix. “Mom, where’s
my scrub top with the kittens on it? Did you wash it?”
Of course I washed it. I wash everything. “Folded in a basket on top of the dryer.”
Annie dashes into the laundry room behind the kitchen and comes back with a pile of her clean and folded clothes. “Dad, can
you move? I need to make my smoothie and I’m late!”
Tim takes his still-empty mug and, holding up one hand in submission, steps away from the counter where the blender sits next
to the coffee maker.
“Why did you oversleep?” my mother asks, turning away from my sister to her next victim, my daughter. “You should have set
your alarm.”
“I did, Grandma,” Annie says as she tears a banana from the bunch and breaks it into chunks. She then pulls a bag of frozen strawberries out of the freezer and opens a cabinet and busies herself searching for her chia seeds.
Lily comes to Annie’s rescue. “Mom, she’s an adult. She doesn’t need you to—”
Annie turns on the blender, and my mother shouts something over the grinding that none of us can hear. Probably just as well.
Tim lets himself out the back door with his empty mug and walks down the driveway where the newspaper is waiting. If he’s
smart, he’ll take his time.
“—rich coming from you” is all we can hear of Lily’s retort to my mother.
“What the hell?” Cam leans against the doorjamb, his handsome face creased by sheet marks, his hair both flattened and sticking
straight out at the same time. “I don’t have to be at work till noon. Can’t you all ever chill?”
I take a deep breath and let it out to a count of four like they suggest on the mediation app I downloaded but only had the
patience to try once. I’d like to say this chaos is an anomaly, but it’s not. Even without Lily here, mornings in the Ackerman-Petty
household, ever since the kids moved back in and Mom arrived, filling our empty nest with an odd array of mismatched eggs,
often start out like a barn fire.
“I’m taking the car, and I’m leaving in five,” Annie says to Cameron. “So, you’d better figure out how you’re getting to work.”
“No, Annie,” I break in before they can start fighting over the fact that they share a car. “You need to drop Grandma at water
aerobics in half an hour.”
“Sorry, Mom. I can’t. We’re spaying five cats today. Dr. Kozak wants all the techs in early. Tell Cam to do it.”
“I don’t have a car. Duh,” my son says.
I check my list. Number One: Peloton ~20 min. I glance down at the workout clothes that have suddenly become nothing more than athleisure wear. “Fine,” I say.
“Oh, and you’re going to have to give me a ride home,” says Lily.
“And since you’ll be out anyway, can you pick up some more bananas?” asks Annie.
“And don’t forget my prescription at CVS,” chimes in my mother. Lily flinches at the mention of the pharmacy’s name.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four.
Finally, like a crashing wave, they all recede. Annie takes her smoothie and goes upstairs to dress. Mom returns to her pod
in the backyard to pack up her swimsuit and goggles. Cameron goes back to bed—he’s got hours before his shift. Tim, the smartest
guy in the family, is still outside on the driveway. Lily and I are alone. It’s quiet enough that I can hear a jay whistling
outside. The garbage truck rumbles down the street. The Graingers’ old deaf dog barks at something it remembers hearing in
the past. I rinse the glass jar of the blender in the sink and wipe up the milk Tiger missed. My sister leans against the
counter, her arms crossed, watching me.
“I figured out what I’m going to do,” she says.
I wipe my hands on a dish towel. “Oh?”
“Yeah. I’m getting the hell out of here. I’m going to go as far away as I can. And I want you to come with me, Big. Please,
I need you. Say you’ll come with me.”