Chapter 3
“Meow.”
I kept my eyes shut.
“Meow.”
I rolled onto my side. I pulled the comforter over my ear. I made a deal with myself, which was that if I just held very still and didn’t acknowledge anything, it would resolve itself, and the world would let me have five more minutes.
A paw landed on my forehead.
“Pickles. Pickles, baby, please. Five minutes. Five. I’ll give you anything.”
A wet nose was on my temple, very close to my eyelid.
“You’re a tyrant—a fascist. I’ll be writing a letter.”
He purred.
I cracked one eye open. He was an inch from my face, blue eyes patient and unmoving. He nuzzled my cheek once, he claimed his tax, and he jumped off the bed.
I rolled onto my back. The digital clock on my nightstand said 6:29 a.m.
My alarm would’ve gone off in a minute.
I turned it off so it wouldn’t wake Bonnie. I sat up, and Pickles was already at the bedroom door looking back at me with the patience of a king who has called for his horse and expects it immediately.
I followed him.
The kitchen was the part of the apartment I liked best, because it was tiny.
I didn’t have to walk far to get coffee.
I poured Pickles’s kibble into his bowl.
I checked the litter box and dragged the scoop through it without looking.
There’s a level of acceptance you reach about your life, and pulling cat shit out of sand while half-conscious is somewhere on the path to enlightenment.
I started the coffee. I leaned on the counter and waited for it.
Pickles wound around my ankles. Then he abandoned me for his bowl, because that’s what he does. Love is conditional in this house, and the condition is kibble.
The fridge was covered in things, but the calendar mattered most. A date two weeks out was circled in ink—pediatric cardiology follow-up, Dr. Reyes.
I’d been the one to mark it. Then I went over it again in marker.
Then again in red. The appointment kept shifting—pushed once, rescheduled twice, changed to a different specialist, then moved back again—and by now the circle wasn’t really a circle anymore, just a red bruise on the paper from three months of worrying at.
Next to the calendar was a piece of construction paper.
Bonnie drew it in second grade. She'd written MY FAMILY across the top in green marker.
Underneath, from left to right, were me with curly hair and a coffee cup, Bonnie with a ponytail, Mrs. Park with what looked like a feather boa but was probably her good scarf, and Pickles, drawn at twice the size of any human in the picture.
There was no father in it.
I'd waited, the year she drew it, for the question.
I'd practiced the answer. I'd practiced an age-appropriate version of your father was a coward who got on a plane when he found out about you—practiced it in the bathroom mirror with the door closed, like a closing argument I'd never get to deliver. But Bonnie hadn't asked.
She still hadn't asked.
She was too smart not to have noticed. She knew the shape of every other family in her class—Mira’s two dads, Owen’s stepdad and mom, Jamie’s mom and grandmother. She saw everything. She had opinions about everyone else’s life. Just not her own.
She wasn’t okay with it. I knew she wasn’t okay with it. I knew the longer I let her not ask, the worse it was going to be when she finally did. I knew, in a sober, conscious, well-articulated way, that I needed to sit her down and say something true to her about her father.
And every time I came close to doing it, I poured a glass of wine instead.
I'm a good mother. I'd had to fight for the title, and I'd earned it. But I was a coward in this one specific direction, and I hadn't beaten it yet.
The coffee finished. I poured a cup and took it black. I stood at the counter and drank half of it before I let myself think about Mr. Cross. The moment I did, nothing else stayed in place.
The thud.
The shoe.
Backs forming a wall around something I couldn't see. The waiter sprinting past the bar with a glass of water. The woman in cream with both hands at her mouth. Cross going through the ring of backs without looking up at me once.
I'd left the auction in the chaos. The catering captain had told us to pack down and go home. I'd taken a cab back. I'd let myself in and kissed the top of Bonnie's sleeping head and lain awake for an hour with the streetlight through the blinds making lines on the ceiling.
His dad. It had to be. The older man with the silver-blonde wife. The man Cross had run for.
I hoped he was okay. I really did. Losing a parent is no small thing, and I'd know, because I lost both of mine the same night.
There was a whole sea of extended family at the funeral, and not one of them put their hand up for the nineteen-year-old.
They each had a reason. The reasons were all very reasonable. I hadn't talked to any of them since.
After that, I’d decided I could carry myself, alone, indefinitely, as long as I was willing to keep my weight low to the ground. I made it work for almost a year. I had a job, a studio, and two friends who loved me and one I was beginning to love back.
And then I got tired.
That was when the deadbeat asshole appeared. His timing was so good; it should've been a tell—like he'd had a notification on his phone, telling him, Sabrina Vela's load-bearing wall has hairline fractures. He was charming, beautiful, and handsome enough to be a warning. But I failed the test.
I drank the rest of the coffee and pulled out the bowl and the eggs and the milk.
A stranger's wish for a stranger's father—short, real, gone before I'd cracked the first egg.
I was a mother of an eight-year-old with a golden heart, a cat on a counter who shouldn't be on there, and I had a pancake to make.
"Pickles. Off."
He looked at me.
"Off."
He looked at me longer.
"Pickles."
He jumped down with the slow indignity of a man who was already leaving.
Blueberry pancakes. Bonnie's favorite. I made a stack of three and arranged the blueberries on top of the top pancake into a smiley face—two for eyes, an arc for the mouth, one in the middle for what was either a nose or, on a generous day, a soul—and I'd just set the plate on the table when I heard her door open.
Tiny feet. The tiny feet stopped halfway down the hall and went into reverse—Pickles had heard them too, and he was on his way. I heard the soft thump of him jumping off something, the slap of feet returning, the murmur of Bonnie greeting him in the language she only used on the cat.
She came around the corner with him in her arms.
She was rubbing one eye with the back of her hand. Her ponytail was sideways. Pickles was tucked against her chest with his head on her collarbone. He gave me a glance that said, "This is who I really love, not you."
I rolled my eyes at him.
At that time, I wanted a dog, and Bonnie wanted a cat. I can't believe I lost an argument to a six-year-old, I'd said this to Mrs. Park, on the phone, holding the cat carrier.
People say Bonnie is the little version of me. They couldn't be more right. Arguing with her is arguing with myself, and I've never won an argument with myself in my life.
“Good morning, baby. How’d you sleep?”
“Good.” She yawned. “Mommy.”
“Yeah?”
“I had a dream.”
“What kind of dream?”
She climbed onto her chair. Pickles placed himself in her lap like a king. She took her fork and pointed it at me.
“I dreamed you got me a new phone.”
“Mmm…”
“With the bigger screen.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And the better camera.”
“Eat your pancakes, baby.”
“My screen is so small, though, Mom. It’s like an ant-size. I have an ant phone.”
“You’re not an ant.”
“So why do I have an ant phone?”
“Because you’re eight.”
“That’s a straw man.”
“Eat your pancakes.”
“Mom. Mom, that’s literally a straw man, you can’t just — ”
“Pancakes.”
She poked her fork through the smiley face’s left eye and ate it.
Then the second eye, which felt wrong, and then the mouth.I poured myself a half cup more of coffee and let her eat in peace, telling myself I’d get her a new phone when she was twelve.
Then when she was twenty. Then the day after her father sent me even a single dollar of child support.
The third one made me snort into the cup.
She looked up. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing, baby.”
“You laughed.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Eat the pancake.”
She ate the pancake.
When the plate was clean we did the meds.
She counted the pills out of the plastic organizer herself.
I’d taught her this when she was six, and she was better at it now than I was.
She lined them up on the counter, two pink, one white, one yellow oval.
She named each one as she picked it up because that was the deal.
Beta blocker. Diuretic. Aspirin baby. The yellow one I hate.
I handed her the apple juice in the small purple glass that was the only glass she'd take medication out of.
“It tastes bad.” She made a face.
“I know.”
“Like a battery.”
“I know.”
“Why does it taste like a battery?”
“Because it’s doing something more important than tasting good.”
She glared at me and drank the juice. Then handed the empty glass back without breaking eye contact, which is a thing she does when she wants me to know she has been wronged, and went to take her bath while I packed the school bag.
Lunch was a turkey sandwich cut into the shape of a square because she'd informed me at six that she was anti-triangle, and I'd never recovered the right to cut a sandwich diagonally.
Apple slices. The juice box she liked. The two granola bars she'd eat one of and trade the other one for someone else's chips.
The backup inhaler in the side pocket. The main inhaler I'd put in her hand at the door.