8. Oakley
Oakley
Coming home to her house in Waimea, Oakey always felt a sense of pride and pleasure in the life that she had created there. She loved her white picket fence and her carefully curated living space. It was a picture-perfect life.
Coming home to her rental in Pualena, Oakley felt… not that.
The house was old enough to look run down but new enough to have absolutely zero charm. It was a long beige rectangle with chipped paint and a mangy-looking tin roof. Walking up to that house, Oakley always felt a vague sense of failure.
It was nice enough inside, a reasonably spacious two-bedroom home. Rentals in Pualena were so sparse that she had snapped this one up, so desperate was she to leave her house when Trent filed for divorce.
The place wasn’t in great shape. The roof leaked, and the owner kept promising to fix it. Worse than that, mold was a real problem. The house had a pervasive musty smell that worried her.
She did everything she could to keep a breeze moving through and hoped that whatever spores were in the air wouldn’t have any deleterious effects on their health.
Even if the air was harmless, the overall feeling was cramped and oppressive.
But it was close to family – and it had been the only viable option available in the area when she moved out of the house that she had shared with Trent.
Oakley had a nest egg now that the divorce was finally over and done with, but she still felt anxious. She wanted to invest that money and watch it grow.
Instead she was watching it waste away, month after month, siphoned out of her account by her overpriced rent and her ever-hungry gas tank.
Even food was expensive.
One easy privilege throughout her life with Trent was that they had never hesitated to spend money on the best groceries that they could find; health was paramount, after all.
But these days, with her spending far outstripping the money that was coming in, she had started actually paying attention to the price of groceries.
The two bags they had picked up in town that day cost nearly two hundred dollars.
The way that things were going, she didn’t know how she would ever get ahead. She wasn’t even sure how she would be able to break even. She didn’t know how to bring her monthly income up to compensate for what was rushing out of her bank account each month.
As Oakley carried their groceries into the kitchen, she wondered if the cost of gas spent driving to Costco would be more or less than what she might save on groceries. She could give the girls a Kona beach day to make the drive worth it.
“Pull your workbooks out,” she told them as she put the milk and cheese in the fridge.
Her command was met with a double groan.
“You haven’t gotten any schoolwork done today. You each need to do at least two pages of math, and then we can start today’s science lesson.”
“But we just got home,” Harper whined.
Oakley chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment and then relented.
“You can start with reading.”
“Sweet!” Harper grabbed her current read off of the kitchen counter and threw herself onto the living room sofa.
A puff of musty air went up when she landed, and Oakley looked at the old heap of fabric with distaste. It came with the house, which had felt like a boon at the time, but now she wondered if it wasn’t the primary feature of the home responsible for that pervasive smell.
She made a mental note to find them a new one – but the prospect of looking over other moldy old sofas or paying through the nose for a new one made her wince.
Hayden sat at the table reading the latest book in a long series about dragons. Her girls were both avid readers, so at least that one aspect of their homeschool studies was never a fight. Between the library and Paradise Books, they never lacked reading material.
Oakley cut up some cheese and apples for a snack; she had learned from experience that their math workbooks were best tackled on full stomachs.
When she opened the cupboards to pull out a couple of plates, a faint green haze caught her eyes. She swiped one of her fingers across the back wall of the cupboard. It left a trail of white behind it and came away olive green.
“Ugh!” Hayden came up beside her and scrunched her face in disgust. “What is that?”
“Mold,” Oakley said shortly.
“The same mold that ate your shoes?” Harper shouted from the living room.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Oakley looked at Hayden. “Grab that cutting board and move it to the table, would you? You two can have a snack while I clean.”
The girls read and munched on apples while Oakley set about taking every single thing out of the cupboards – luckily she had only acquired a few basics thus far – and piled them in the sink.
Then she wiped away the mold and cleaned the inside of each cupboard thoroughly with a lemon-vinegar spray that she hoped would help deter the growth of any new mold for a while.
The sharp smell filled the air and stung her nose.
She redirected the girls to their math workbooks, and they complied with a minimum of griping and groaning. By the time she had washed and dried all of their cups and plates and bowls and put them back in the cupboards, the girls were done with math for the day.
“Ready to start on science?” she asked brightly.
Hayden rolled her eyes.
“Do we have to?” Harper asked.
“You like science,” Oakley reminded her.
“Sure, sometimes. But it’s a gorgeous day outside!”
Oakley smiled, charmed by her younger daughter’s word choice, but she wouldn’t be so easily swayed.
“We live in Hawaii,” she responded. “It’s always a gorgeous day.”
“Not lately,” Harper whined. “It’s always wet and rainy. But the sky is blue today, look!” She pointed to the small patch of sky that they could see through the kitchen window.
“You still have to learn things.”
“Can’t we learn outside?” she pleaded.
“Don’t bother,” Hayden muttered, picking at the flaking paint of the kitchen table that had also come with the house. “It won’t work. We just have to sit here and learn about–” She paused and peeked at Oakley’s lesson plan for the day. “Mitochondria.” She rolled her eyes again. “Really?”
“What’s mitochondria?” Harper asked.
“The powerhouse of the cell,” Hayden droned. She turned to Oakley. “We did this last year in school. Can I skip it?”
“I don’t want to do science alone!” Harper exclaimed.
Oakley leaned back in her chair and took a moment to soothe her frustration before responding. She picked up the last piece of apple and munched on it thoughtfully.
Apparently the girls took her silence as a refusal, because they pulled the science printouts across the table and looked them over with morose, resigned expressions.
Homeschooling wasn’t turning out to be as much fun as she had hoped. Bundled together as it had been with the massive upheaval of divorce and a move to Pualena, the girls hadn’t responded to the prospect of leaving school with the excitement and joy that she had once envisioned.
She had even kept them at their old private school for a while, trying to ease the transition, but leaving Pualena before dawn to make it up to Waimea in time had been exhausting for all of them. Nothing about it was sustainable.
Oakley felt like she had failed her daughters somehow, by locking them into a rental near her family instead of giving them the stability of finding something in the same town.
But at the time, that degree of proximity to Trent and Jennifer had felt unbearable.
And she had so badly wanted to homeschool the girls and spend more time with her family, even before Trent brought the axe down on their marriage.
And so she soldiered on and made the best of it.
It gave her more time with her daughters – and since Trent had claimed their weekends, she would hardly see them otherwise – but being their teacher in addition to being their mother was creating a lot of added struggle during a time when they were all already struggling.
Several times a day, she asked herself the painful question of whether she had done the right thing, taking them out of school and moving them down to Pualena. She tried her best to convince herself that she had, but she never fully succeeded.
She didn’t think that parenting them in isolation in Waimea would have been any different. Keeping up their old schedule and stressing over homework wouldn’t have necessarily been any easier on anybody.
Homeschooling was meant to be an improvement on all that.
So why did it always feel like a fight?
Maybe Trent had been right all along. Maybe she just wasn’t cut out for this.
No.
Oakley brought her hand down on the table with a thwack.
She wasn’t going there. She wouldn’t allow him that space in her head.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” she decided. “We’ll take a beach break–”
The girls cheered and jumped up from the table.
“But,” she added, “Hayden gives Harper a lesson on mitochondria in the car. I’ll give you my half of the lesson plan and everything.”
“Cool!” Hayden brightened at the prospect of taking the lead on a lesson.
“The powerhouse of the cell!” Harper shouted, both fists in the air.
“So we’ve got a deal?” Oakley asked.
“Deal!” they shouted together.
She laughed. Suddenly, the atmosphere in the house felt a lot lighter.
“Okay. Go get your bathing suits on. I’ll pack a lunch.”
This was what they needed, Oakley reflected as she sliced veggies for their lunch. Freedom and flexibility and sunshine. Time together as a family. That was what this was for, all of the early hurdles and growing pains.
Whatever her girls needed, whatever was truly best for them, they could all figure it out together. The three of them, as a team.
As she drove along the highway, listening to her daughters talk about organelles and aerobic respiration, she knew that she had made the right decision.
Whatever obstacles they faced along the way, whatever turns they might decide to take down the road, she knew that they were on the right path.
They were together, they were happy, and they were well.
And that was all that really mattered.