Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
“Benjamin!” June called over her shoulder to her son, who she could hear giggling about something deeper in the house. “It’s almost time for school!”
“Coming, Mommy!”
“Well, that didn’t sound convincing,” June muttered to herself as she put everything into her son’s backpack.
The summer school program that was offered by Magnolia Shore school district had, thankfully, started that Monday morning.
While June loved the extra time with her son that came with school vacations, she couldn’t deny that not having a place for Benjamin to go all day made her life a lot harder.
Fortunately, for Benjamin’s age group, the “summer school” was really more part summer camp, part school.
If it had just been regular school, June knew she would have had a much harder time convincing Benjamin to go every morning.
It also helped that Isabelle Meadows attended, and Benjamin loved Izzy.
That said, liking where they were going didn’t always matter all that much when it came to getting little kids out of the house. They were still easily distracted enough that sometimes it felt like arranging an entire battalion.
June had been doing the single parent thing for long enough to know that you never, ever looked the other way at a spare few minutes. If Benjamin was distracted, she was going to accomplish things.
Quickly, she put his lunch box in his backpack, then flipped open her calendar to consult her schedule. June was nothing without her calendar. Basically her entire life was in this thing.
Today, she confirmed, she had a housekeeping job followed by an evening shift at the diner.
Cadence would take Benjamin home with her after summer school…
and yes, June thought, rifling back through her memories, she had remembered to sign the form that let the school release Benjamin into Cadence’s care. Thank goodness.
It was always something, she thought with a dry little chuckle.
“Hey, Mommy, have you seen my sock?”
June paused her packing. The last she’d seen Benjamin, he’d been wearing socks and shoes, so this was a definite step backward.
Indeed, when she looked at him, he had one sock and shoe on, one off.
“Oh, Ben,” she sighed. “Where’d you take it off?”
He looked at his foot like it was the most surprising thing in the universe. “I don’t know.”
“Can you go check your bedroom?”
“Okay!” he chirped, sprinting back up the stairs.
She shook her head. Sometimes it still really hit her, how much Benjamin reminded her of Keith, his father and her late husband.
Losing Keith and becoming a single parent all in one day had been… well, it had been the worst day of June’s life, without contest. And the days after had been unimaginably hard too. Honestly, some of her days were still tough, even two years out from that terrible, terrible day.
But for all the struggles of being a single mom, she wouldn’t trade her son for anything.
She wouldn’t trade the memories of Keith for anything either, even if they made her feel a little melancholy at times.
And she loved the moments when she could see her late husband in Benjamin.
They felt like a little gift, like Keith was giving her a little wave hello, even from beyond the unbridgeable divide that separated them. It was a comforting kind of thought.
She smiled about it… quickly. She didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on the past, not with her busy schedule, and especially not when she was trying to get out of the house.
“Ben? Did you find that sock?” she called.
“Ummm…”
“Hoo boy,” she murmured. She glanced at her watch. She’d let him try to figure it out for… three more minutes before she went up there.
It was optimistic thinking though. She gave it about a ninety-nine percent chance that sock was long gone. She’d find it four or five laundry days from now.
Probably.
She took a slow sip of her coffee, thinking about days gone by, when she had time for breaks that lasted longer than ten seconds at a stretch.
These days, if she wasn’t working or taking care of Benjamin, she was worrying about money or trying to squeeze in time for her friends…
or worrying that her friends felt like she was trying to “squeeze them in” when really, they meant the world to her.
And if she wasn’t doing any of those things, she was cooking, or trying to keep her house from turning into a pigsty, or doing laundry.
There was always so much laundry to do.
And then there was the time she spent trying to find new clients and figuring out the bizarre tax situation that came from having her kind of patchwork employment, or…
Shoot! Or losing track of time!
“Ben!” she called more urgently. “We need to go!”
“Okay, Mommy,” he said, his tone already letting her know that he was about to try to explain away some kind of shenanigans. “So I didn’t find my same sock, but I did find my shoe and another sock.”
She looked down. His shoes were on the wrong feet, but there were two of them. And the socks… well, one was an ankle sock that barely peeked above the top of his sneaker, while the other came more than halfway up Benjamin’s shin.
Well, they were too late to try to worry about fashion.
“Close enough,” she told him. “Swap the shoes and you’re ready to go.”
“Okay,” he said. “But what should I do if I throw up?”
June paused from where she’d turned back to zip Benjamin’s suitcase.
Benjamin asked a lot of bizarre questions, just like any other kid, but something made her think that maybe this particular question wasn’t purely hypothetical.
“Do you think you might throw up?” she asked him. “I mean, like, today?”
He nodded. “Yeah, my belly has that yucky feeling, and then I thought I was going to throw up, so I went to the bathroom, because you said I should try to throw up in the bathroom and not on the rug, but then I didn’t throw up. Oh, wait!” He perked up. “That’s where my sock is.”
“Okay, wait, wait,” June said before Benjamin could rush off in search of his original sock. “Let me feel your forehead.” She pressed first the back of her hand, then her cheek against his forehead.
“Hm, you feel a little warm,” she said. “I think I’m going to take you to work with me instead of sending you to school today. Then we’ll see how you’re feeling this afternoon and go from there.”
“Okay, Mommy,” Ben said, throwing his arms around her waist and pressing his face into her stomach.
This was a sure a sign as any that he wasn’t feeling well.
Normally the suggestion that he spend a boring day at work with her instead of going to school to see his best pal Isabelle would be soundly and swiftly rejected.
June accepted the hug happily. Her little boy grew faster than light, or so she felt most days. She knew that soon enough she would be too uncool for him to want to hug her, so she soaked up what she could.
Even so, her mind whirled. She was housecleaning this morning, and Mrs. Richards was a long-term client, an elderly woman who lived alone and whose arthritis meant that cleaning house was a challenge for her.
Mrs. Richards wouldn’t object to Benjamin hanging around while June cleaned.
The diner, though… that was a different story.
You couldn’t take a sick kid to a place where people were eating, not if he was coughing or sneezing at all.
He wasn’t yet, but if he started, she’d have to cancel her shift, which meant she’d lose that income, which she would have to make up later, and…
Don’t borrow trouble, June-bug, she told herself, remembering the way her grandfather had always said the phrase when she got worried about things that were ahead.
She took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get in the car.”
She became a whirlwind of energy, swapping the backpack for a tote bag, which she filled with some of Benjamin’s favorite snacks, his water bottle, and a handful of books.
She was happy to be relaxed about screen time when her son wasn’t feeling well, but kids got restless when they felt sick, so it was better to have more than less to distract them.
Even moving as quickly as she could, however, left June pulling into Mrs. Richards’ driveway ten minutes after she’d been scheduled to start her cleaning. The older woman met her at the door, although her face creased into a mask of concern when she saw Benjamin standing behind his mother.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Richards,” June said at once. “Ben wasn’t feeling well this morning, so I didn’t want to send him to school, and shifting our plans made us late. I’ll make up the time on the end, I promise.”
“Oh, honey, I don’t care about that,” the woman said, leaning more heavily on her cane to look closely at Benjamin. “I care that you’re feeling bad, buddy. That stinks.”
“Yeah,” Benjamin agreed. “But I’ll let Mommy work! I used to come to work with her a lot when I was little, so I know how to do it.”
The two adults exchanged an amused glance. There was nothing more charming than a small child speaking about their past smallness like they were fully grown.
“I bet you do,” Mrs. Richards said. “And, if it’s okay with your mom, I even have some of those popsicles… the ones that are for kids when they’ve got a bug,” she added to June. “I can’t remember what they’re called, but my grandkids left them here last time they came to visit.”
“You definitely don’t have to—” June began to instinctively protest, but the elderly woman cut her off.
“Oh, stop that right now, June Caldwell. I know I don’t have to do it. When you get to be my age, nobody can tell me I have to do anything. Besides, I like company, so I’m happy to see young Benjamin here. Benjamin, do you like movies? Would you mind if I joined you watching one?”
June’s son smiled, revealing a gap where he’d lost a tooth several weeks prior.
“Can I, Mommy?” he asked.