Chapter 31 Michelle The Simple Life
MICHELLE: THE SIMPLE LIFE
Thirteen Years Later
I had exactly five minutes of peace and quiet. Five glorious, sun-drenched minutes on the back patio with a cup of coffee and the same magazine I’d been trying to read all week. It felt like a tiny vacation carved out of real life. I knew better than to trust it.
Then came a thump.
And a scream.
Grunting. Struggling. Another scream. A door slamming hard enough to rattle the windowpane.
Still not enough to make me get up. I took another sip, fully expecting the retaliation that always came next.
It didn’t disappoint. The banging started, and not just any banging.
This was the rhythmic, rage-fueled pounding of a twelve-year-old boy scorned.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
“Jake! Open the door!” Kyle yelled, pounding louder. “Mom! Jake won’t let me in the room!”
“Because you threw a suitcase at me,” Jake shouted through the door.
My brows shot up. A suitcase? It had better not be the one I bought on clearance from Ross last month. I inhaled deeply, summoning whatever Zen I had left, and kept reading while the fight raged on.
“Stop kicking the door!” Jake yelled. “You’re gonna put a hole through it.”
“I’m going to keep kicking until you stop being a sissy-ass punk!”
“Dalton and I aren’t letting a Bieber fan in our rock band.”
“I’m not a Bieber fan.” More kicking.
“Then explain why you’ve been singing ‘Baby’ on repeat.”
“Because it’s catchy!” Kyle let out a growling wail, wronged on a molecular level.
I closed my eyes and muttered a curse under my breath.
Bieber. They were fighting over Justin Bieber.
I liked to think I was a pretty calm and steady mother, but Jake and Kyle were the reason I needed this coffee break in the first place.
Those two were inseparable half the time and mortal enemies the rest. Their fights were constant and always about absolutely nothing.
Yesterday they’d argued over whether their imaginary pool in their imaginary mansion had an imaginary diving board.
Minutes later, they were on the floor choking each other out.
That’s what I got for thinking you couldn’t get pregnant while breastfeeding. Kyle arrived eleven months after Jake. Same year, even—Jake in January, Kyle in December. After I delivered Kyle, the nurse patted my shoulder and said, “Honey, you just gave birth to twins the hard way.”
But unlike real twins, who supposedly shared a psychic connection and maybe even the ability to be kind to one another, these two mainly shared insults. And since it was impossible to figure out who started what most of the time, they both got punished in the name of fairness.
The Bieber fight continued unchecked.
“Don’t listen to him, Dalton,” Kyle pleaded through the door to Jake’s best friend. “Jake’s a liar.”
“Hey, I don’t want any part of this argument,” Dalton replied, wisely staying neutral. He’d been around enough to know nothing good came from taking sides.
“You and me both, bud,” I mumbled, trying to focus on my magazine despite having read the same sentence four times. I knew I should probably step in, but selfishly, I didn’t feel like being their referee.
“Baby, baby, baby, oh,” Jake sang, twisting the knife. “Come on, Kyle, you know the lyrics. Pitch in.”
“I don’t duet with losers, you knockoff Hanson brother!”
“All right!” I slapped my magazine shut and got to my feet.
Those were fighting words if I’d ever heard them, and I knew exactly where this was headed.
By the time I reached the hallway, Kyle had launched his entire body against the bedroom door like a battering ram.
From inside, I could hear the discordant twang of an electric guitar as Jake gave the fight its own soundtrack.
“Hey,” I barked, charging down the hall like a mall cop. “If you break that door, you’re paying for it.”
“It’s Jake’s fault! He locked me out!” Kyle shot back, his face a thundercloud of fury. “He and Dalton are in there forming a band without me.”
“Because we want to be cool, and you look like something that crawled out of a sewer.”
“I look like you!” Kyle screamed, teetering on the edge of a total meltdown, and I didn’t blame him.
Jake was an expert button-pusher. You had to feel for Kyle.
While Jake was excited to see the world, Kyle’s whole world…
was him. Since he was a baby, he’d copied every extracurricular his big brother touched.
Music. Skateboarding. Surfing. Whatever Jake liked, Kyle liked.
When they were getting along, it was a beautiful thing.
But when they weren’t… there went my coffee in the sun.
“A low budget version of me maybe,” Jake shot back.
“Enough! Jake, get out here. Right now.”
“He threw an entire suitcase at me, Mom.”
“What, am I supposed to throw a half a suitcase at you?” Kyle snapped. “Grow up.”
“That’s it. I’m done with both of you,” I said, my heart rate rising. “Jake. Door. Now!”
A moment of silence. Then: “Password?”
I closed my eyes and counted in my head to three. “The password is ‘I’m not asking again.’”
The lock turned, and the door creaked open just enough for Jake’s face to appear, a smirk already forming. “Jeez, Mom. So hostile. We’re creating art in here.”
I bit back a smile. God help me, this kid was the exact recipe Scott and I made without even trying.
My calm clarity and his biting sarcasm, shaken together until we ended up with a smart-mouthed charmer who could talk his way out of a felony.
But that wasn’t his only superpower. No, Jake was also musically gifted.
All my kids had an ear for it, but his talent didn’t go unnoticed—and that attention had turned into a part-time teaching job for me with the school district: introducing music to kids just starting out.
I pushed the door open the rest of the way. “Rehearsal’s over. Dalton, I’m sorry, but you know the drill. If the boys can’t get along, then they can’t have friends over.”
“That’s not fair,” Jake protested. “He wasn’t doing anything.”
“No,” I said, taking the guitar out of his hands. “But you were.”
“Sure, Mrs. M.,” Dalton said, bumping fists with Jake. “See ya later, dude.”
Jake watched him round the corner then turned back to his brother. “Thanks a lot, Kyle.”
“Me? You’re the one—"
A high-pitched wail from the other room cut him off. It was followed by the unmistakable thud of a small body collapsing in full tantrum.
A little girl shrieked. “My doll doesn’t want to marry the evil space robot!”
“She’s a warrior princess, duh!” a little boy shot back, genuinely offended. “Who else is he going to marry? A laser blaster?”
I thought again, longingly, about my possibly still hot cup of coffee and the gossip magazine I’d left sitting on the chair like a hopeful placeholder for a future I would no longer have.
I snapped at Jake and Kyle. “You two—come with me.”
The boys trailed after as we stepped into the living room. Four-year-old Grace, the strawberry-blonde baby of the family, lay face down, sobbing into the carpet, while Quinn, nineteen months older, officiated a shotgun wedding between her veterinary Barbie and his two-headed alien.
“The wedding’s been called off,” I announced. “Give her doll back, Quinn.”
“They’re not married yet,” he protested. “They have to kiss.”
“No!” Grace wailed. “I don’t want her to kiss the bad guy!”
I pried the Barbie from Quinn’s hand and passed it back to Grace. She popped up, ran straight at Quinn, and smacked him with it.
“Grace!” I reprimanded, and she immediately burst into tears.
Keith strolled into the battlefield, took a look around, and said, “Damn, Mom. Not to judge your parenting, but are we just letting the Lord of the Flies thing happen now?”
“Yes, Keith. I’m letting natural selection sort it out.”
“Cool, cool,” he said, continuing on his way.
Hoisting Grace into my arms, I barked orders. “Let’s go. All of you.”
I turned toward the kitchen, trusting the boys had enough sense to follow. They did. I pointed them to the table. “Sit. You here. You there. You—right there.”
Grace was last, mostly because I had to pry her, sloth-like, off my body and pour her, limp as a noodle, into her seat.
“What are we doing?” Jake asked, glancing at Kyle, who glanced at Quinn, who glanced at Grace, now smearing snot across her face with the back of her hand.
“Team-building exercise,” I said, pacing in front of them. “This is a failure to communicate. A breakdown in the sibling unit. The four of you are going to sit here until you two—Jake and Kyle—and you two—Quinn and Grace—can name three nice things to say about the other.”
“That’s it?” Jake brightened. “Okay. One. Kyle, you don’t smell nearly as bad as you did last year. Like… I noticed. It’s weird.”
“Your face has finally grown into your donkey teeth,” Kyle countered. “Way to go. That’s my one.”
“Not so fast.” I went to the junk drawer and pulled out a stack of wide-ruled paper and a container of pencils and crayons.
“It has to be heartfelt. I’m setting a timer, and you’re all going to sit here quietly for five minutes and reflect on what you mean to each other.
I cannot stress this enough: no talking.
Once you have three actual beautiful reasons, you’ll write them down—or draw a picture for the non-literate ones—and then we’ll share them out loud.
If you don’t take it seriously, we start over… and I have all day. Do you?”
I set the timer on the microwave and stepped out to the patio to grab my coffee, now lukewarm.
Still acceptable. When I returned, Keith caught my eye, clearly enjoying the show as he shoveled a heaping spoonful of cereal into his mouth.
He didn’t have a care in the world until Emma came blazing into the kitchen, holding her CamelBak water bottle like it was radioactive.
“Keith! Tell me you did not drink out of this.”