Tommie looked at her. “Amelia said that I could sit next to her on the bus today.”
At his comment, Beverly knew her son had missed the hint, and her melancholy deepened as she rose from the table. After swiping at her tears, she made him a sandwich, adding an apple to his lunch, making sure to put it in his backpack. Yesterday felt almost like a lifetime ago.
By then, Tommie was just about finished. He drank the remaining milk from the bowl, leaving a milk mustache. She wiped his lips. “You know I love you, right?”
When Tommie nodded, she thought again that she should tell him the truth, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, she dropped to one knee, feeling wobbly and hating herself for all she was about to put him through.
“Let me double-knot your shoes so they don’t come untied when you’re running around.”
When she finished, she looped the backpack over his shoulders and they left the house, their timing perfect. By the time they reached the road, the bus was already slowing to a stop. She kissed Tommie on the cheek, then walked with him toward the doors of the bus just as they swung open. She watched him ascend the steps and offered a quick final wave, but with his back to her, Tommie didn’t seem to notice.
As she turned and headed back toward the house, she saw it as she had the first time, when she thought that she could make it a home. She remembered walking through and thinking that painting the kitchen walls yellow would be perfect. She’d allowed herself to believe that everything was going to turn out okay, but as she continued to stare, she saw it now for the trap that it was, its sole purpose to dangle a dream in front of her, only to crush it.
Dwelling on the unfairness of it all and the mistakes she’d made, she enumerated her failures as a mother. And this time, when the tears started anew, she barely made it to the couch, knowing she couldn’t stop them.
By the time she finished weeping, she was wearied and spent. Wiping her face with the bottom of her shirt, she noticed numerous brown smudges on the fabric and realized that she was looking at dirt.
From the digging when I hid the guns. Her face must have been filthy—no surprise since she hadn’t showered—and she wondered why Tommie hadn’t said anything about it. He had to have noticed, and she suspected that he was reacting just as she had as a child, when she didn’t understand what was going on with her mom. In those moments, it was better to pretend that everything was fine, even when frightened. It was no wonder that Tommie hadn’t spoken at dinner and barely glanced at her over breakfast. He’d been afraid for her and of her, and the realization made her throat tighten again. It was another mistake, one in a long line of mistakes she’d made recently.
The crying had sapped her energy, and rising from the couch was strangely difficult. She lurched to the kitchen and turned on the faucet. Cupping her hands to wash her face, she could feel flecks of dirt at her hairline and in her ears, even in her eyelashes. A mirror would help, but going upstairs to the bathroom to check would take too much effort.
She eyed the food she’d taken from the freezer the night before, then removed the plastic wrap and set it all on a plate, thinking it would be one less thing she had to do later. She found a large pot in one of the open drawers. Adding water, she began soaking the beans. None of it would be ready to cook for a couple of hours. She considered starting the sandwiches, but as she reached for the loaf of bread, she flashed to an image of Tommie as he sat between her and the old woman in the station wagon, when he’d stared at her with nothing but love and trust in his eyes, and it broke her heart.
The knowledge made her ache, and her thoughts began to scatter again. She remembered Tommie as an infant, when she rocked him late at night; she reflected on the quiet way he now seemed to move through the world. She decided to make the sandwiches later, and though she didn’t understand her reason, she didn’t bother to question it. She wondered again who in their right mind would ever choose orange walls for a kitchen.
Her thoughts continued to pinball, lighting up one memory after the other, and she knew the only way to shut them down was to go back to sleep. Instead, she pulled the carrots from the fridge and set them on the counter before rummaging through the drawers, trying to find the peeler. She couldn’t find it, so she settled for a butcher knife, her hands trembling. She longed for sleep again and understood that it had been the only time in the last few days when she felt safe and hadn’t been burdened by worries.
Her movements grew more uncoordinated until her hand suddenly slipped and the blade cut deep into her forefinger, bringing her back to the present. She yelped—screamed, really—watching as a bead of blood appeared, and then the long gash turned completely red. Blood splattered to the counter and onto her shirt. She pinched the gash with her free hand, momentarily mesmerized, before the sting rose in full fury, morphing into searing pain. When she let her finger go, blood flowed onto the counter. With her uninjured hand, she turned on the faucet, watched the faded-pink water flow down the drain, then shut it off. She used the bottom of the shirt to wrap her finger, thinking that if she were someone else who lived a different life, she’d hop in the car and drive to the urgent care to get stitches.
But that wasn’t her life, not anymore, and her eyes filled with tears. One step at a time, she told herself. She needed gauze and tape but doubted there was any in the house. There might be Band-Aids in one of the bathrooms, she reasoned, heading up the stairs to the bathroom Tommie used. In the second drawer down, she got lucky.
She pulled out a Band-Aid, but she needed both hands to open it, and blood splattered onto the counter. The wrapping, sticky and wet with blood, made the adhesive worthless. She tried again with another Band-Aid and got the same result. She tried again and again, failing each time, bloody wrappers and Band-Aids dropping to the floor. Finally, she got two of the Band-Aids ready, rinsed the blood from her hand and finger, and dried it using her shirt, squeezing tightly. She applied the first one, followed quickly by the second one. That gave her the time she needed to apply more, and it seemed to do the trick. Her finger throbbed with its own heartbeat as she went downstairs.
The living room and the hallway and the kitchen were wrecks, and the thought of having to clean it all and make the food and pack and escape and somehow find a way to start a new life was simply too much. Her mind shut down like an overloaded circuit, leaving nothing but sadness in its wake.
Exhausted, she went to the couch and made herself comfortable. Closing her eyes, her worries and fears faded away completely the instant she fell asleep.
Despite sleeping for hours, she woke feeling as though she’d been drugged. She forced herself upright, her mind working in slow motion, the room gradually settling into focus.
“What a mess,” she remarked to no one in particular, amazed again by the clutter spread throughout the room, the cabinet at a cockeyed angle, the wall half primed. She rose from the couch and shuffled to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As she drank, she felt the throbbing in her finger, the deep bruising ache. When she looked at her hand, she saw that the blood had soaked through the Band-Aids, staining them brown. It was gross, but she wasn’t about to undertake an attempt to replace them, any more than she wanted to clean the living room or the kitchen or the rest of the house. Or make sandwiches or slice carrots, for that matter. She had no desire to do any of it, at least until she felt a bit more like herself.
Instead, she went to the front porch. She turned from side to side, noting the ever-present farmworkers in the fields, but they were farther from the house than they had been the day before, working on another section of the crop under a grayish cloudy sky. There was a breeze, too, fairly steady, and she wondered if that meant it was going to rain.