“Mom, lay down,” Karen says as she stops me in the hallway.
“I need to cook dinner, honey.”
“I can handle it,” she says cheerily. “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
“Don’t burn the house down.”
“I’m not going to burn the house down.”
I sigh. “Good, don’t. Really.”
As much as I don’t care if the damn thing burns, I can’t deal with it right now. I flop back on the bed and drink half my bottle of water then doze off again. I’m so tired.
It’s a fitful half sleep, the kind that leaves you aware of time passing and more groggy than you started. I snap awake when Karen shakes my arm.
“It’s ready, Mom.”
She made Tuna Helper, and she did an okay job. She never let it boil over, it’s not burnt, and it’s not all congealed and nasty. Kelly certainly eats it up. I push mine around the plate, leaning my chin on my hand like a sullen teenager.
There’s no sound except for the faint scraping of forks on plates. Kelly finishes first, burps loudly, and asks to go upstairs and do her homework. I wave her away and she darts up the steps, and her door closes.
Karen sits at the other end of the table, eating almost grudgingly.
“So your father picked you up,” I sigh.
“Yeah. I didn’t want to go with him, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“There was nothing you could do, honey.”
“I know, Mom, but ugh, I can’t stand him and I can’t stand that woman.”
Karen won’t even say Skyler’s name.
“It’s not fair that he makes you look at her.”
I nod. “He brought her here to annoy me, you know that.”
“She tried to act all Mom with us. Kelly just wanted food but it made me sick. She’s not even old enough to be my mom. She could be my sister.”
I sigh. “Your weekend with them is coming up.”
“I don’t want to go. They’ll make us do some stupid shit like go to Dutch Wonderland again.”
“Language.”
She rolls her eyes. “Mom, come on.”
“You never talked like that when you were younger. You picked it up from one of those dirty books you read.”
She blushes faintly.
“I read one,” I add. “Really, Karen.”
She squirms in her seat. “It’s just make believe.”
I laugh. “I know, but you’re a little young for that. You’re still supposed to be in your princess phase.”
“I grew out of that in a hurry,” she says mournfully, and carries her and Kelly’s plates to the sink.
“Do you think Quentin will come back?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, hon. Probably not.”
“He seemed nice.”
“They usually do.”
“He said something weird when he was leaving.”
I look up at her. “What?”
“Something about how being nice to us doesn’t make up for ‘it’, but he didn’t say what ‘it’ was.”
She shrugs. “He was just being mysterious, I guess. Boys like to be mysterious. They think we like it.”
I quirk my eyebrow and stare at her. She shrugs and goes back to scrubbing the dishes.
“I can handle cleaning up. Lay down, Mom.”
“Thanks, honey. You don’t have to.”
“I want to. You don’t get any time,” she sighs. “Except when we’re not here. What do you do while we’re gone?”
Drink and cry, mostly.
“Just putter around the house.”
She can read my lie, they always can.
“Go lay down.”
I rise from the table and carry my plate to her, but that is the limit of the help she will accept. I feel better, at least enough to take an orange soda up with me. I lie back on my bed, turn on my TV and fall asleep to a Storage Wars marathon.
That show has to be rigged. Nobody just leaves a Matisse in a storage locker.
I wake a few times in the middle of the night and look out my windows. There are lights on in Quentin’s house, on the top floor, the garage, and in the basement. I see a brief flicker of a shadow cast across the backyard. Somebody is still in there.
In the distance I hear a faint sound, almost a voice, but it must be my imagination.
I roll back on the bed and sleep through until morning. When I wake up and go to the window I’m confronted by the earliest stages of the block party. At the end of the street there’s music equipment and a disk jockey setting up. Farther down the street there’s a bouncy castle and portable basketball hoops.
I haven’t prepared anything or done anything.
I lie back on the bed sideways and yawn. I just want to sleep. Is that so wrong?
There’s a knock at the door.
I open it and Karen is standing outside, already dressed.
“Mom, can we go?”
“Yeah, honey. Let me get dressed.”
I throw on shorts and sneakers and a loose t-shirt, snap on my sunglasses, and follow them outside.