We stapled the last row up when the sun was a glowing ball of unrelenting heat on the horizon. There were no celebratory dances. No victory. No words. The insulation had inflicted enough pain to be the battle victor.
We rinsed our faces, arms, and legs with the hose, but it did little more than cool us. Our clothes and hair were still filled with bits of fiberglass that rained down when we moved and stuck to our damp skin. A shower and generous handfuls of soap followed by equally generous handfuls of lotion was the only thing that would offer relief. Still silent, we packed tools away and loaded up the car.
“Crap,” Drew said, pointing to a stack of concrete-reinforcement wire in the driveway. We were trapped. Blocked in. The six-by-twelve-foot grids of rusty wire had been delivered that morning and we’d forgotten all about it. Eventually, the wire would reinforce the slab outside our garage and a driveway up to the shop. The rest of our long drive would be paved after we’d moved in and I saved up the money. But the only thing that mattered just then was that the wire was blocking our way out. I took a few steps toward it, measuring the idea of driving around without hitting a tree or a muddy sinkhole. I might have taken the risk if I hadn’t remembered that the Sheetrock truck would need to get up the driveway bright and early.
I went to the shop for a pair of gloves, and the kids followed, silently sorting through the milk crate of gloves for a right-and-left pair, no matter the size or mismatched colors.
Drew and Hope stood on one of the short ends and I took the other. The wire sheets tangled in each other when we lifted them two at a time, and then tangled in the long grass and shrubs when we dragged them across to the edge of our property. On the final trip, we struggled with three sheets, determined not to walk all the way back for a single piece. We hadn’t eaten much all day and were at the edge of heatstroke. If the pinpricks of fiberglass hadn’t been torturing us, we might have slowed down and been more careful. I might have watched the four-inch spikes of wire sticking out from my end of the sheet as carefully as I watched the grass for the copperhead snakes that we knew lived nearby. But we were tired. We were desperate. And we were less careful than we should have been.
When the spike of rusty metal stuck into my left calf, I thought for one instant that it was just a scratch and my exhaustion had focused the pain, made me overreact. But when I bent over to look, the spike was shorter than it should have been by nearly two inches.
I exhaled quickly and pulled it out, like ripping off a Band-Aid; there was no reason to wait and think it through. More than anything, I was pissed off that I had yet another thing to deal with on a day that had already had enough of me. Rich blood pumped out, matching the rhythm of my heart rather than just dripping in a steady stream. My vision tunneled. I had passed out when the older kids’ dad had his wisdom teeth pulled and again when Jada’s bottom teeth poked through her lip after a fall. Passing out there in the field would have been a welcome reprieve from the day.
“Mommy?” Hope’s voice went wobbly, sounding a lot like Jada’s.
“I need,” I said, looking around for something to put over the pulsing wound and not seeing anything. “Tape. I need the roll of duct tape.” I pulled off my left shoe and sock, wadded the already bloody sock over the hole in my leg, and fell backward onto my butt.
“You okay?” Hope asked, her face ashen and her hands shaking.
“It’s just a little hole. Where’s the—”
Drew handed me a roll of gray tape. I wrapped tape around my leg to hold the sock in place. Definitely not the most sanitary wrap, but it couldn’t be helped. Jada was holding Roman and leaning against the car. All four of them looked terrified.
I took a deep breath, preparing myself to shrug it all off and reassure them. Maybe I could have pulled that off if I hadn’t looked down at my leg. The sock was drenched in blood. On my exhale, I leaned over and puked in the grass, narrowly missing Drew’s foot. It wasn’t that the injury was all that terrible, but combined with our hellacious day, the heat, and my squeamishness, it was more than I was prepared to handle. I put a hand up, palm out, to the kids and waved like it was no big deal, but in reality it was in surrender as much as reassurance.
“Just need to keep pressure on it and get a tetanus in the morning. Good as new.”
Hope drove us home and no one spoke.
Some of our words had been stolen away by exhaustion, that was true, but my mom had taught me to live by the old “if you can’t say something nice” rule, and I had nothing nice to say.
We were so far beyond tired of the project that there wasn’t a word to describe what we felt. And with so many things left to do, the deadline looked more impossible every day. I wanted my kids to go on dates and eat spaghetti and meatballs instead of jerky and crackers for supper. I wanted the house we were living in to sell and I wanted the new house to be a home instead of the hardest damn thing I’d ever done in my life. I wanted to go on vacation with my mom again and invite my dad down to relax.
I wanted to take my own turn at feeling broken and let someone else take a turn at cheering everyone up. But that isn’t how being a mom works. So I swallowed all those thoughts, got everyone showered and fed, and carried on with the pushing-forward, the cheering-up, and the determination to work hard enough to make everything better.
Have I mentioned I’m an optimist?
–20–
Fall
Down by the River
Even though Adam and I had been divorced for well over a year, my erratic sleep reflected how often I still worried about him coming back. I stayed up late, woke frequently, and found deep, solid sleep only in the early-morning hours before my alarm rang. It wasn’t a sustainable pattern, and I told myself that every evening before I climbed into bed and did it again.
My phone was ringing, and I had the sense that it had been for a while. But it was so far away that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to get to it. I tried to climb up out of the foggy sleep determined to hold me down, and I slowly became aware that I was in my bed.
A woman had been yelling at me in my dream. She was red-faced and angry. When she opened her mouth, the ring tone of my phone sounded from deep inside her.
Yes, I’ll get it. Leave me alone.
I often felt like it had been years since I’d slept a whole night without worry or fear. But that never seemed like a terrible thing, as long as there was hope that it would end sometime soon. A person can get through just about anything if they believe it isn’t forever. I reached over to my nightstand and fumbled for the phone, knocking it to the ground. It stopped ringing. Fine with me. I rolled over so my back was to it, but I had only pulled in two slow breaths when it started again. The ringer was turned too low to wake the kids, but I couldn’t ignore it no matter how much I wanted to.
I leaned over, grabbed it, and tucked back under the blanket like there were monsters under the bed.
It was a Little Rock number. “Hello?” I cleared my throat.
“Is this Cara? Cara Brookins?”