“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I woke up early and have tonight off, so I figured I’d go do stuff.” She paused. “Sometimes I forget what it’s like to be out in daylight.”
“You should be gardening, or taking a walk.”
“Shush. Will you please let me do this?” Her voice caught a little at the end. “I feel like I’m never around for you.”
Then just talk to me, I wanted to say. Ask me how my day was. Ask me if I had any good moments and I would tell you that, yes, I did. And I might even share them with you.
But I knew this simple car ride was all she had to give right now.
At home, Mom shooed me straight to my room to study. She said she’d bring me a snack, get Danielle off the school bus.
So I let her do that. It was all I really had to give back.
I heard Dani’s musical voice fill the house when she came home, Mom whispering for her to be quiet and that she couldn’t go see me right away. Dani protesting, then some kind of food being unwrapped and the TV turning on, and Dani not protesting anymore. I put on music and reintroduced myself to my history notebook.
Sometime later, I heard Richard come home. Voices, footsteps down the stairs, up the stairs. Raised voices.
Then, crying.
I leapt up, opened the door, and poked my head out of my room. My mom was at the kitchen table with her laptop, her head in her hands. Richard stood above her, holding Dani in his arms, her limbs pretzeled around him.
“You couldn’t hear it? Come on, Kate. I caught at least three F-bombs between the front door and the den!”
“I got involved with something online!”
Dani saw me, then scrambled out of Richard’s arms and came down the hall. Neither Richard nor Mom seemed to notice. They continued bickering.
I motioned for Dani that it was okay to come into the safe harbor of my room. After she stepped inside, I closed the door and turned to her.
“What was that about?”
“Uh. Nothing.”
“Dani.”
“I may have started watching an inappropriate movie. I didn’t mean to, I was trying to get to Nickelodeon. But I don’t know how to use the remote!”
“How inappropriate are we talking?”
“Boobs.”
“Fantastic.”
I put the pieces together. Richard was often mad at Mom for not spending time with Danielle. In most houses, it’s the mother accusing the father of that. We were Mirror Image Bizarro World Family.
And now here I was, curling up on the bed with Dani instead of reading about the War of 1812, folding her against my body so maybe she wouldn’t hear my mother’s words as they swirled down the hall.
“I just needed some downtime, Richard,” Mom was saying, her voice high and squeaky. “When do I get a break from taking care of people?”
You chose to be a nurse, I thought. You chose parenthood. How is “taking care of people” a surprise here?
Okay, so I knew it wasn’t that simple. She was tired. She was giving so much, she was losing track of herself. I understood all that; I understood more than I wanted to admit.
“They’ve been fighting a lot lately,” said Danielle. “One of them always goes to the store or takes a walk around the block. Why do they do that?”
“So that person can come back and everything can be okay.” I pressed my cheek into the back of her head. Her hair was so damn silky and she never even shampooed it.
“Was it like that with Mom and your dad?” she asked.
“I don’t really remember. I was only two.” I didn’t want to tell her that I imagined it had been like this. The muffled but angry voices down a hallway, and way too long between good memories. “But it must have been worse,” I said instead, “because eventually, my dad didn’t come back.”
I’d gotten none of the real story. Only gift cards on my birthday and Christmas from an address in Oregon that looked like a small rectangle of a house in online satellite photos. Not that I searched for it (that much).
“Do you think that’ll happen?” asked Dani. “Would Daddy leave and never come back?”
“Absolutely not,” I said, with conviction about the second part of her question. Richard would always come back, to her at least. And if he left, he wouldn’t go far. He wouldn’t go anywhere, except maybe a really sweet condo in one of those new developments with a pool and workout room. Dani would get passed back and forth like a hot potato, and she’d get used to it. Two birthdays, two Christmases. An extra bedroom to fill with new toys. There were worse things.
Like me, and how much I’d miss Richard.
And also my mom being the way she was in the years before she met him.