by Lisa Wingate
“Well, you guys probably didn’t happen to eat any of it, Cody.” I hated it when he acted like he was Mr. Big Daddy who knew everything, and I was the little nincompoop who got pregnant right out of high school.
“So we’ll tell the boys not to eat it.” His shoulders went up and down, like it was that simple. Just tell kids not to do something, and they wouldn’t. Where’d he been for the last five years of Benjamin’s life, and the last three years of Tyler’s? Oh, yeah—hanging out at the deer blind with his daddy, or out four-wheeling and fishing with the guys he worked with at the county sheriff’s department. He didn’t have a clue what it was like to be home with the boys all the time. Whenever Cody was supposed to babysit, his mama was right there to do all the work, and Cody sneaked off to the backyard with the bird dogs, or ended up in the barn doing some project for his daddy.
“You have to baby-proof everything when you’ve got kids around, Cody. They try stuff out when you’re not looking.”
He snorted softly. “They’re not babies. It’s not like they walk around picking junk up and putting it in their mouths.”
Heat crawled over my back and made a muscle go spastic at the base of my spine. I reached around to rub out the cramp. What with getting the furniture into the house and then taking the boys down to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate, this was feeling like a long day. I wanted to go inside, curl up on one of the mattresses still on the floor, and go to sleep, but there was lots to get done yet. “You never know what they’ll do. It’s not worth having a poisonous bush in the yard.”
Cody stuck his arms out and posed like he was a sci-fi robot about to take on the bush with his death ray. “Evil Plant of Death. Must destroy.”
“That’s not funny, Cody.” He was only putting on the goofy act to get me off his case. If I left it up to him, that bush would still be there six months from now, but the freezer would be stocked with fish fillets, as soon as he found a place to drop a line in the water. “I don’t want that plant there, okay?”
“The boys aren’t gonna eat the plant.”
“I mean it. I’ll chop it down myself if I have to.” Cody gave me a weird look, and I knew he was trying to figure out why I was pushing so hard. I couldn’t exactly tell him it wasn’t the boys I was worried about. It was the new baby. The one that would be showing up in about eight months, give or take. Cody didn’t know about the baby, and I hadn’t figured out how to tell him without starting a meltdown. Telling Mama the next time I talked to her would be even worse. She’d have a conniption so big you’d be able to see it hanging in the sky over southeastern Oklahoma, like a wall cloud.
Cody lowered his death-ray fist and gave me his confused look, like there was some ridiculous woman thing going on in my head. He crossed his arms over his chest. “What the heck is wrong with you all the sudden? I thought we were celebrating the new house. Happy-happy, remember? Havin’ a good time.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.” When you tell him, you have to make it sound like you got pregnant on accident. If he thinks you did it on purpose, he’ll be so mad, he’ll never get over it. “I just want you to help do things with the house. You can’t spend all your time either at the academy, or crashed out on the sofa, or looking for someplace to fish. We have to get the house ready.”
An eyebrow hung low over one dark eye. “Ready for what?”
The baby. Our baby girl. “Just the kids and stuff. It’s an old house. There’s things that aren’t safe for kids in an old house—like plugs, and we need to check for lead paint, and take care of the cords on the blinds, and put batteries in the smoke detectors, and things like that.” Maybe you should just go ahead and tell him. Right now, while he’s happy, and his mind’s on the house.
He’ll never believe you didn’t do this on purpose. He’ll know, and he’ll know why you did it, too. . . .
“You watch too much TV.” He tipped his head toward the sound of the boys playing in the backyard. Tyler was squealing, and Benjamin was hollering something about Pokémon. Any minute now, they’d be in a fight. “I grew up in an old house.” Lifting his arms, he turned his hands palms up, as in, And look at the wonderfulness of me.
“Yeah,” I said, smirking at him. He could be such a smart-aleck. “Exactly.”
He smacked himself in the chest and coughed out a breath like I’d taken a shot at him and he was catching the arrow where it went in. Not likely, since Cody was tough as leather and just about as easy to make a dent in. “Oh-ho! That’s it. Them’s fightin’ words.”
The next thing I knew, he’d scooped me up and tossed me over his shoulder.
“Cody, put me down!” I squealed, but of course he wouldn’t, and with him two hundred pounds of muscle now, I didn’t have a prayer of making him do anything. He twirled me in a circle, and I watched the grass, and the pecan tree, and the yellow house, and the brush along the creek next door, and the slide in the little kiddie park across the creek, all blend together into a swirl of color. I saw the oleander bush, and Tyler running around the corner of the house, his stocky legs pumping hard, his head a dark, fuzzy burr, like his daddy’s. He skidded to a stop and crossed his arms over his chest, just like someone else I knew.
“Daddy, pud-a-Mama-down!” he ordered, shaking a finger at us. Then I couldn’t see him anymore, because Cody spun me around and scooped up Tyler in his free arm, and we were bouncing along together, laughing.
I heard Benjamin come around the corner and complain, “Daddeee!” Grabbing my arm, Benji tried to pull me free, headfirst.
Cody stumbled sideways, and the thick smell of oleander filled my nose. I felt the leaves brush my arm.
“Oh, no!” Cody cried out. “It’s . . . it’s . . . the evil Bush of Death!” He staggered backward, gasped his last, then collapsed to the ground just a few inches short of making a pancake of our oldest kid. The three of us landed in a pig pile, Benjamin jumped on top, and we rolled around, laughing and tickling and wrestling in the dried-up crust of last year’s oleander leaves. When the craziness died down, I turned onto my back, and Cody lay beside me, and we just stayed there, looking up at the corner of the house, and the pecan branches overhead, and the clear, blue summer sky. Our little piece of sky. Over our trees. Over our house.
The house that was worth everything it took to get here.
Next door, a window blind pulled back, and then fell into place again. Whoever the neighbors were, if they were watching, they probably thought we were nuts.
Chapter 4
Tam Lambert
It wasn’t the first time Barbie had wrecked the Escalade. It was just the first time I’d seen my father cry about it.
All of a sudden, I wished I hadn’t started the morning by trapping him in the game room and going off about my getting stuck with the Fearsome Foursome after Barbie’s fender-bender. It was just that I’d been ready to behead someone since last night, when I learned that Barbie wasn’t at the hospital, but with her massage therapist, Fawn, drinking wine and trying to recover from the trauma of crashing into the Baby Bundles. When she did come home, Barbie brought Fawn with her, and they uncorked a bottle of wine in our kitchen, so I couldn’t say what I wanted to. Barbie knew that, of course. She wasn’t always as blond as she looked. Sometimes she actually thought things through. She had a little bruise on her cheek where she’d hit the steering wheel, and Fawn helped ice it while Barbie droned on about what a blessing it was that the kids weren’t in the car when it went crazy. Somehow, the wreck had become largely the fault of the vehicle, which was now sitting in the driveway with the front end crumpled on one side, and the grille hanging in pieces.
I left the kitchen, so as not to kick off World War III, and went up to my room and vented to Emity in a text message. Gonna bite someone’s head off tomorrow, I said before we signed off. Europe’s not even far enough away. So sick of this.
LOL, Emity ended. Spare the innocent children, K?
I sent her back a laugh, then went to bed. I dreamed about la tía lo
ca. She was swimming in an Olympic-size pool with the sibs. They were wearing matching pink bathing caps with puffs of chiffon and furry pink slippers. The fur expanded underwater, so that their legs looked like Q-tips with pink ends as their feet fanned the water, sending strange currents swirling toward the surface. They were performing synchronized swimming maneuvers. Even the baby. The team made a pyramid with their legs, and Jewel was on top, holding an inner tube that looked like a giant Cheerio.
I actually woke up in a good mood, but halfway down the stairs, I caught the lingering scent of incense from Fawn’s visit last night, and I was mad all over again. I caught my dad in the game room and told him exactly how I felt about Barbara stopping off for a winefest and a whinefest with Fawn, while I was stuck home babysitting. “I can’t handle them. The nanny can’t even handle them. I didn’t ask you guys to have a bunch of kids no one wants to take care of.”
It crept into my consciousness that my father hadn’t moved or responded in any way, and that possibly he wasn’t even listening to me, but I was on a roll. I stabbed a finger toward the upstairs, where Barbie, blissfully asleep as usual, knew that the nanny would arrive at seven to wake up the sibs. After the morning tantrums and breakfast were taken care of, Barbie would descend below stairs to tackle the dressing and hair combing, thus bringing the pack to the level of cuteness required for playgroup dropoff at church. “I’m sick of everything being about Barbara. I’m sick of not being able to come home without her dumping kids on me. I’m sick of . . .”
The light from the window caught my father’s face suddenly, and there was moisture sparkling in his eyes. I’d never seen him cry. Even at my grandparents’ funerals, and the day my parents told me they were splitting up, my father had been as steady as Lincoln at the Memorial—stoic and thoughtful, with a pale patina of regret, as if he’d studied the mask that should be worn at such times. By watching, you could tell how he was supposed to feel, but not how he really did feel. He was a mystery, a cipher, but then, that was nothing new. His lack of accessibility, as my mother referred to it, was one of the reasons she left. She needed depth, meaning, connection. Being married to him was a starvation of the soul she could no longer endure, after twelve years. She was ready to spread her wings and fly, to do something that mattered, to be fulfilled.
I couldn’t really blame her. Even at eleven years old, I understood what she meant. It was painful to know that we didn’t fit into the larger equation, but I could relate to what she was saying. Before she was someone’s mom, someone’s wife, she was someone. She was a journalist working her way up through local news, which was how she met my father. Now she wanted to be someone again.
I wondered what she would think if she could see my father now, his hand clutched over the surgically implanted hairline that my mother thought was ridiculous, his fingers tightening into the skin of his forehead, his lips forming a thin line, trembling. His eyes were turned toward the window, two blue pools draining down his cheeks, where the skin was smooth and free of sun damage, thanks to the laser treatments at Barbie’s favorite spa. The skin-care package was a Christmas present, to let him know Barbie was thinking of his well-being.
My mother had responded with an Internet laugh when I told her about it. LOL. Guess she just realized he’s over fifty. . . .
“Dad?” I whispered. The ground shifted under my feet, and I tried to catch my balance. Maybe something had happened to Barbie overnight—some sort of weird aftereffect of the accident. “Dad? What’s the matter?”
He sat unmoving until finally his lips parted, letting out a long draft of air. Trembling fingers combed his hair—the fuzzy part on top that didn’t look quite natural, and then the real stuff toward the back. He clutched it for a moment before his fist dropped into his lap. “You might hear some things today, Tam. At the country club, or just . . . around. You might hear some things. Don’t worry, all right? Just go about your normal day, and . . .” His eyes slowly fell closed, and his head swayed as if he were falling asleep midsentence. When he looked up again, moisture clung to his lashes, turning them dark. They were thick, like the boys’. “It’s just a normal Thursday.”
An uncomfortable sensation crawled underneath my golf shirt, turned my neck hot and itchy. “It’s Friday,” I whispered.
“Right . . .” he muttered. “Friday.” His gaze slid back and forth across the fireplace, as if he were searching for something in the squares of white marble. “Almost the weekend. Nobody does business on the weekend.” Chewing his bottom lip, he nodded, still scanning the wall, the darkness in his face easing slightly. “Nobody does business on the weekend.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable, uncertain. Something was wrong. This man heaped in the chair, babbling nonsense, his cheeks wet with tears, was not my father. My father was strong, silent, always on the cell phone, wrapped up in negotiations to take a partial interest in some business deal, in return for attaching his name to it. Anything attached to Paul “the Postman” Lambert’s name and face was golden, even fifteen years after his playing career was over. My father was larger than life in every possible way.
“Dad, what’s the matter?” Maybe Barbie had stormed out again. Maybe they’d had a fight about the Escalade. “You’re scaring me.” Surely he knew that Barbie wouldn’t really leave. Where could she go? Her family, whom she didn’t speak to anyway, lived in some backwater town in Louisiana, and none of her spa girls or her mothers’-day-out friends would take on Barbie and the Four.
Maybe my father’s meltdown was work-related—some deal gone wrong. He’d be on the cell phone like crazy for a day or two, and then this weird, weepy mood would blow over.
Would he really sit in the game room and shed tears about work?
Shaking his head, he cupped his fingers over his lips again. I heard the nanny coming in the kitchen door. In a few minutes, she’d start rousting the twins, and then the house would descend into the usual chaos. “You might as well tell me,” I said. “If it’s going around at the club, you know I’ll hear it. Whatever it is, I can handle it.” An affair. It’s probably an affair. Somebody strayed, and now word’s out. It’ll be a big scandal at church. “I’m not a child anymore.”
“No,” he murmured, his eyes falling closed again. “It’s just business. These things get blown out of proportion.”
“Ohhh-kay, but what . . .”
The nanny walked by in the hall, and we waited for her to pass. “Hola,” she called; then a string of Spanish drifted behind her as she continued down the hall.
“She wants you to know you forgot to leave her check out last week. Counting this week, you’re three weeks behind.”
He nodded again. “I need to go talk to Barbara.” Pushing himself out of the chair, he stood up and left the room. Overhead, dull thumps shook the ceiling, followed by the crash of something hitting the wall, then bansheelike howling. The sibs were awake.
I hurried to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water and a breakfast square, and make my escape before the Four moved downstairs. Outside, Aunt Lute was sitting in a reclining chair by the pool, her legs crossed yoga-style and her arms held out with her index fingers touching her thumbs, so that she looked like one of those goddess statues from India. The only thing missing was six more arms and a headdress. She was wearing white spandex exercise clothes with a Bahamas logo on the front. It looked like something out of Barbie’s closet—not a good choice for a seventy-year-old woman. Loose, wrinkled skin hung out everywhere, folded and bunched like yesterday’s laundry.
Stuffing my breakfast in an empty Whole Foods bag, I ran upstairs, grabbed my golf shoes and a string top with a cute pleated miniskirt for later, plus a jacket for the clubhouse—maybe I’d ask Emity to meet me for lunch, and then we could hang out at the pool and talk about Europe. She’d be upset that I hadn’t told my dad about our plans yet, but today clearly wasn’t the day to bring it up.
Stuffing everything in a gym bag, I checked
myself in the mirror—not too bad. I’d be a mess by the time I left the course anyway. The main thing now was to get out the door before one of the sibs decided to stow away in my vehicle. For them, escaping the house and hiding in one of the cars was the coup de grâce of nanny pranks.
Landon was standing at the top of the stairway rubbing his eyes, naked except for his Spider-Man undies. His little body was bony and brown and potbellied, so that he looked like a poster child for a Feed the Children campaign. His hair, which had dried in soft, wavy curls after last night’s swim, framed his face as he yawned, swayed on his feet, and held out his arms like he was waiting for a hug.
Squatting on the top stair, I reached for him, and he looped his arms around my neck, then nestled under my chin. The sibs could melt you when they wanted to. “Hey, buddy,” I whispered, because Mark and Daniel’s bedroom door was open, and I didn’t want them to hear me. The boys were never all in a good mood at once. “What’s the matter?” I could hear the nanny in the twins’ room, which meant Landon had gotten out of bed on his own this morning. “Go lie back down for a bit. Esmeralda will be there in a minute. I have to head out to the club.” If I didn’t show up on time to play eighteen this morning, after having left the lesson yesterday, Coach would give me more than just a lecture.
Landon shook his head, the cottony tips of his hair tickling my neck and chin. I tried to stand up, but his arms tightened around my neck so that he rose with me, then looped his legs over the top of the gym bag.
“Landon, I’ve got to go.”
He held on like a spider monkey clinging to a branch in a stiff wind. The circle around my neck tightened until I was choking, the strap of the gym bag cutting into my collarbone.
“Landon, quit it, now. I said I have to . . .”
He sniffled, and I felt moisture on my skin. What in the world . . .
Something slammed against the master bedroom door at the end of the hall, and Landon jerked in my arms, his body quivering. The muffled sound of Barbie yelling drifted forth, followed by the deeper tone of my father raising his voice in response, both of them trying to be heard at once. Something metallic collided with the door, then spilled what sounded like marbles onto the floor. They click-clacked against the tile and clattered around the room.