She couldn’t keep getting into trouble like this and Ms. Conway was right about her school work. Although she was only in first grade, she had all but given up trying to do well on anything.
“Am I in trouble?” she squeaked nervously.
I gave her a look, my mom look. I had perfected it over the years. She shrunk back. She knew the look all too well.
The ride home was silent. I let Abby stew in her fears of what was to come, but I didn’t exactly know what I was going to say either. I needed to work that out.
I had no idea where to begin with my daughter when her entire life had been shattered. She was my wildflower, my free spirit. Abby couldn’t follow rules before Grady died. How could I expect anything less of her now?
“Hey!” Emma greeted happily. “How was school?”
“Ask Abby,” Blake mumbled and then took off to find a snack.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked me.
“Hey, can you stick around for a little bit longer? Like another hour?”
“What’s up?” Emma stepped close while Abby hovered nearby.
“I’m going to take Abs for some ice cream,” I whispered so the other kids didn’t overhear. “I need to talk to her.”
“One hour.” She held up her finger to accentuate her point. “I can give you one hour, but no more.”
“You’re a saint, Emma.” I kissed her cheek and then shuffled my wayward child out the door.
We drove to McDonalds where I bought us both vanilla milkshakes and parked in the corner of the lot. I invited her to sit in the front seat with me before turning the radio off and getting down to business.
Once she’d crawled to the front and situated herself with ice cream in hand, I began, “Abs, you cannot keep doing what you’re doing. It is not working.”
“What do you mean?”
I gave her a look. “At school. In the lunchroom. With your homework. Baby girl, you cannot behave the way you are behaving any longer. This behavior and this attitude are just not okay. You are not acting like the Abby I know.”
She opened her mouth to defend herself, but couldn’t find the right words. Her shoulders slumped and she stared down at her cup. “It’s not fair,” she mumbled. “It’s not fair that other people have dads and I don’t.”
I knew this was coming… I knew all of the reasons for her behavior problems and issues at school. Still, nothing could have prepared me for that.
“Abby,” I cried and then pulled her across the center console and into my lap. I buried my face in her wild hair and let out a choked sob. “I don’t think it’s fair either.”
“Why did he have to leave us, Mommy? Why did he have to die?”
“I don’t know, Sweetheart. He didn’t want to die. He tried his hardest to stay with us, but his sickness was too bad.”
“Why did he have to get sick? My friends at school have dads and none of them have gotten sick and died.” Tears streamed down her pretty face and her little nose ran. She sniffled and wiped her rivers of snot with the back of her hand.
I cupped her face with my hands and kissed a few of her freckles. I couldn’t give her answers to those questions, at least not any answers she would understand. “Abigail, your daddy got sick and because he got sick, he had to die. And now where is he?”
“Heaven,” she whispered.
“And did he love you when he was alive?”
She nodded, “Yes.”
“Did he love you with his whole heart?”
She nodded again and hiccupped a sob. “Yes.”
“And did he stop loving you when he went up to heaven?”
“Did he?” she asked in the most frightened and innocent voice I had ever heard.
“No,” I promised immediately. “No, of course not. He loves you just as much now as he did when he was alive. He’s just in a different place now.”
“Will I ever see him again?”
“Of course you will. Of course. One day you will see him again, but it might not be for a very long time.”
Her chin trembled as she struggled to hold back more tears.
I took a breath and pressed on, “Abby you cannot keep getting into trouble at school. I know you miss your daddy. I know that. I miss him too. But honey, you are a good kid. It’s time you start acting like one.”
“Mr. Hoya doesn’t think I’m a good kid.”
Mr. Hoya was her first grade teacher and at his absolute wits end. “Then show him, Sweetie. You’ve given him a headache all year. Prove to him that you know how to listen and pay attention. Show him that you do know how to read and write. He’s not even sure if you know your own name!”
Abby laughed like I wanted her too. “He knows I know my own name! He’s always yelling it!”
I couldn’t help but smile at her. “I need you to try, Abby. Okay? I really need you to be the good kid I know that you are.”
She let out a long-suffering sigh, “Fine. I’ll try.”
“And if you don’t try?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and picked up her milkshake again.
“You’re in super big trouble, that’s what. This is the last time I ask you nicely. Got it?”
She slid back to her seat. I could feel her struggling not to roll her eyes. “Okay. Got it.”
“I love you Abs. I love you more than the whole world. I know you can do this.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
I asked her about her day yesterday and we laughed about the incident in the lunchroom. Maybe that made me a bad mom, but I still couldn’t believe it happened.
It was an hour and a half before we got back home and Emma’s car was nowhere to be seen. I shut the car off and jumped out of my seat, racing inside and checking my phone for a missed text at the same time.
I found Ben sitting at the island going over Blake’s homework with him. Lucy was at the craft table coloring and Jace was sitting on Ben’s knee eating a banana.
“Hey,” he greeted me easily, as if he had done this a hundred times before.
“Hey.”
“Ben!” Abby screamed and ran over to give him a hug. “Will you help me with my homework? Mommy says I have to start doing it. And you do Blake’s for him. Can you do mine too?”
“Get it out, kiddo. But you have to write all of the answers so your teacher doesn’t know it was me.” He looked up at me and winked.
“Where’s Emma?” My mind spun with conflicted feelings. Should I be upset that Ben was here? Alone with my kids? Or did I trust him enough to leave him unsupervised and in charge?
“She had to go. She called and said a bunch of things really quickly. What I got out of it was that you told her you’d be gone an hour? And it was longer than that? She asked if I could hang out until you got home. I’ve only been here… maybe twenty-minutes? I put chicken fingers in the oven. The kids were getting hungry. Is that okay?”
And just like that my spinning thoughts slammed to a stop.
I trusted Ben.
I trusted him completely.
“That’s great,” I told him.
“You’re okay?” he asked next. “Abby?”
“We’re fine. We just went for a little drive and had a little talk.”
He nodded like my answer mattered to him. “If the kids eat the nuggets, I could order us Thai food.”
“That sounds good.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? You look a little jarred.” I watched him twitch as if he wanted to walk over to me, but he had too many kids around him.
I smiled at that. I smiled because it relaxed me to see that my children trusted him and that he seemed to genuinely like them too.
“I’m good, Ben. I’m really good.”
It wasn’t until after dinner, when I sent the kids to the living room to watch a little bit of TV before bed that Ben and I had another opportunity to talk.
He stayed after dinner and helped clean up the cartons of Thai and what little dishes there were to do. He filled m
y dishwasher while I wiped down the table and then he filled up the water on my Keurig for tomorrow.
“That will save me some aggravation in the morning,” I told him gratefully. I leaned back against the sink and smiled at him. He moved to stand next to me.
“We should do this again.” His low voice was barely louder than a whisper.
I tilted my head so that I could look up at him, “Dinner?”
“Yes, but not here.”
“What do you mean?”
“We should go out to dinner,” he clarified.
“With the kids?”
He shook his head slowly as if he couldn’t figure me out. “Just the two of us. You and I should go out to dinner.”
I shot up and practically jumped across the room. “Like a date?” I gasped.
He nodded, hitting me with one of his slow smiles. “Yes.”
I started shaking my head rapidly. “Ben, are you serious? You can’t be serious.”
Doubt flickered over his face. “Valentine’s Day is coming up. Neither of us has a date. I don’t know, I thought it would be… fun.”
“That’s sweet, really. But, I can’t. I cannot go on a date with you. I can’t. I… can’t.”
“It was just a thought,” he shrugged casually.
I ignored the expression on his face. I couldn’t read it right now and frankly I didn’t want to know what it meant. “You don’t want to go on a date with me anyway. You don’t. I’m… I’m broken, Ben. My husband hasn’t even been dead a year. I’m done with dating. Forever. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to make this awkward between us. I just care about you. I didn’t think you thought of me that way.”
His hands cupped my shoulders and held me still so that he could look into my frightened eyes. “Liz, you didn’t make things awkward between us. This isn’t the right time, I get that. Don’t feel bad. I’m not in a hurry. It’s alright. I can wait.”
“No, Ben, that’s not what I m-”
He leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to my cheek. I shivered at the contact and whatever I had wanted to say to him dissolved into thin air. When he stepped back, my body swayed toward him.
“Goodnight, Liz,” he told me sweetly. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Thanks for dinner,” I squeaked. “And for babysitting.”
He gave me one more charming smile when I walked him to the door. I didn’t watch him walk to his house or wait for him to get inside. I closed the door and locked it as soon as he was through it.
I had to shut him out, shut him out of my house, my thoughts and my heart.
I climbed into bed that night more upset than I had been in a very long time. I reached out and clutched at the sheets on Grady’s side, desperate for him to be here.
“I don’t know what is happening to me, Grady.” The words fell out of my mouth as a frantic prayer. How could I love my husband so very much and still have these feelings for Ben? It didn’t make sense to me. “I need you, Grady. I need you to come back to me. I hate that you left me to do this on my own because I don’t know what to do. Come back to me. I would do anything to have you come back to me.”
Chapter Eighteen
March fifteenth. The one-year anniversary of Grady’s death.
I woke up that morning before the kids and stared at myself in the mirror for a long time.
I couldn’t find myself through the haze of grief and heartache. In the mirror I saw a stranger, a person I didn’t know and couldn’t tolerate.
Every once in a while I would glimpse a glimmer of my old self, but it was only a flicker, an echo of life and light.
Part of me accepted that this was the person I was now. I could never go back. I would never find my lost self. That part of me knew I could only go forward and I would have to discover this unknown person as the days went by.
And that same part was okay with finding this new version of me. I couldn’t go back, but I also didn’t know if I wanted to go back. The other Liz had been happily married to Grady. She had been a good mother that had things under control because she had the help of a good man. She built a life that revolved around her husband and her children and that was enough for her.
But I could never have those things again. And so moving forward I needed to let them go.
Yes, I still had my children and I would always do everything I could to give them the best life possible. But I wasn’t the mom that volunteered twice a week in their classrooms now. I wasn’t the mom that baked up a storm for fundraisers and teacher appreciation week. I wasn’t the mom that remembered every practice and had healthy meals on the table every single night.
I was just me. A widow struggling to keep them bathed and clothed.
And you know what? It worked for us. We survived a year without Grady. A whole year. Maybe it wasn’t pretty. Maybe our lives weren’t tied up perfectly with bows. But we still loved each other. And we were still alive.
There were dark times over the last year, but it hadn’t been all darkness. There were days I never thought I would live through and moments when I was convinced that it was the end of us. But we’d pushed through and we’d kept on living.
Best of all, it wasn’t all depression and hard times.
Somehow, we hadn’t just managed to go on living, but we’d managed to smile through some of it too. Our hearts hurt and our souls ached, but there was plenty of love and happiness left for us.
I pushed my blonde hair back from my face and made a mental note to make a hair appointment. The lines near my eyes were definitely more pronounced and my youthful complexion wasn’t so youthful anymore.
At almost thirty-three-years-old, I could say that I was happy with how I’d aged. I hadn’t found much time to run through the winter. I hoped to remedy that this spring. Still, I was in better shape than I ever had been before.
What mattered most to me about looking at myself for so long was that I could finally recognize some of what Ben saw in me.
I knew Grady loved me. I knew without a doubt he thought I was sexy. He told me I was beautiful nearly every day. But he had been married to me. We had spent ten years together. At some point he had made a conscious decision to see me that way and to continue seeing me that way. I had no doubt that he believed all of those things, but part of that was because he never looked any other direction. I was it for him, just like he was the end all, be all for me.
Ben had started as a complete stranger with absolutely no obligation to me. Our relationship had developed into a strong friendship and I was happy with that. Although, I knew he wanted more. He had told me so more than once.
I thought it might be awkward between us after he asked me out and I turned him down. I shouldn’t have ever worried.
Ben would never let something as little as rejection stand in the way of our relationship. Not even more rejection. He’d continued to ask me out as another month passed.
He was never forceful about it. He had this gentle way about it that always made me feel comfortable enough to say no. And I always said no.
I should have ended things with him in every way. I didn’t want to lead him on. I cared too much for him to play games with him.
But I was also too selfish to let him go and he seemed in no hurry to escape me. He meant more to me than nearly anyone else. And if I was honest with myself, I knew I had feelings for him.
I just could never explore them.
I still loved my husband as fiercely as the day he died. It wouldn’t be fair to Grady, my kids or Ben for me to say yes. Besides, I knew Ben and I would not last long after a first date. Where could that possibly go? Marriage was out of the question. A long term relationship was out of the question. Sex was so far out of the question it made me laugh, and then seize up in fear and anxiety immediately after.
We had no future as a couple.
I didn’t want to mess up our friendship. It was too important to me.
I decided to keep the kids home from school today. It was a Tuesday, s
o the rest of the world went on as normal. I just couldn’t make them go.
Our world had stopped being normal a year ago.
No, longer than that. After Grady’s first diagnosis, things took an abrupt turn into the abnormal. And we’d pretty much set down roots there.
I got dressed and put on some light makeup. I made my way downstairs in a still quiet house and went about making breakfast.
The kids trickled into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and tussled. I loved this picture of them. I loved their sleep-rumpled pajamas and lazy smiles. I loved that they walked straight to me and wrapped their arms around me as soon as they saw me, as if the very first thing they needed every day was my touch.
I kissed their wild hair and turned on some cartoons so I could focus on a great big breakfast of pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs and pre-made cinnamon rolls.
This day was going to be tough no matter how it went; I figured we should start off by glutting ourselves.
We ate quietly, except for Jace, who didn’t understand the significance of this day. He was just excited to have his siblings all home with him.
After breakfast, I bathed them and dressed them in nice clothes with bows for the girls and shiny shoes for the boys. And then I took them back downstairs and I gave them each a present.
I gave them all something of Grady’s.
I gave Blake his daddy’s basketball. Grady would often play Saturday morning ball with his guy friends at the local Y. He kept it in a gym bag in our closet and I hadn’t touched it until I thought about giving it to Blake. It smelled like leather and sweat. It smelled like Grady when he would come home after a few hours of playing, dripping wet and exhausted, but alive with an energy he only found with good friends and hard play.
For Abby, I found a boxset of The Hardy Boys in hardback. They were Grady’s from when he was a kid. His mom had brought them over when we first moved into this house and he had kept them on a shelf in the den. Abby was just now able to read well by herself and I thought she would love the mysteries and adventure, and even more, reading something that her daddy loved at her age.
The Five Stages of Falling in Love Page 17