The Simple Life

by Tara Sivec

  “Mia!” I shout for the hundredth time as I head upstairs and start opening doors. “If you come out right now, I know a unicorn you can pet, we’ll go into the next town to get McDonald’s french fries, and I’ll let you put sparkles on anything you want!”

  I don’t care if bribery with kids is frowned upon. I’ll do whatever it takes at this point. I can’t lose one of Clint’s kids on my first damn day at work. Not only will he probably be a little sad he’s minus a kid, but he’ll never let me live it down.

  “Did you seriously lose Mia?”

  Closing the door to a spare bedroom when I’ve checked every nook and cranny and didn’t find a chatty, sticky five-year-old, I slowly turn around in the upstairs hallway and come face-to-face with Grace. As soon as Ember left and Mrs. Sherwood went into town to run some errands, I asked Grace what she wanted to do. She rolled her eyes at me, ran upstairs, and locked herself in her bedroom for the rest of the day. I’m not gonna lie; I breathed a little sigh of relief that she still seemed to hate me. That’s one less kid I needed to worry about. Unfortunately, being alone with Mia was like being alone with sixty-five rabid cats who just did a few lines of coke.

  “I didn’t lose her. I just… misplaced her. We were playing hide-and-seek, and that’s kind of the point of the game,” I reply in annoyance.

  I cannot believe I’m letting a ten-year-old judge me and I’m actually getting defensive about it.

  “Dad’s gonna be pissed.”

  She smirks at me, clearly full of glee that I did something that will get me in trouble.

  “Are you allowed to say pissed? I think that language is a little old for you.”

  Look at me, being all stern and nanny-like!

  “Yeah? Well so is that makeup and bad hair-do. It makes you look thirty,” she fires back.

  “I am thirty! Thirty is not old!” I shout, wondering if they make muzzles for smartass little girls. “And besides, I let your sister do my hair and makeup, so this is all her fault. Can you possibly cut the attitude for two seconds and help me find her?”

  All of a sudden, her face softens and she loses the permanent scowl. She really is a beautiful little girl when she shuts her mouth. I have no idea what kind of shit she’s had to deal with in her young life, and I sort of feel bad about throwing the attitude right back at her.

  “Hey, Brooklyn?” she asks quietly, biting her bottom lip nervously.

  Finally! I knew there had to be a nice kid in there somewhere.

  Bending over, I rest my hands on my knees so we’re at eye level, and I give her a smile.

  “What’s up?”

  She smiles at me for the first time, and I notice she’s got the exact same dimples in both of her cheeks as her father. This kid is going to be a heartbreaker when she’s a teenager.

  Grace leans in closer to me and rests her hand on my shoulder.

  “Suck it.”

  Before I can come up with an appropriate response, Grace whirls around and whips me in the face with her hair, before marching back into her room and slamming her door closed so hard it rattles the hinges.

  “You little motherfucker,” I mutter under my breath as I stand back up.

  I spend the next hour stomping around upstairs, going from room-to-room, screaming Mia’s name, bribing her with my first paycheck, promising to buy her her very own McDonald’s, and even agreeing to let her do my hair and makeup every single day for the rest of the summer.

  Nothing works, and I’m really starting to panic. What if she’s hiding somewhere eating peanut butter and silently choked on it? What if she snuck out of a window, fell into some bushes, and broke all her bones? What if she’s pooping somewhere and got exhausted talking to herself, fell in the bowl, and drowned?

  Not even the prospect of being able to snoop through Clint’s bedroom made me feel better. The smell of cedar and sandalwood just distracted me and made me more flustered than I already was. I didn’t even care about going through the medicine cabinet in his bathroom to see if he had a prescription for Viagra, or rifle through his nightstand in the hopes of finding gay porn I could use against him. All I could think about was Clint walking through the front door and the look on his face when I had to tell him that his baby got flushed down the toilet.

  Racing into the kitchen once again, I start opening all the lower cabinets, pulling every single item out of them, and flinging them around the room, hoping Mia might be hiding behind something and I missed her the first ten times I looked in these damn things. Pots and pans go flying, cutting boards smack against the fridge, a handheld mixer goes skidding across the hardwood floor, and an entire drawer of wooden spoons, plastic spatulas, rolling pins, and rubber scrapers gets upended, just in case she curled into a ball in the bottom of the drawer and piled everything on top of her.

  Stepping over the disaster, I swallow back the tears as I go to the opposite side of the kitchen, and slide open the white, double barn doors in front of the pantry.

  “You found me!”

  “Jesus Christ!” I shout, when Mia throws her arms out in excitement, a bag of sugar falling out of her hands and spilling all over the floor at my feet.

  “Jesus Christ!” she screams back, clapping her hands together in glee.

  She’s sitting cross-legged on the top shelf, and I don’t even want to think about how she managed to climb up there without falling. All I know is that there is a jumbo-sized jar of peanut butter and about twenty very sharp knives within her reach.

  “I win hide-and-seek!” she singsongs as I walk into the pantry, push up on my toes, grab her under the arms, and gently pull her down from her hiding spot. I hug her tightly to me as she wraps her arms and legs around me like a spider monkey.

  Her sticky fingers start playing with my hair that didn’t make it up into the very messy ponytail she put on one side of my head, and I don’t even care that she’s making it look worse and putting more knots into it than it already has.

  I should probably be concerned that she has sugar all around her nose and upper lip, and I’m fairly confident she was snorting that shit while she was in the pantry, but I’m not. I don’t care. She didn’t drown in the toilet, and it looks like none of her bones are broken.

  “I was hiding behind the back door over there, and I watched you look in here three times, and I was laughing so hard, but I covered my mouth so you wouldn’t hear me, and when you left the room, I climbed up in here and I win hide-and-seek!” she rambles, shouting in my face so loudly it makes me wince.

  She starts squirming in my arms, and even though I kind of want to hold onto her forever just to reassure myself that she’s alive, I have to put her down before I drop her.

  “I win, I win, I win, I win! I get to pet a unicorn, and I get McDonald’s, and I get to do your makeup again, and I get aaall the sparkles!” she shouts, running around me in circles a few times before she zooms out of the pantry so fast all I see is a blur of dirty blonde hair and a cloud of sugar fluttering to the ground in her wake.

  With a sigh, I pick up the half empty bag of sugar from the ground and set it on one of the shelves, shaking my head when I get a better look at the pantry.

  There are at least fifty opened and empty packets of Kool-Aid littering the ground, along with two empty boxes of cereal, one empty box of Twinkies along with all the empty clear, plastic wrappers that used to house them, and an open bottle of syrup tipped over on the top shelf that is now dripping down onto the pile of garbage all over the floor.

  “What the fuck?”

  I jump and let out a scream, turning away from the carnage in the pantry so fast I smack right into Clint. His hands quickly wrap around my upper arms to steady me, and my hands automatically press flatly against his chest.

  Holy pectoral muscles, Batman.

  Clint is looking down at me, and I’m looking up at him, and we’re standing so close I can feel his breath on my face and see the gold flecks in his green eyes. He lost the cowboy hat at some point today, and now I
can see his dirty blond hair that’s cut really short on the sides and a little longer on top. It’s just long enough for it to be messy from him running his fingers through it, and I suddenly have the urge to reach up and run my fingers through it to see if it’s as soft as it looks.

  “The ’80s called. They want their hair and makeup back,” he laughs softly, breaking me out of my thoughts and the ridiculous feelings I was having.

  I don’t have feelings. Not anymore. I turned them off after Stephen the Shithole. I especially don’t have feelings for Cunty Clint. I probably got a secondhand sugar high from Mia. That’s the only explanation for what’s happening right now.

  Jerking my arms out of his hold, I take a step back from him to clear my thoughts. Instead of making it look all defiant and graceful, I slip on the pile of sugar on the floor and slam my back into one of the shelves, managing to grab onto it and steady myself before I fall flat on my ass and look like an even bigger idiot.

  Clint crosses his arms over his impressive chest, and the corner of his mouth tips up as he watches me flail around in his pantry. Lifting my chin, I run my fingers through my hair that isn’t in a ponytail hanging all askew off the side of my head, and the damn things get stuck in a sugar-peanut-butter-Kool-Aid-who-knows-what-the-fuck-else knot. It takes me a few seconds to extract them, and I lift my chin once again and walk around him, making sure to smack my shoulder against his arm as I go.

  “Grace is in her room, and Mia is most likely attempting to fly off the roof. She probably won’t be hungry for dinner, since she ate roughly three pounds of sugar today. Have fun with that!” I chirp as I continue moving through the kitchen and out into the hallway.

  My hand pauses on the knob to the front door when I hear Clint shout from the kitchen.

  “Where the hell are all my knives? And my toaster?”

  “Get a mirror and bend over!” I shout back, smiling to myself for the first time since that stupid hide-and-seek game.

  I slam the door closed behind me, pausing on the front steps. My smile quickly falls when I realize having the last word wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. I have to wake up tomorrow and live through this hell all over again.

  “In the words of Mrs. Sherwood—sweet, merciful Jesus, take me now,” I mutter to myself.

  Chapter 7

  Past Life

  I hid it really well from everyone around me, but I hated my life when I was a teenager. I hated being in a house where I could still smell my mother’s perfume, but was starting to forget what she looked like, since my dad got rid of all her pictures. I hated that every time I tried to talk about her, ask questions about her, or even mention her name, my dad would storm off into his room and not come out until the next morning, pretending like nothing ever happened. A month after she left, I stopped trying to talk to him about her.

  I lied to everyone I knew, even Ember, about my relationship with my mother. You would think in a town this small, my lies would have been figured out pretty quickly, but my dad’s complete and utter refusal to talk about her helped me out in that way at least. Whenever Ember would ask about her, I’d tell her we talked on the phone all the time, and I’d tell her our relationship was better than ever. Whenever I got something new to wear to school and friends would ask about it, I’d tell them my mother bought it and sent it to me. Every summer, I spent a week at my grandparents’ house in Idaho. When I came home, I’d gush about how my mom stayed there with me, how she took me to all the best malls to go shopping, and how we’d stay up until all hours of the night talking.

  I made up elaborate tales about my mother, and how she’d always dreamed of moving back to New York one day, the city she grew up in, and where my father met her when he was stationed there in the Navy. I told them she never wanted to move back here to Montana when he left the Navy, but she did it for my dad, and made it work for as long as she could. I told them how she fell out of love with my dad and decided to take the leap and move back to make it easier on him. I explained to everyone that it killed her to leave me, but she didn’t want to uproot me and take me away from my friends and the only home I’d ever known during my teenage years. I told them she was waiting for me in New York, and that’s why I couldn’t wait to get out of here.

  The truth was, I have no fucking clue where my mother went when she left us. I came home from school two weeks after I turned thirteen and found my dad sitting at the kitchen table with a note from her in his hand that simply said I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.

  I thought it was a joke. I thought I would run into their bedroom and find her sitting on their bed where she’d smile and say, “Gotcha!” When I ran into their bedroom, all I saw were empty drawers still pulled out of the dresser, and her half of the closet completely bare. She never called. She never sent a postcard or a letter. She disappeared into thin air. The last time I saw her was before I left for school that morning. She tried to get me to eat a piece of toast and an apple. I rolled my eyes and huffed, and told her to stop nagging me, that I’d eat something if I was hungry. To this day, I always eat breakfast, even if I’m not hungry. It’s ridiculous, and I’m thirty years old and know it’s ridiculous, but I still wonder every day—if I would have sat down at the kitchen table with her and eaten that stupid toast and that dumb apple, smiled at her instead of rolling my eyes, maybe she wouldn’t have left.

  The only true fact in all the bullshit I spewed to everyone was that my mother was indeed from New York, and that’s where she met my father. I always wanted to go to New York, even before she left, but after she was gone, it turned into an obsession. I imagined walking down the street and bumping into her. I pictured her crying, throwing her arms around me, and telling me she never should have left me. Obviously, that never happened, but I spent the last twelve years constantly aware of my surroundings whenever I walked through the city, always searching for her among the crowds of people.

  The last time I saw Clint before I moved to New York was the day I graduated from high school. He was a sophomore at UCLA and he’d only been able to come home twice since he left White Timber, both of those times at Christmas. Since my dad and I traveled a few hours away to see his side of the family on holidays, I never got to see Clint when he came home those two times. When I was at the farm and Clint would call from college to check in, Mrs. Hastings would pass the phone around so he could talk to everyone. When it was my turn, he would ask me how many guys I turned gay with my shrill, annoying voice, and I would ask him how many chicks he gave herpes to.

  I told Ember and anyone who would listen that it was a good thing he never came home and we couldn’t be in the same room with each other, or one of us would have died. Namely, him.

  I only told my diary and the Joshua Jackson poster on my ceiling that I kind of missed him. I missed the way he would run his hands through his shaggy hair whenever he was frustrated. I missed how his dorky eyes would light up whenever he talked about computers. I even missed fighting with the big nerd. Fighting with him made me forget about the fact that my mother never loved me and didn’t give a shit about me. Coming up with new barbs to lob at him, and new rumors to spread, gave me something else to think about other than all the things I did that made her leave. Clint was the only person in town who never asked me about my mother. Not that we ever had any kind of meaningful conversations or anything like that, but he also never once used her against me in our arguments or insults. I thought about her so much on a daily basis that he made me forget I was unlovable and easy to leave.

  The last time I saw him before a few days ago, Ember’s parents threw us a joint graduation party at the farm for all our family and friends, and it started off as one of the best days I’d ever had. Ember’s parents told me they were surprising her by flying Clint in for the party, and it killed me to keep it a secret from her. Especially since I’d spent a week writing down every good, new insult I’d come up with since the last time he called home, and it was hard not to share them with her and gau
ge her level of amusement to know whether they were good or not. I had a few doozies about syphilis and some research I’d done on that I was dying to use on him about how many computer nerds had to go to the emergency room on a yearly basis from jerking off too much because they couldn’t get laid.

  I spent twice as long on my hair and makeup, and squeezed my ass into that damn little black dress he’d made fun of a few years prior, even though my boobs had grown in size, and I knew he’d definitely make another comment about me shopping in the toddler section. I was eighteen, and finally legal, and I thought maybe a few years in college hanging out with dorks all the time would make him desperate enough to maybe make a move on me.

  Much to my surprise, Clint spent the entire party completely ignoring me. Not one comment about my dress, and not one insult about my annoying voice. Nothing. He never even glanced in my direction. I was always known as the girl who didn’t drink in high school. My dad, as distant as he was, was also kind of a cool dad in his own way. I was always allowed to drink, as long as I did it at home, or stayed wherever I was, and I let him know what was going on. Because of that freedom, getting drunk out in a cornfield with the rest of my classmates who paid an older brother or sister to buy them booze never appealed to me. I was always everyone’s designated driver, which—let me tell you—is as annoying as you would think. I don’t know how many times I had to clean up puke out of the back of my car, or help sneak someone through their bedroom window so their parents wouldn’t know they were hammered.

  On the night of our graduation party, I snuck out into the horse barn with half the football team and a handful of cheerleaders, and proceeded to drink myself silly after I’d had enough of being ignored by Clint. And since I’d never had much more than a sip of alcohol before that point, four Bartles and Jaymes strawberry daiquiri wine coolers was all it took before I was giggling like an idiot and tripping over everything.