All Fall Down

by Megan Hart

  “I just… I’d have to ask my dad.”

  His laughter slid away the moment it left his mouth when he saw she wasn’t laughing along. “Really? You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head.

  “I figured you were my age.”

  Sunny didn’t want to talk about this anymore, but he was still looking at her. “I’m going to be twenty.”

  “I just turned twenty,” Tyler said. “I don’t ask my parents if I can go out. Is it like…some religious thing?”

  He meant the clothes, she thought. Or maybe her past clung to her like a stink. Sunny shook her head. Then nodded.

  Tyler’s smile was half of normal, but it still warmed her. “Okay. So. Ask your dad.”

  She opened her mouth to say no. What came out instead was, “I will.”

  Chapter 30

  Liesel’s mother is about to scream. Liesel can see this by the furious way her mom’s trying to light her cigarette, but her shaking hands are making it impossible. Robbie cringes behind Liesel, and Gretchen is stone-faced, though her eyes are glittery with tears and her cheeks are bright red. Liesel hasn’t started to cry yet, but she does want to run away.

  Fast.

  “How. Hard. Is. It?” Mom’s words crack on Liesel’s ears the way stones shatter glass. “How many times do I have to say it?”

  Robbie lets out a little whimper. Liesel wants to poke him, tell him to shut up, because when Mom gets like this, she’s like one of those lionesses in the grass on one of those nature programs the family watches on Sunday nights. Don’t draw her attention to you, and you might escape alive.

  “You kids,” Mom says, “are driving me crazy. You know that? How many times do I have to ask you to pick. Up. Your. Crap! Pick it up! Don’t throw your shoes and coats on the floor! Hang them up, put them in the closet! If something belongs to you, put it away, for the love of God!”

  Liesel can’t be sure what prompted the tirade, but she’s pretty sure it was Gretchen. She always comes in the front door from school and dumps her stuff on the dining room table so she can run downstairs to watch that stupid cartoon all of her friends are so into. It could’ve been Robbie, he never puts away his shoes. Or his toys. His stuff is always all over the place.

  “Liesel!” her mother cries loud enough to snap Liesel’s attention back toward her. “This isn’t brain surgery!”

  Her mother points at the kitchen sink with one perfectly manicured fingernail. She’s finally managed to light her cigarette, and she draws in the smoke now, eyes narrowed against it. She holds it for a second, so when she talks she sounds harsh and breathy.

  “Dirty cups go in the goddamn dishwasher!”

  “Oh.” Liesel’s stomach sinks. Yes, she’d had a drink of water from the faucet and had put her cup in the sink, not the dishwasher. “But it was full!”

  Her mother hits the latch and the door to the dishwasher falls open. Her mother points again. “Yeah, with clean dishes. If you see that? Here’s a small clue. Put the dishes away. Then put the dirty dish in the dishwasher! This is not difficult.”

  She points at Gretchen. “You. Go get all your crap off the table, or I swear by all that is holy I will throw it all in the trash.”

  At Robbie. “You. If I find one more dirty sock anyplace other than the laundry—if I find any single article of your dirty clothes, for that matter, in any location other than the appropriate laundry basket—I will take one dollar out of your allowance for every single thing. Do you hear me?”

  Robbie and Gretchen nod. Liesel has already moved toward the dishwasher. Her mother takes in another long drag and lets it out, the smoke rancid and making Liesel want to choke.

  “Are we all clear on everything?”

  The kids nod. It’s better not to speak. Nothing they say will make any of this better. Besides that, they know they’re wrong. Mom does ask them all the time to do exactly what she’s asking now. But it doesn’t seem fair that she gets so darned mad about it.

  “Good.” Mom stabs out her cigarette and takes a deep breath. “We all live here. Right? And I know you have this crazy idea that I just love cleaning up after you, but the fact is, I do not. There is more to my life than doing your laundry.”

  Liesel can’t imagine what else her mom might do all day other than laundry and clean, but wisely, she keeps her mouth shut. She considers herself lucky that she got away with only having to unload the dishwasher—she could’ve been grounded. That would’ve sucked.

  Mom sighs. “And really…I hate yelling like this.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy.” Robbie is kind of a suck-up, but when he squeezes Mom around the waist she does smile.

  Phew. The worst has passed. At least until tomorrow when the same conversation probably will happen all over again.

  That was what Liesel thought of when the words popped out of her mouth. “There is more to my life than cleaning up after you.”

  Peace, hands and mouth smeared with chocolate pudding, blinks and says nothing. Happy frowns. Bliss, firmly ensconced on Liesel’s hip, babbles something so cute and precious it would be nice to take a second to appreciate it, but Liesel is caught between her genuine and somewhat frightening fury and her shame at realizing that she’s turned into everything she swore she’d never be.

  “Happy, didn’t I ask you to watch your sister?” Ten minutes, that was all it had taken for Liesel to take the baby upstairs to change her diaper. Ten minutes and thirty seconds that had apparently been long enough for two kids to destroy the kitchen.

  Half-gallon of milk on the floor, mostly spilled. Two glasses half-full, contents slopped on the table. Chocolate pudding cups completely emptied, though it seemed more of the pudding ended up all over Peace’s face and clean shirt than in her mouth.

  “Peace was thirsty,” Happy said. “I had to get it for her.”

  Liesel knew the kids were a little wild with the idea that they were allowed to help themselves to stuff from the fridge, and the last thing she wanted to do was have Peace revert to asking her every twenty minutes if she could have a drink or something to eat. Happy wouldn’t—he was still very much attached to the idea of a schedule. But he’d help his sister do whatever he thought was necessary to keep her content. It was sweet, actually.

  Just messy.

  Liesel sighed, bouncing Bliss on her hip. “I have to put Bliss down for her nap. Why don’t you go in the den and play.”

  Upstairs, Bliss fussed when Liesel put her into the crib, though it was at least half an hour past the time she normally went down for a nap. It was the second day in a row Bliss had fought going to sleep in the morning, and Liesel really hoped this meant she wasn’t trying to give it up. That hour in the morning had become precious to her, one of two times a day when she could set the other kids in front of the TV and grab a shower. Or God, just go pee by herself.

  She hadn’t shaved her legs in two weeks. No time, and when she thought of it, she was usually too tired to bother. Her hair was in desperate need of both a trim and a color touch-up. No time for that either, unless she wanted to drag three kids along with her to the stylist, who never seemed to have any appointments available on the days Sunny didn’t work or after she got home. Liesel hadn’t yet broken down enough to go to one of those mall salons, but it was getting close. There was only so much a couple of bobby pins or a baseball cap could handle.

  None of this had been anything like she expected, which was stupid on her part since she’d certainly been privy to Becka’s grousing about how hard it was to be at home with kids. But somehow Liesel’d thought things would be…different. Because they weren’t her children? Because she wanted this so much? Or because it was the only way she could stop herself from dwelling on the fact she’d quit her job and it was the first time in her entire adult life she hadn’t had a payc
heck to call her own.

  There was a lot of good in not working, sure. The longer she was away from the print shop, the more she realized the good parts hadn’t even come close to making up for the bad. And the rewards of hearing Happy teaching his sister her ABCs from a book Liesel had ordered online, of watching them slowly blossom from the frightened children they’d been at the playground that first day to kids confident enough to run and play and swing…there’d been nothing like that in her life before now.

  It was all the rest of it she couldn’t quite manage. The constant noise. The mess. The lack of bathroom privacy. Hell, the lack of any privacy. Leaving the door open a crack in case of cries in the night had become second nature, just like any small sound had become an interruption to whatever few-and-far-between intimacies she and Christopher managed.

  Even when Sunny was home, it wasn’t much easier. The kids had started turning to Liesel first before anyone else, so even with their mom in the house they went to Liesel for snacks, drinks, to put a new movie in the DVD player, to get out the games from the cupboard.

  Sunny’s days off from the shop were Liesel’s days off from child care and housework, at least ostensibly. But with Sunny on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor in the kitchen, Liesel couldn’t exactly plop herself down on the couch with a bucket of bonbons to glut herself on daytime television. First, she’d have had to wrestle the remote away from Peace and Happy who’d become addicted to sickly sweet kiddie programming that made Liesel want to poke out her eyes. Second, Sunny never complained about cleaning no matter how messy the house got, and that made Liesel feel like she shouldn’t, either. Sunny was in the bathroom right now, scrubbing the toilet and the shower. Singing while she did it. The lilting melody of “The Sound of Silence” filtered into the hall. Liesel hadn’t run in a week.

  Stupid. Bliss, Peace and Happy were Sunny’s children and her responsibility, and there was no reason why Liesel should feel one second of guilt about leaving her here alone with them. Especially because it had been months since there’d been any need to worry about something going wrong. Yet there Liesel was, rushing through showers, forgetting to shave her legs, foregoing her daily run, all in order to get back out there and help Sunny with the cleaning and the kids and everything else.

  It was amazing, though, what just an extra pair of hands could do. In a couple of hours Sunny and Liesel had managed to clean the whole house, feed the kids and even fold and put away three baskets of laundry. Both the washer and dryer were still going, but as Liesel looked around her newly cleaned kitchen, she felt as if she could take a full, long breath. The first in days.

  Sunny had taken Peace and Happy outside to play, and Liesel drank in the quiet. She mixed up some lemonade using real lemons, scrubbed to make sure they were clean from pesticide, and real sugar because chemical sweeteners were full of…well, chemicals. Sunny was a walking encyclopedia of what food was good and what was bad, but Liesel had to admit, homemade lemonade tasted better than any powdered substitute. She took it out to the deck along with a plate of crackers and cheese. The kids were playing tag and Sunny was sitting next to the angel, so Liesel poured two tall glasses of lemonade and took them down to her.

  She handed one to Sunny. “It’s hot out here. Have some lemonade.”

  Sunny took it. “Thanks.”

  Liesel looked at the angel and her poor, sad garden. “Maybe she cries because there aren’t any flowers.”

  Sunny looked startled. “What?”

  “The angel.” Liesel gestured. “Maybe she cries because I haven’t planted any real flowers.”

  Sunny looked around at the garden. “I like the wildflowers. They grow however they want to. And they come back all on their own.”

  Liesel sat on the warm stone bench and sipped cold lemonade. “They’re weeds, mostly.”

  “I don’t care. They’re still pretty.”

  Sunny looked…edgy, was the only way Liesel could think to describe it. Cagey. A little shifty, even.

  Dr. Braddock had told them it was okay to ask Sunny if she was all right as many times as it seemed necessary, but to be prepared for her to resent it. She’d also told them to be ready for Sunny to push at boundaries and rules the same way the children did. So far, nothing like that had happened, but Liesel kept waiting.

  She should ask Sunny what was bothering her, but then Liesel would know, and she’d have to figure out a way to help Sunny solve all her problems…and right now, sitting in the hot sun with cold lemonade, the only problem Liesel wanted to solve was how to find a way to take a nap. They sat together in the hot sunshine and drank lemonade while the children played. Liesel basked in the sun, letting it paint the inside of her eyes with crimson.

  She’d thought wanting this so much would make it all easier, but none of it was.

  Chapter 31

  Liesel went for a run after dinner, leaving Sunny to clean up the dishes. She didn’t mind. Bliss was happy enough on Chris’s lap, while Peace did her best to talk his ear off from his other knee. Happy had been a good helper, clearing off the table and loading the dishwasher. He sat at the table now, coloring in one of the many books Liesel had picked up for him. He sat close enough that Chris could comment on what he was doing. It warmed her to see that closeness, because although Chris never seemed thrilled about having her there, it was clear that he loved her kids.

  She’d brought home some leftover chocolate cake and pastries, bought with her own money and her employee discount. Silly things, not at all healthy, but knowing she’d paid for them with money she’d earned herself made them taste so much sweeter. Maybe knowing they were bad for her did, too.

  “I can make some coffee,” she said.

  Chris looked up as though startled she’d spoken to him. He probably was. They hardly ever talked. Well, he barely spoke to her, and she’d taken the cue from him. Their morning and afternoon car rides were spent listening to the radio with only an occasional comment in between. He always said “have a good day” when she got out, but he never asked how her day had been when she got in again.

  “I learned how at work,” Sunny told him. “I’m pretty good at it.”

  “Sure. I’d like some coffee. That would be great.”

  He hardly looked at her, either. It was because of that night when she’d come across him in the den, when he’d pulled her onto his lap. She’d assumed he was the sort of man who would do that to a girl, even his daughter, but she’d learned since then he wasn’t. She wondered if he’d ever be her dad.

  She made the coffee while she finished up the last of the dishes, then brought him a cup fixed the way he liked it. “Sugar and cream, right?”

  “Yeah…thanks.” Chris nudged Peace off his lap and put Bliss on the floor to follow her. Now that she’d learned to crawl, you couldn’t keep her still. “Go play. This is hot stuff.”

  “C’mon, Bliss. Let’s play with the blocks.” Peace could be inconsistently kind to her baby sister, but now she patiently waited for the baby to crawl after her across the tile floor and down the hall.

  “Be careful,” Chris called after them. He looked at Sunny. “Will they be okay?”

  “We’ve put everything Bliss can get into up high, and there’s a baby gate to keep her from the stairs. They’ll be okay.” Sunny took a mug of coffee for herself. She always thought she’d learn to like it. Maybe she would, eventually.

  After dinner, if he was even home for it, Chris usually disappeared upstairs to work out or into the den to watch TV, since he could close the door against the kids. Tonight he sat with his mug in his hands, spinning it slowly on the tabletop.

  “So,” he said, “how’s…work?”

  Surprised, Sunny wasn’t sure how to answer. “I like it.”

  “Good.”

  So many of the blemished didn’t know what
to do with silence. Sunny’d learned that well enough at the coffee shop, where people insisted on talking, talking. To be “social,” they said, but she thought it was because they didn’t really know what to do with themselves if they had to listen to what was in their heads instead of what came out from their mouths.

  “I’m sorry,” Chris said suddenly. “I’m bad at this.”

  She had no idea what he meant. Chris was good at lots of things—he’d fixed the sink when it broke and he had a real knack for getting Peace to calm down when she was wound up about something. He was bad at lots of things, too, like picking up after himself and turning off lights and closing cupboards. She looked around the kitchen now, trying to see what he was talking about.

  “At being your dad,” Chris said.

  “Oh.” Her voice sounded smaller than usual, and Sunny focused on her mug. “Well…I’ve never really had a…dad, Chris. If that helps any.”

  “Liesel said I should talk to you more.”

  Sunny laughed. “About what?”

  He shrugged. “About anything, I guess.”

  She considered this. She and Liesel talked all the time, about the children, the house, grocery lists. What would a daughter talk to her father about? Something important? She thought about telling him Josiah had come into the shop, but what could she have said about it? He came in, talked to her, left.

  She didn’t want to tell Chris about Josiah.

  Still, he was looking at her expectantly and also a little fearfully. “Well, there is something.”

  Chris cleared his throat. “Hit me.”

  “There’s a…boy.”

  “What kind of boy?” His brow furrowed, eyes narrowing.

  “He comes into the shop,” Sunny explained. “His name is Tyler. He goes to the community college.”

  “Is he bothering you? I’ll talk to Amy and Wendy.” Chris frowned.

  Sunny shook her head. “No. Not bothering me. He’s…nice. He asked me to go to the movies and dinner with him.”