Full of Grace

by Misty Provencher

  The doorbell still gets me up first. I untangle myself from Sher as carefully as I can, but whoever keeps laying on the doorbell is more to blame for waking her.

  “Don’t answer it,” Sher groggles from the bed.

  “Why not?”

  “It could be Trent, and he’ll shoot you in the face if you open the door.”

  “I doubt he’s coming back here, but thanks for the heads-up.” I still have my clothes on from last night. I run a hand through my hair before I take a glimpse through the peephole.

  It’s Lisa. And a wiggling pile of Sher’s siblings, who are climbing all over each other, like escaped acrobats from a circus. I hesitate to open the door. Although it’s not Trent, Lisa is just as likely to shoot me in the face.

  “What took you so long?” she says when I finally open up. Her eyes pause on the skating spider tattoo, but then she just rolls her eyes and says, “Sher’s still here, isn’t she?”

  The kids bubble over the threshold, repeating Lisa’s question and asking who put the spider on my face, before they start scouting through my house like curious cats. One of the boys climbs onto my couch, grabs the remote, and works it like a pro. He’s got cartoons on before I can ask him if he wants help. His own search for his sister is over.

  “Ma? What are you doing here?” Sher shuffles down the hall, in her shirt and panties, straightening her ponytail. Her little sister runs to her and throws her arms around Sher’s legs. Lisa drops a bag from her shoulder onto the floor. She glances at Sher, catching the tattoo collage on her arm and, I’m pretty sure, at least the edge of the cheeky monkey. Lisa doesn’t seem to miss much. She frowns, but doesn’t comment.

  “I need a favor,” she says. “Marco let me pick up an extra shift because Dean’s sick.”

  I figure Sher’s going to melt and fold at her mom’s feet, telling her how crappy life is treating her. I wait for her to complain to Lisa about Trent, or to beg her mom to let her move back home. But instead, Sher crosses her arms over her chest so tightly, her new pregnancy cleavage pops a little over her forearms.

  I have to stay focused. Especially with Lisa in the room.

  “You kicked me out and now you want me to do you favors?” Sher says. Lisa rolls her tongue in her cheek. “You got a lot of nerve.”

  “Watch that mouth,” Lisa warns and I notice that Sher drops her arms to her sides as Lisa continues. “You’re still my daughter and you’re still their big sister, Sher. You can help your family out. They’re giving me grief over staying with Donny and Christine.”

  “Donny smells like cheese,” the boy on the couch says.

  “And Cris-een always falls asleep and spills Stinky Drink on me.”

  “That only happened once,” Lisa says, turning back to Sher. “I’m in a jam, for pete’s sake. Can you just help me out this once?”

  “Alright, fine,” Sher grumbles.

  “You don’t want us to come here no more?” the girl asks from Sher’s leg. Sher rubs her sister’s head.

  “Of course I want you here. But Mom has to get you a new babysitter.”

  “Nobody wants to babysit ‘em!” Lisa complains as she turns to go. “They don’t listen to nobody else but you.”

  When the door finally shuts, there are four little kids left in my apartment. The only thing I am sure of is this: I am dangerously outnumbered.

  ***

  Sher says she’s going to take a shower. She leaves me with all four of her siblings starring me down from the couch. They had strict orders to watch cartoons, but that’s not what they do. They wait until the second the shower turns on; then they go to work.

  One starts taking apart the remote. The blondest one disappears into the kitchen. I follow him in when I hear a box of cereal spill all over the floor.

  “Need help?” I ask. The kid is kneeling on my counter, with the cupboard door hanging open. And the box didn’t just fall. He threw it.

  “I want Fruity-O’s. Where are they?”

  “I don’t have Fruity-O’s,” I say, picking up the box off the floor. “But you can help sweep these up…what’s your name?”

  “Whitman,” he says, jumping off the counter. He walks out of the kitchen, the cereal crunching under his feet. I’m about to grab him by his grimy collar when something else crashes in the bedroom.

  Holy shit. Did one of them lean on the window screen and fall out?

  I rush in, to find the third little boy in mid-spring on my bed. One end of the frame has broken loose from the headboard from his jumping. Sher’s little sister has found a bottle of lube that must have rolled under the bed. She’s sitting beside the bouncing mattress, sniffing a puddle of the liquid that she’s poured into her palm.

  “Get off the bed,” I tell the boy. He just moves to the other edge, furthest from me, and continues hopping.

  “Say the magic word!”

  “Please stop jumping on my bed,” I say, but he doesn’t stop. His lubed sister, who has touched the tip of her tongue to the lube puddle, scrunches up her face.

  “That was the magic word, Beck,” she says, still grimacing. “You got to get off.”

  “Nuh uh. He didn’t say it right. He’s gotta say, stop jumping PLEASE.”

  “Stop jumping, please,” I echo, and Beck’s face drops into a frown. He stops jumping. Ha.

  The shower turns off, and like someone’s sounded an alarm, Beck leaps off the bed. Sher’s sister dumps the open lube bottle on the dresser and wipes the gunk smeared in her palm on the back of her dress. I snatch up the open bottle before my dresser is coated. I hear the kids vault onto the couch, giggling and shushing each other. Then, silence.

  Sher steps out of the bathroom in a puff of steam. She looks like a goddess with her hair slicked back and the towel winched tightly around her, outlining every curve. Shooting a quick glance at her couched siblings before walking into the bedroom, she spots the bottle of lube in my hands.

  “What,” she says, stopping in her tracks, “are you doing?”

  I cap the lube and drop it in my dresser drawer.

  “I’m not doing anything, but trying to protect the place from your brothers and your little sister. They’re monsters!”

  Her eyes narrow to slits, but it’s not aimed at me. She spins on her heel, stomps out of the bedroom, and marches into the living room. I watch her little rear end sway under the towel and follow her, just so I can keep watching it.

  She stomps right to the edge of the couch, stopping at the straight row of little feet that are all hanging just over the edge of the cushion, unable to touch the floor. Sher plants her own feet, pointing with one accusatory finger and clutching her towel with the other, as she growls at her siblings, “What did you do?”

  The guilt is as thick as the lube all over her little sister’s hands. Sher’s siblings hang their heads, peeking at one another with chins down, each waiting for the other to squeal first.

  “You better tell me now, ‘cause you know I’m gonna figure it out, and when I do, then everybody’s gonna be in trouble.” Sher’s tone sends a shiver down my own spine. “Chandler, tell me what happened.”

  The kid who was taking apart my remote, pushes out his lower lip in a quivering pout. He can hardly keep it together as he holds out the batteries to her. Sher pulls them from his grasp and slams them down on the coffee table.

  “What’d I tell you about taking apart other people’s things?”

  “To not to.”

  “That’s right,” she seethes, but she turns her laser beam glare to the three others. “What else do I need to know about?”

  “Beck was jumping,” Sher’s sister whispers. Beck’s eyes get wide.

  “Whitman threw that guy’s poopy cereal all over the floor!”

  “Dani was using his perfume!”

  The little girl elbows her squealing brother. “That wasn’t perfume! It was granola oil, and it didn’t even smell good!”

  “It’s canola oil, stupid,” Whitman corrects her under his breath. />
  “Enough!” Sher stomps one foot and the kids clamp their mouths shut. “This is my house now. All of you had better behave while you’re here, or you can’t come back, you hear?”

  They nod and Chandler loses it. He sniffles as if Sher just beat him, and Dani joins in. Sher doesn’t ease off.

  “You are all going to sit here until I’m done with my hair. If anybody gets off this couch, so help me, they’re in big trouble, got it?”

  When they nod, the last two finally start sucking wind, their lips flapping as they try to stop themselves from crying. Sher seems satisfied.

  “If you behave,” she says a little more softly, “we can have fun, but we won’t do anything if even one of you acts up, understand me? Now sit and watch your cartoons.”

  “Okay,” they answer in unison. Sher turns and blows past me with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry. They won’t do anything else.”

  “No problem,” I say. I’m absolutely floored. I pretty much just watched Sher single-handedly dismantle the atomic bomb of her siblings.

  The bathroom door closes and when I turn back to the couch, the four of them finally look up at me, each with teary, remorseful eyes. Their lips are all quivering, trying to hold back the waterworks. I look back at the bathroom door and then at the four kids again.

  “I can’t jump on the bed when she’s around either,” I whisper.

  “Is that why she put a spider on your face?” Dani giggles.

  ***

  It’s a surprisingly easy afternoon. I pick up pizza, which is it’s own adventure, since I have a skating spider on my face. The pizza is a reward for the kids, for not destroying my apartment, and when I get back with it, the kids cloud around the table, actually sitting on their butts and chewing with their mouths closed, like Sher tells them to.

  The kids act like Sher’s their mom, doing what she tells them and ashamed of themselves when they don’t. Whit has an accident in his pants and after Sher cleans him up, he clings to her leg and is only comforted when she rubs his back and tells him it’s okay. Chandler begs her at least thirty times to come back home.

  “I can’t,” Sher tells him with an uplifting giggle. “I live here now. With Landon.”

  She doesn’t look at me when she says it, but I stare at her. She says it simply, warmly even—as if she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. Her words soothe me, as if I were clinging to her leg too.

  “Trent said you’re gonna be just like Mama,” Dani chirps.

  “He did, huh?” Sher drops her crust on her plate with a frown. It’s obvious to me what he meant and that Sher’s taking it the same way. Having spent the afternoon with the Traifere clan, it’s not hard to notice that Sher and her sister are the only two that look anything alike. Since Sher mentioned that she and her sister have different fathers, it seems to be just luck of the draw. Every one of Sher’s brothers is distinctly different, almost marking the heritages of Lisa’s lovers, as if she went in phases of preference. To say Sher is going to be like Lisa, is calling Sher easy, and I won’t let that happen.

  “I can see what Trent means,” I say, and Sher turns a stunned, painful and horribly agreeable stare on me. I know she could give me her resume of bad habits and short comings. She could sit here all night and try to convince me that she’s nothing. But I see what she is. She can’t hide it from me. I continue as casually as I can, “You’re not made of hairspray and make-up. You’re stronger than that. You’re loyal to your family. You’ll defend your own, take care of your own, and you are a good person. Your mom’s epic, Sher, and in that way, you’re just like her.”

  “I wanna be like Mama too,” Dani says. A blushy kind of giggle wiggles out of Sher, even though she continues to stare at her plate.

  ***

  Lisa is late and I’m a little disappointed when she shows up. The kids have charmed me and I—almost—hate to see them go. Beck has got an impressive career possibility as a stunt man, Chandler reprogrammed my remote, Whit is happy to tell me all of Sher’s secrets, and Dani thinks I poop unicorns.

  The minute Lisa walks in, though, everything changes. The kids go haywire. Three of them spring across my couch and Chandler stands next to the door, kicking the wall, as Lisa repeatedly shouts at the kids to get their shoes on. The chaos goes to a fever pitch, until Sher finally steps in.

  “Knock it off!” she shouts. Everyone freezes. Even me. Sher turns on her mom. “You got to say something, Ma. You can’t just let them run wild!”

  Lisa tips her head and rubs her temple with two wary fingers.

  “Don’t get that tone with me. It’s not like I ask ‘em to act up, Sher.” Lisa turns for the door and Sher herds the rest of her siblings out with their mom. The kids flow away, down the steps to the parking lot. They chase each other around the family’s old boat of a car as Lisa pauses on the top step. She shakes a tired finger at Sher. “Tomorrow, I might need you too.”

  “I can’t,” Sher says.

  “How come? What’s so important?”

  Sher’s body tenses. “Because Ma. You can’t just…I’m not your…”

  “It’s my fault,” I interject. Sher and Lisa both turn on me. “I’m taking Sher out to a friend’s cottage. We were invited through the weekend.”

  “Oh great,” Lisa grunts. She doesn’t buy it, I’m sure of it, but she hobbles down the steps and shouts over her shoulder, “I’ll try to get Marcy to watch ‘em, then. Hope you have fun.”

  Sher’s lips are open and her brows steepled, like a question is trying sneak out of her face, but can’t. Her siblings pile into Lisa’s car and Lisa turns over the engine with a vroom.

  “What?” I ask. Her gaze shifts from Lisa’s car as it finally leaves the lot, to me.

  “She said have fun.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “She wasn’t angry. It sounded like she meant it,” Sher says, and instead of tears, she giggles. “We’ll have to hide out though. My ma will probably drive by here to catch me in the lie. She hates lying.”

  “We don’t have to hide,” I shrug. “It’s not a lie. We aren’t going to be here.”

  Sher scratches her elbow, her gaze suspicious. “Where are we going?”

  “Oscar’s beach house, if we can.”

  “With Hale and Oscar?” Her tone takes an elevator straight to the top floor of Giggle-opolis.

  “No, I think it should just be us,” I tell her. I can tell she’s trying to maintain the maximum level of excitement, but she drops her clasped hands and fidgets with her fingers.

  “Just us?”

  “We won’t have to hide out here,” I say. “Besides, I’ve got some sour memories from the last time I was there that I wouldn’t mind erasing.”

  “You think I could erase them?” Her voice, her eyes, her fidgeting fingers relax into a happy softness.

  “I do,” I tell her with a grin. “Let me call Oscar and see if the house is available.”

  ***

  The next morning, we’re up early and on our way to O.C.’s cottage. The last time I was here, it was with a hot psycho. This time, I’m here with the mother of, possibly, my child.

  We listen to the radio and Sher catnaps and the whole time I’m driving with my mind going in circles. What if the baby really does belong to Bull-Ring? Do I spend nine months with this girl, just hoping it’s mine? What if I get a negative paternity result right after the baby is born? What do I do then? Walk away? Could I? Or raise Bull-Ring’s kid, pretending it’s mine? Could I?

  I just don’t know.

  We stop at a grocery store on the way, after Sher reminds me three times, in increasingly angrier tones each time, that her bladder-alarm is going off. There is only a single bathroom in the store and Sher just about throws an old woman out of the way that is trying to enter the facilities.

  “Sorry, sorry, I’m pregnant!” Sher squeals as she dodges the woman and slides inside the open door first.

  “And I’m 85!” the woman protests, banging her cane once
on the floor.

  “I know! It could take you forever!” Sher slams the door on the old woman. The lady grumbles under her breath and grunts, until she turns and sees me. She studies the skating spider glued to my cheek. Her face blooms into a smile. She adjusts her teeth with a cackle. “Well, if she’s going to steal my turn, at least she left me a nice boy to look at. Is that a gang thing, on your cheek there?”

  “No.” I smile. I think I actually blush.

  Sher whips open the bathroom door and shoots the old lady a relieved grin upon exiting. Sher grabs my arm and I let her lead me away from the 85-year-old cougar with the cane. It’s the first time Sher’s reached for me and her touch straightens out my car-seat-curled vertebrae. We walk through the aisles, attached at the elbows. We.

  I push the cart with one hand and Sher decides which groceries make it into the basket. She compares prices, mostly choosing whatever is lowest, and criticizes the store for gouging its customers on milk. The only thing I care about is that she doesn’t lift her one hand from the crook of my arm the whole time. We move, linked, toward the shelves and coolers, and the one time I miss the cue, she gives me a gentle tug instead of just letting go.

  I’m as good as a dog on her chain. Maybe I was right the first time when I told her I would be here, no matter what. Maybe I knew what I was talking about after all, because right now, she can lead me wherever she wants, and the sad part is that I’m totally okay with it. Happy even.

  ***

  We finally pull up to the cabin and Sher gasps.

  “This is the place Oscar took Hale?” she asks. I nod and Sher giggles. “This is so cool!”

  She scrambles out of the car and I unlock the place with the key that the Maree’s always keep under the welcome mat.

  “Isn’t Oscar worried people will break in?”

  “Around here?” I laugh, motioning to the woods all around. “Nope.”

  We drag in all our stuff.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” she asks. We.

  “Upstairs,” I say. I don’t mention the one bed. I let that slide, with a hopeful silence on the subject. Sher hauls her stuff upstairs and she doesn’t come down screaming, so I figure she’s fine with it.