by J Hoffman
She paused and racked her brain for a moment. “Uh, you know what… I think I did.”
Her eyebrows shot up, “Usually people don’t think about it.”
She shrugged, “I forgot my list.”
“Must’ve been a long list,” the teenager mused.
She nodded, “It was. I feel like I haven’t been here in forever. Did y’all change the store around?”
“We put produce where the pharmacy was and got rid of the pharmacy.”
Natalee looked behind the cashier toward the produce department and nodded knowingly. “That’s what it was!”
“Do you have a rewards card with us?”
“Yes,” she tapped her phone number into the card machine and watched a few dollars fall off from the total. The cashier handed her the receipt and wished her a good day.
After she finished loading the groceries into her car, she glanced at her receipt and noticed it said forty-seven items sold. She was lost in thought about her list as she headed back toward her house. A few streets away from her road, she saw a small video gaming store in a plaza. Either it was new, or she had never noticed it before. She pulled in and slipped the car into park.
Once inside, a short, older man with bright white hair poked his head out from behind a display. “How do you do, ma’am?”
Natalee smiled, “I’m fine, sir. How are you?”
“Oh, no need for that ‘sir’ nonsense. Call me Stan.” He approached her and held out his hand.
She took it and shook it gently. “I’ve never noticed this shop here before, is it new?”
“Oh, no, I’ve been here for years. Decades. Half a century, almost.”
Natalee’s eyebrows shot up in shock. “Really? I only live a few blocks away and I swear I’ve never seen this place!”
“I usually have the invisibility shield on,” his sly smile proved he was joking, but his serious tone danced the line between real life and fantasy.
She chuckled and adjusted her purse on her shoulder, “That must be it then.”
Stan let her be while she browsed the store. She passed the gaming consoles and virtual reality gear. Past the science experiments and action figures, she finally found what she was looking for: a build your own robot kit. She picked out two, a pre-built robot with remote control, and a larger one that could be controlled from Jonah’s smartphone.
She laid the boxes on the counter and Stan beamed at her, “Robots, eh? Wonderful choice.”
“Yeah, they look pretty fun.”
“How has the rest of your day been?”
“Ya know, it’s been pretty great. I think I remembered at forty-seven items on my grocery list. I left the list at home on accident.”
“Well, if you did remember a whole forty-seven item list, you’d be a superhero.”
She chuckled as she slid her card into the machine. “Oh, I’m definitely not a superhero. Just a mom missing a lot of ingredients.”
“Oh, a mom? You are a superhero.”
Natalee blushed, “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Mom is a hard gig. I wouldn’t know, but I’ve seen it happen. You are a hero. Whether you’re super or not is up to you, but I think so. And I bet your children think so too. Plus, no offense, but it’s probable I know a little more about superheroes than you do,” he winked at her with a big grin.
Natalee thanked him for his kind words and left feeling much more light-hearted than when she had gotten there. She thought about their conversation the entire way home. She pulled her list off the refrigerator and pulled out the receipt from the store. She sat down at the breakfast bar and matched every item of her list to every item on the receipt. She stared in disbelief, wondering how she could have possibly remembered that many items without stressing. For a moment, she felt proud of herself and felt good that her memory had been so sharp.
She organized all the food in the kitchen while she put everything away. She tossed the old food and made a pile for donations of things no one ever opened. Jonah grabbed a bag of chips and headed straight for the living room.
“Hey! I’m about to cook dinner!”
He shrugged, “I’m hungry now.”
She rolled her eyes, “You’re something else. You better eat your whole plate.”
“I’m a growing boy!” He hollered from the couch.
She pulled ground beef from her groceries and sat it next to the sink. She pulled out all her spices and added them to the ground beef. She formed a large loaf and placed it on a thin rack over a baking sheet. Once the oven was preheated, she popped her meatloaf into the oven and started boiling water for potatoes. Just as Natalee was slicing up the potatoes, she remembered the gifts for Jonah she had picked up.
“Jonah!” she screamed, not taking her eyes off the potatoes.
“What?” He hollered back; his voice muffled by a mouth full of chips.
“Go check the trunk!”
“Why?”
“Just do it!” She could hear him grumbling over the sound of the chip bag being crumpled shut. He stomped into the kitchen, tossing the bag onto the counter. “You could put those away, you know.”
“I’m not done with them.”
“Dinner is almost done, though.”
He continued to grumble as he grabbed the keys off the keyring by the door and let the garage door swing open until it smacked off the workshop counter behind it. He hit the button to pop the trunk and Natalee could hear his shocked responses from the kitchen.
“Whoa, this is neat!” She heard the bags rustle. “No way!”
He ran back in the house, a box under each arm and he bolted through the kitchen, “Thanks, Mom!”
Before Natalee could ask him not to, he had both robots, and all the pieces dumped out on the dining room table. She could hear him ripping into bags of screws and wires, circuit boards were smacking the wooden table like coins. He activated the pre-built one and was immediately absorbed into learning all its actions and commands.
The remote had a lot of buttons, but Jonah seemed to navigate them easily. He sat at the head of the table and drove the robot into the kitchen. After a few small bumps into the counters and walls, he finally made it to Natalee’s feet. He used the microphone on the remote to talk through a speaker in the robot.
“Mom, can I have a drink please?”
She looked at the tiny robot at her feet, “Am I supposed to give it to him?”
“Yeah, put it in his hand!”
Natalee pulled a juice box out of the fridge and held it out to the robot. After a moment she realized he wasn’t going to physically take it from her, so she set it inside the two claws on his arm. She held it there for a second before the claws snapped shut, grasping the juice box, squeezing a little too hard, and making Natalee panic to grab paper towels. That was just enough for him not to drop it as Jonah navigated it back into a cupboard, a wall and the door frame on its way back into the dining room.
“This is so cool,” Jonah cooed as he grabbed the juice from his little robot friend.
“I’m glad you like it,” Natalee yelled from the kitchen. “Don’t forget to clean up your mess before dinner.”
“Okay!” Jonah agreed as he started to follow his robot around the house. He set it on the stairs and learned the “climb” function. It took the robot approximately twenty-five seconds to completely climb one stair.
As Natalee began mashing the potatoes, she peeked her head around the doorway, “It would be nine and a half times faster for you to pick it up and carry it up the stairs, babe.”
Jonah shrugged, “I don’t care. It’s cool.”
Natalee shrugged too, “Alright. I always knew being cool was a waste of time.” She smiled to herself, pleased with her wit.
She set the meatloaf and the large bowl of mashed potatoes on the dining room table and went back to the kitchen for the duck-shaped gravy boat. She called for Jonah and could hear him stomping across the top floor. He never verbally answered her, but she knew he was coming.
As the two of them finished up their plates, Natalee reminded Jonah to clean up all the pieces of the build-your-own robot he had dumped at the other end of the table. He promised he would and took their plates to the sink. Natalee started cleaning up the kitchen and put a plate away for Judah. She heard Jonah rustling around in the dining room for a couple of minutes before he bolted back up the steps and slammed the door to his room. Natalee frowned, not sure why he would run away so quickly. She peered into the dining room and saw all the pieces still scattered on the table, although they looked slightly more organized.
Her shoulders dropped and she rolled her eyes, “Watch, now he’s gonna say he’s tired.”
She walked to the bottom of the stairs and called his name. She heard nothing but silence. She called his name again, a little louder and listened. Again, she heard nothing. She screamed his name as loud as she could and turned her head to angle her ear up the stairs.
“I’m tired!” Jonah groaned loudly.
She rolled her eyes again, knowing that’s what she was expecting. She went back to the kitchen and finished up her cleaning. Then, she headed to the dining room and sat down in front of the pile of robot pieces. She held up the box and noticed Jonah had shredded it to pieces while trying to open it. She rolled her eyes again as she noticed all the bags that contained all the tiny pieces had been shredded beyond repair as well.
“This kid acts like a damn werewolf,” Natalee muttered. She grabbed the instructions and glanced them over, “This looks like a shitshow.”
She picked up one piece that looked like it belonged to the leg of the robot, and she turned it over in her hand a few times before she set it down and picked up another piece. After a few minutes, she had the empty shell of a robot sitting before her. She held the circuit board in front of her and analyzed it for a moment. She attached a couple wires and noticed they weren’t strong enough to hold for a long period of time and the next thing she knew, she was in the garage searching for Judah’s soldering iron.
Natalee dug through boxes on his workshop table, pushed them to the side and found a series of boxes attached to each other and small locks on each door. She tilted her head, examining it, and noticed a large ring of keys sitting on top of the case. She picked them up and flipped through them. She chewed the inside of her bottom lip before she threw the keys back down and kept searching for the soldering tools.
Finally, she found them on a high shelf. She had to climb on top of the work table in order to reach, but she managed to slide it out from in between two other dusty boxes. Once she sat back down at the dining room table, she unpacked the soldering iron and plugged it in. While that was heating up, she arranged the wires in a more logical way and tapped the tip of the pen on the small metal coil. She dripped liquid metal onto the connections from the wires to the circuit board and installed the battery pack. With everything connected to each other, she installed the entire system into the robot and powered it on.
The robot’s eyes flashed red and then lit up green as it located her. It looked her up and down and made a cheerful beeping sound. She smiled to herself and started packing the remnants of the bags and box. She put away the soldering iron and slammed the case shut.
“Took me longer to find this damn thing than it did to build a whole fuckin’ robot.” She slid the case next to the box of many locked boxes and she eyed it again for a moment before heading back in the house. She tossed away all the trash and revisited the robot on the dining room table. She could command it to do things with her voice or link it up to her phone and give it commands via the app. She decided against both because she knew Jonah would be upset if he lost control over his toy because his mom was being neurotic in the middle of the night. She chuckled to herself and set the robot in the middle of the dining room table for him to find when he woke up.
Nineteen
Lying in bed, Natalee curled up in Judah’s spot and stared at the wall on her side of the bed. She started contemplating all the things that had gone wrong in the last couple of months. She dwelled for a while on the entire situation with the parent-teacher association meeting from the previous month and realized there were probably more problems she could’ve come up with in order to throw it in all of their faces that their stupid group was completely pointless.
She rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling fan as it rotated silently above her. She thought about the dozen or more children who had to sit amongst the other students, eating from a white cardboard box filled with stale peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a bag of pretzels and white milk - because this was the state-mandated meal for students who couldn’t afford lunch every day, but their parents also made too much money for a reduced price lunch. She thought about the students who frequently sat out of recess because they didn’t have weather appropriate clothing that day.
She also thought about the kids who had to walk close to a mile home every day because their parents worked too late to pick them up and they lived “too close” for the bus. And she thought about the kids they didn’t know about, who couldn’t afford school supplies, who couldn’t afford new clothes and shoes, who couldn’t afford to play sports. She wondered how many kids in the school didn’t have dinner every single night and how many laid in bed on Saturday night starving and laid in bed on Sunday night dying to go to school the next day so they could, bare minimum, eat once that day.
She took a deep shaky breath as she brought herself to tears, knowing that eliminating sugar from the foods wasn’t the answer, and hiking up prices on sports participation wasn’t the answer. She knew jacking up the price on late library books wasn’t the answer and she knew very well that the stupid white cardboard boxed lunches weren’t the answer either.
They needed something to change. They needed the teachers to be as involved as they needed the parents to be involved and there wasn’t much going on from either side at that moment. She knew the happy-go-lucky rich moms always had coffee together while their husbands worked full-time plus overtime-type jobs to keep their hands manicured and their houses immaculate, just like Natalee’s. She knew that she fell into the group of women with ease because of it. But what about the mom’s she didn’t know, and she didn’t have the opportunity to associate with - possibly because of their social differences, work schedules, amount of kids, et cetera.
Natalee made the decision at that moment to find a way to reach out to these women and she knew if she did, she could be the one to make a serious change in the school district. From preschool up to high school seniors, she knew kids needed help and they needed someone to step up and speak out of them. Natalee jolted out of bed and headed for the office.
She pulled out a notebook and started jotting down all the lists she had just gone over in her head and she continued to add to the list until she heard Judah step through the front door around two in the morning. She met him in the foyer with a big smile on her face, “Hey, handsome.”
“Hey, beautiful,” he smiled at her. “You look wide awake for this hour. And happy too.”
She nodded excitedly, “I am! I figured something out.”
Judah walked past her and headed to the kitchen. He grabbed his plate from the oven and put it in the microwave. As he was waiting for it to warm up, she followed him in, bringing the robot from the dining room table.
“What the fuck is that?”
“I built it!”
“You what?”
“It was actually pretty easy, but the directions were a bunch of nonsense,” she rambled.
“Okay…” Judah watched her strangely. “So, is that what you figured out? How to build a robot?”
“Oh no, I just thought it was cute. Isn’t it cute?”
“Yeah, it’s cute. Are you on drugs right now?”
Natalee shot him a look, “No, why would I be?”
“You’re just so…” He waved his hands in the air erratically.
Natalee snorted. “What about me is so…” she attempted to r
eenact his movements.
“Who builds a robot in the middle of the night?”
“That’s not even the important part! Forget the robot!”
His eyes grew wide, “Okay! Forgetting the robot!”
“Look!” She held out the notebook proudly.
He peered at the notebook strangely, “That’s a lot of shit on one piece of paper.”
“Yes, and it’s all bad shit.”
“Why would you make a list of,” he glanced at the tiny number at the bottom. “Two hundred and nine things that are bad?”
“They’re things that can be fixed in the school district to provide a safer, happier location for children to learn.”
He nodded slowly, “I thought you were kicked out of the PTA.”
“I was but hear me out. I’m going to reach out to all the parents who aren’t in the PTA and we’re going to rally together for changes.”
He nodded slowly, “Okay, and what triggered this thought?”
“I’m tired of how they run that place and do nothing. So, I’m going to do something.”
He nodded again, “Okay... Well, I’m going to eat now.”
“Your potatoes are cold in the middle.”
He raised an eyebrow at her and stuck his finger into his pile of mashed potatoes. The outer edge of the potatoes was blistering hot, but the inside felt ice cold.
“Flatten them out on the tray and try again.”
“You’re being fucking weird, Natty.”
She shrugged, “I feel pretty great, though.”
He headed to the dining room to eat his late-night dinner. Natalee sat on the couch and read through her list for what felt like the hundredth time, even though she hadn’t read through it once. She studied it until Judah was done eating his dinner and then she cleaned up after him and followed him upstairs. While he was relaxing in a nice hot shower, Natalee laid on the bed contemplating more things she could fix while she was on this hero-mom binge.
The next morning, Natalee set off to put in some work on her list. She parked a block from the school and walked back and forth between her car and the school as kids and their parents started pouring onto the sidewalk. She stopped several mothers and asked them questions pertaining to their child’s lunches, their wellbeing in the school, and how they felt their children were being treated, regardless of their income or their employment status.