Glitter and Glue (12 page)

I’m up early, making lunches, when Milly finds me in the kitchen working on her sandwich.

“That’s too much,” she says, looking at the Vegemite. “You always put too much.” If you ask me, any Vegemite is too much Vegemite.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I’m not allowed to complain.”

Oh, this girl and the list of things she can’t do or say.
I hate my nanny. I cry at night. I’m not okay
. How much make-believe can a seven-year-old take?

I spread as thin a layer of Vegemite as has ever been applied to a piece of bread, barely a stain, and hold up my work for inspection.

“Not enough. I can do it myself. I’m almost eight.”

I hand over the butter knife and reposition the cutting board in front of her. She drags the knife forcefully across the dry bread, which rolls up and breaks, as I knew it would. In the most pitiful way, her failure pleases me.

“This knife is bad,” she says.

“Tell me about it.”

“Tell you what?”

“Nothing. It’s an expression.”

“A what?”

“An expre— Nothing.”

While she works on her second piece, I check my desire to meddle, to fix, and maybe, glory of all glories, to save. Intervention will backfire. Milly is a sovereign state.

“So, what do you want for dinner?” I ask.

“Um, soup,” she says.

“Soup?” I didn’t eat soup until I was in college.

“Soup.”

“What kind?”

“The kind you make in a pot. From in a cookbook.” She points to the shelves behind me.

I’ve never made soup or been in a kitchen where soup was being made. Restaurants make soup. People open cans, or they go to restaurants where soup is made.

I pull out the most likely resource, a thick book covered in faded blue linen called
New South Wales Favourites
, and flip around in the “Soups & Sauces” section. Crumbs fall from the pages. Then, in the margin of page 26, next to the ingredients for “Fall’s Best Minestrone,” I see handwriting—delicate, easy, feminine—perfectly matching the composite I’ve created of Ellen Tanner in my imagination. This is as real as she has felt to me, as if she stood in this exact spot only a moment ago, so present that if I knew how to parse the smells of this house, I’m sure I could pick up her scent.

Her note—to whom, I wonder—next to
pasta shells
says,
Use barley here
.

“So, okay, here’s one,” I say with hesitation. “Minestrone. Do you like minestrone?”

“Yes, with barley.”

“Ah.”

To me. The note was to me, I guess.

“When is Daddy coming home?” Milly asks when I pick her up from school, sounding like me for the first ten, or twenty, years of my life.

“Around dinnertime.” I reach over to put on her seat belt but she shakes me off. She’s got it.

“That’s so long from now,” she whines.

I’ve done a fine job these last two days, but the kids miss John all the same. Even if he sometimes seems lost or out of place, more like a stepfather than a father, the kids want him more than anyone. I guess that’s the thing about parents.

“How do you like my new hair? I dyed it.”

“Your hair died?” Martin asks.

“No, I colored it. I made it red with a dye, like tie-dyed shirts.”

“It doesn’t look red,” Milly says, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. She’s right. It doesn’t look anything like the plastic hair in the supermarket. Some things you can’t change.

As we pull out, I turn on the radio. “Okay, guys. This is Tom Petty.” I jack up the volume. “Listen. Hear that organ?” I raise my finger and tap it in the air.
“ ‘… Said a woman had hurt his pride …’ ”
I turn it up louder, maybe louder than this radio has ever been played.
“ ‘Don’t do me like that …’ ”

“Do me like what?” Milly asks.

“And what means
pride
? How does it hurt?” Martin wants to know, challenging me to rephrase the line using only the words a child will understand.

“It just means you feel dumb, someone made you feel stupid.”

“By hurting you?”

“Sorta. Just listen to the song.” I sing a little louder.

There’s so much to define and differentiate. As I stutter through a definition of terms, I wonder if John and Ellen used all the big hard words, like
tumor, neurosurgery, chemotherapy
, or just kept it simple.
Boo-boo. Owwie. Yucky medicine
.

“Stop!” Milly shouts from the back.

“Stop!” Martin calls. “Keely!”

“Aw, come on, this is a great song!” I call back over my shoulder, belting out the refrain.

“No!” Milly barks.

“Dammit! I just went the wrong way!” I am now on the Pacific Highway, which is dramatic and curvy, like the roads in BMW commercials.

“Move over!” Martin shouts as I accelerate into the turn, leaning forward, hoping for an exit sign.

“No!” Milly screams. “Stop!”

“Hey! Not another word,” I say, verbatim Mary Corrigan. “Not another word!”

“Keely! Keely!” A car beeps.

“Shhh!” Another car beeps.

Two cars are driving straight toward us.

“We’re on the wrong side!”

“Oh God!” I swerve, prickling with adrenaline. “Oh God.” I flip off the radio, turn on my hazards, and pull over to the shoulder, my breath caught in my throat.

“I’m so sorry. Thank you. I thought … Thank you. I’m so sorry.” I put on the emergency brake and wait for the rush to pass, to feel safe and competent and level again. I slipped into autopilot. I forgot I was in a new place, with different rules and people who don’t belong to me.

Eventually, I start a five-point turn, inching myself around, letting many cars pass, waiting for an opening in the traffic that poses no risk whatsoever. We drive home slowly, quietly, like we’re crossing a gorge on a wire.

John is smart not to rely on me. This isn’t some lark. I’m driving around, playing the music too loud, ignoring the signs and shushing the warnings, with a man’s last and best treasure in the backseat. The teetering height of this truth, its shadow with no end, gives me vertigo.

That evening, John returns from his travels. The kids give him a hero’s welcome, and for a moment anyway, the house feels lively. But once we sit down to dinner, the dialog track drops out and we eat to sounds, not words. Martin hums a made-up song as he chews, though not so loudly that we can’t hear Milly’s teeth breaking through her carrots. John cuts his meat all at once, like my mother told me never to do, his knife clicking and squeaking against the plate’s surface. Pop works through his meal methodically, as if it’s a lawn he’s mowing, while Evan stands at the kitchen counter eating what he can in the minutes he has left before work. The five of them are not so much a family as its components, like Evan’s Scirocco broken apart and spread out on the driveway. It’s a complex machine requiring a level of coordination between connection points that not everyone is capable of. Maybe it will run again. Maybe it won’t.

The lethargy around here is seeping into me. Since getting the kids off to school this morning, I’ve been drifting around, noting things that need attention without actually attending to them: crumbs on the counter from the morning’s toast, chairs askew around the kitchen table that would make the whole house feel better if only they were tucked in, Martin’s Ninja Turtles hat, the one he loved so intensely and then forgot existed, jammed in the cushions of the living room sofa. I should pull it out, reshape it, take it back to his room, hang it on a hook so it’s waiting for him on the day he remembers his
favorite
hat. Instead, I just stare at it, too tired to move.

I drink tea, each cup a chance at a new beginning.
I’ll have some chamomile, and then I’ll sort out the kids’ closet. After this cup, I’ll do the beds. One more pot, and I’ll take a shower
. Standing by the window, blowing, sipping, I stare out at the shady part of the lawn, still heavy with the night. It’ll take hours for the sun to reach that patch, dry the beads of water clinging to each blade, and free the grass to spring back to its usual posture. There’s no rushing some things.

By midday, I realize it’s not the sleepy collective heart rate around here that’s left me comatose. I’m sick.

My mom’s a pro with aches and ailments. Unlike funks and malaise, physical problems draw her near. The lure of the fix. If
she were here, she’d stick a thermometer under my tongue, check my swollen glands, jot down my temperature, give me two aspirin, and make me gargle warm salt water, all the while talking in the sugary lilt of a nursery school teacher. Before leaving me to rest, she’d spray Lysol around the room to kill every last germ, slather Vicks VapoRub under my chin, and wrap my neck in a piece of Egyptian cotton about the size of a tea towel that she keeps for just such occasions. I miss her, or I miss that part of her. I always do when I’m sick.

After I’ve spent a couple of hours wincing through every swallow, Evan sends me to an office in Beecroft, where Dr. Hannah takes a look at my throat and orders a culture. She says she’s 99 percent sure it’s strep and that I should call tomorrow to confirm.

The next morning, it’s official. The nurse asks how many times I’ve been on antibiotics in the past couple years, and I’m not sure. “You don’t know?” she asks, like,
How old are you? Twelve?
My mother would know. She’s read all about antibiotic resistance. People are
too damn quick
to take drugs, and someday they’re going to be
mighty sorry
, and that’s not going to happen to her kids, not if she can help it. She writes all our prescriptions in a book that she keeps in her top desk drawer so she can put her finger on the information in two seconds. The nurse rephrases her question. “Do you recall taking any antibiotics in the past three years?” I say no.

After lugging myself home from the pharmacy, I come in the front door and Martin slides toward me on the floor like a seal at Sea World, his chest on a chair cushion. “Are you better?” he wants to know.

“No, but I will be,” I say, shaking the prescription bag.

His eyes widen. “I know what that is! Mummy had those!”

“Oh, Martin.” Tears come to my eyes.

Evan appears and sees me swallowing my emotion. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just strep, just a dumb cold,” I say, looking at Martin.

“You sure?”

I nod.

“You should rest, read your book.” Evan pats my arm, touching me for the first time since we shook hands two months ago.

“Yeah, tha— Wait, what’s Martin doing home?”

“Mini-day today.”

“Oh, God, right. Good thing you’re here.”

I slip into bed and fold my pillow in half behind me, just right for reading. Ántonia’s father has died. The new world was too much for him. His family is moving on, finding shelter in a place with “very little broken ground.” Work is their answer to the grief that keeps pounding to get in. No doubt that appealed to my mother, who considers action infinitely superior to analysis. Button up the kids, tidy the house, get dinner on and off the table by seven, that’s the ticket. Examine? Share? Feel?
I’d rather do time at Montgomery County Correctional
.

I nod off after a few pages and dream that I’m trying to tell my mom about Evan and the kids—explaining who is step, who is half, how each is holding up—until she finally understands, and I am so happy that we make sense to each other for once that I shower her with gifts, first a turtle and then a teapot.

At the end of my dream, Evan taps on my door. He has warm salt water. Martin follows behind him with pink construction paper. “I made you a card!”

“Thanks. Hey, Martin, before I forget, I saw your Ninja hat. It’s in the sofa, between the cushions.”

“Yeah, Keely!” Maybe he’s been missing it after all.

John comes home, and when Evan steps out into the hall to talk to him, I strain to hear the conversation. Their voices are low and soft. I’ve wanted to see them interact since the day I met Evan.

“I hear you’re sick,” John says, appearing in my doorway.

“Yeah, strep, but I started antibiotics, so I’ll be fine.”

“Let me get you some lozenges and ibuprofen,” John volunteers. “Ev will get you some more warm salt water.”
Ev
, he said. He called Evan
Ev
, like my dad calls me
Kel
.