Glitter and Glue (4 page)

I sit back and stare at the list. T
HIS IS
IT, I write at the bottom in all capital letters. T
HIS IS
IT!

The next morning, I’m alone in the kitchen, watching myself make a cup of tea from somewhere outside my body, wondering what I am doing here, when John Tanner appears in the doorway wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. He’s no Val Kilmer, but I could sort of imagine that with a good haircut, some jogging, more color in his cheeks—I don’t know, maybe he could be made over and sent back out there.

“Sleep okay?” he asks.

“Yes, thanks. You?”

He shrugs as if he long ago abandoned expectations about things like sleep. “Is that coffee?”

“Tea. I can make coff—”

“No. No worries.” He lumbers over to a drawer and digs around for filters.

“Should I wake up the kids?”

“Sure.”

When I get back there, Martin’s bed is empty. I can hear him in the bathroom, peeing and humming. That leaves Milly. I stand by her bed, looking down at her hair spread across the pillow. She’s so beautiful at rest, I’m hesitant to touch her. I tap her shoulder lightly, then again, until finally she opens her eyes and gazes up at me.

“Good morning, Milly.” As my voice hits her ears, her eyes
blink and narrow, and she rolls over to face the wall, to will herself back to the dream world she forged in the night, where her life is different and better, where more suitable people stand over her. I should tap her again, lift her shade, give her the razzle-dazzle rise-and-shine “Hello world!” routine my dad used to do for us, but instead I back out of the room, ruing my accent and wishing I had saved more before leaving the United States so I didn’t have to be here, making this girl homesick in her own home.

“Okay,” John says to me back in the kitchen, before I can tell him that Milly isn’t getting up, “they both need a thermos with cordial; orange does fine—it comes back half full either way. I give them two snacks, crackers and Vegemite, right, then a sandwich.” He picks up a pair of Milly’s sunglasses. “Put these in her pack. Not sure she ever wears them, but—” He sounds resigned to the general nonchalance of his children. I wonder if all parents are, or if this is specific to John. “Kids! Let’s go! Breakfast!” He never stops moving, tracking the time like a basketball player watches the shot clock.

“Should I get some cereal going?” I ask, wanting to be useful.

“No. Toast. They like toast. I got it.” He cuts two slices of bread off a brown loaf.

When I was growing up, my mom would have loved to call toast breakfast. She doesn’t go in for
whole big productions
. It just makes a mess, and
Guess who cleans it up?
But my dad, oblivious or determined—I could not say which—preferred a dinerlike experience. He manned the cooktop in his pajamas and a bathrobe, making eggs, any kind you liked, including poached, which required a different pan and special vinegar. He’d fry a pound of bacon, creating a Lincoln Log arrangement on the paper towels, and on special days he added something called
scrapple to the menu, a morning meat treat famous throughout the Philadelphia area, notorious elsewhere, involving internal organs and entrails.

In addition to the
holy mess of it all
, my mother opposed the grand breakfast on moral grounds. She was trying to raise kids who ate whatever was put in front of them, then here comes Mr. Wonderful with his magic spatula, taking orders.
Sunny-side up, one in the hole, over easy? Coming right up, Lovey!
He spoiled my mother’s carefully calibrated economy, like the well-meaning tourist paying twenty dollars for a basket the locals would trade for a cigarette.

Of John’s expedient breakfast, my mom would say
Damn right
.

“Okay, now—” He sets two hats on the counter that look like the straw skimmers people used to wear at Eisenhower rallies. “They must wear caps, it’s a rule, part of the uniform. And you should also wear one whenever you’re outside. The sun is terribly strong here.” Many Australians have told me this, and they all sound the same, like an apologetic host warning guests about the steep driveway.

Just then Milly wanders in, at a tenth of her father’s pace, and leans into his side, squinting at me like I’m a headwind. Martin’s behind her in nothing but his underwear. I guess everybody’s family when you’re five.

“Morning, Keely,” he says, waving around his silver plastic sword and audacious joie de vivre.

“Morning,” I say, mirroring his easy tone, pretending it isn’t ludicrous to be standing smack in the middle of their lives, my conspicuousness so acute I can barely look Milly in the eye.

After breakfast and a burst of last-minute activity—sash! library book! pencil case!—the kids are in the car.

“Keely, will you help do my seat belt?” Martin asks.

“Absolutely.”

“I like it tight. Do it really tight.”

“Yes, sir. And here, this is Blistex, for all that chapping.” He purses his lips for me, and I coat them good.

“Keely, my bag is stuck,” he says. I shimmy it out. And then, “Keely, can you do my shoe?” I love him for needing me.

“Martin, you can tie your own shoe!” John snaps. I step back, and after a moment John follows up with “Are we all set?” in a different tone—contrite, with a red bow of mustered cheer.

With everyone finally belted in, John backs out the driveway, past a thick hedge that covers Pop’s window.

“Bye, Pop!” Martin cries out.

“He can’t hear you,” Milly snarls.

“Yes, he can!”

“No, he can’t …” She trails off, bored. Even making sure Martin knows how dumb he is, how inferior and juvenile, doesn’t feel as good as having me here feels bad.

Just inside the gates of Wallaby Elementary, Martin stops to stare at a large hole in the ground. “Where went the tree?” he asks.

“I guess they took it out,” John says as he nods to a few moms, who send back sorry smiles. He’s the only dad on campus.

“It’s gone?” Martin asks, gaping at the dirt. “All the way gone?”

“Yup,” John says.

“Why?” Martin wants to know.

“I don’t know, might have had root rot,” John says as he picks up the pace, his hand on Martin’s back to keep him moving along. “Sometimes trees get diseased.”

Milly stops abruptly, her mouth falling open a little, until
John turns around and taps his watch. “Hey, hey, hurry up,” he calls to her. She’s looking over at the hole in the ground. “The bell’s about to ring.”

We push through the swarm of children. As we get to the center of the hive, a giant buzzing of a hundred high-pitched voices bounces off the classrooms. Martin pairs off with someone’s little brother. Milly is met by two friends.

“Emma 1 and Emma 2,” John explains.

We cross the courtyard, sidestepping balls, so I can shake hands with Milly’s teacher, who is waiting to greet his students.

“Mr. Graham, this is our nanny, Kelly. She’ll be dropping off and picking up whenever I’m out of town for work.” Mr. Graham is young and tan and looks like he swam in the Pacific before school. If my mom saw Mr. Graham, she’d poke me and say,
Get the net
. (My mom started talking like this after her elbow surgery. She got it from her physical therapist, a bulky gal my mom said was
a kill
who told her to
stay cool
and
cut me a break
and
suck it up
.)

“Great to meet you,” Mr. Graham says.

“Thanks, you too,” I say, wishing I’d worn different clothes, maybe my yellow overall shorts, the ones that scream
Cartwheels! Lemonade! Good times!

John hangs Milly’s bag on her assigned hook while I work to endear myself to Person of Interest #2, Mr. Graham. “The States, yeah … Philadelphia, about two hours south of New York.” I’ve found that in the absence of the usual shorthand we use at home—where you went to school, who your mom and dad are—people need to place you physically to start to understand you.

Mr. Graham could definitely be my Australian boyfriend. We could flirt at drop-off and pickup; I could volunteer to help
out with papier-mâché or give a talk to the class about America the Beautiful; we could make eyes in the art room, brush up against each other in the supply closet; until finally he stops me behind the PE shed, unclips my sunny overalls, watches them fall to the ground, lifts me up and out of them, at which point I give in, wrapping my bare, tan, definitely shaved legs around his waist like the scene from
Ghost
. Talk about things happening when you leave the house.

In the middle of my
full-court press
, as my mother would put it, a wail goes up from across the playground, and all heads turn. Milly is in a heap under the monkey bars. Emma 1 and Emma 2 squat beside her, giving her the
There, there
treatment. John runs to pick her up, and Martin pats her hair while she bleats like a lamb. I grab her water bottle and jog over, even though I’m probably making a fool out of myself with my amateur gesture.

“Do you want some?” I say in a hypersensitive voice. Milly doesn’t look at me but John gives me a nod of thanks. I stand by quietly, along with Martin, Emma 1, and Emma 2, mad at myself for attending to the wrong things.

The buzzer rings. Kids move from their mothers to their classrooms.

“All better?” John says. Milly shakes her head no and cries fiercely, taking this opportunity to set free some tiny bit of the rage and agony packed up inside her.

Eventually, Emma 2 takes Milly’s hand, and they head to class, slowly, hunched together like two grandmothers on a slick sidewalk.

“That was a pretty bad fall,” I say.

“She’ll be fine,” John replies, though he’s shaking his head and blushing, like it was his fault that she fell or his fault that it took so long for her to settle down. I’m not sure why, but he’s
guilty about something. A half step ahead of me, he mutters to himself: “The
tree
. I knew the second I said it …” The tree? I don’t know what’s going on, so I walk quietly next to Martin until John turns around and announces that it’s time to go to Martin’s school.

“Daddy, I don’t have school until afternoon time,” he says, scooting behind John and pulling on the bottom of his Team Qantas T-shirt. “Piggyback.”

John squats so Martin can climb on. “Right.”

“Let’s go have some nice good licorice,” Martin suggests.

“Sure,” John agrees, his stamina shot. He’ll follow anyone with a plan, even if that anyone is a five-year-old trolling for sugar. “Careful—” John loosens Martin’s hands around his neck. “Remember, I have to breathe.”

On the way to the car, John stares ahead while Martin chirps on his back, telling me about all the times he’s fallen off the monkey bars—so many times! One story reminds him of the next.

“I’m a cheeky monkey! That’s what Mummy says.”

His freewheeling reference to her and, more than that, his use of present tense make my stomach clench up. Maybe this explains Martin’s buoyancy. Maybe he doesn’t yet understand that his mother is gone, all-the-way gone.

After we get home from the market and put away what seems like a small amount of food, Martin bounces off to his room.

“He’s a kick,” I say to John, who is blank-faced, leaning against the pantry door. We stand there like that for a minute, strangers sensing our strangerness.

Then, sudden as a sneeze, John says, “All right, well, that’s that.”

“Can I help you with anything else?”

He stops and looks at me like it’s been a long time since anyone around here asked him that.

“No-no—”

Rather than turning to leave, John stares past me at a dish towel or a pot, something he hasn’t noticed in a while, something that has a story in it. I stand still and stay quiet. Must be a minute now. No, more. Maybe he’s having the corollary moment to the one I had that morning when Martin appeared, defenseless in his undies:
Who … how … why is this person standing in my kitchen?

“So, you’re good?” I say finally.

“I said
diseased
. At school. At drop-off. That’s a bad word.” The hairs on my arm rise as he rolls out of the kitchen and down the hall.

He managed another morning. He got his kids up and dressed, fed and brushed, zipped and buckled in. He forced independence, insisted on safety, babied a little, barked a little. There were gross misunderstandings and the careful metering of information and truth and licorice. He quieted Milly, carried Martin, and suppressed every emotional reaction to every reminder of his wife’s absence. The tree with root rot, the fall, the grip so tight he couldn’t breathe. He did everything right and then he obliterated it all with one word.
Diseased
.

He slips into his room and closes the door. Before I can make a decision about where to go, I hear John sit on his bed, sigh, fall back, and then, after the springs settle, cough out a muffled cry that might be the worst sound I’ve ever heard.