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“Okay, Mom,” she says as she follows me. “Can I leave school early every day?”
“No.” I smile, thinking of when I was her age. There were always a million things I wanted to do, and school didn’t encompass half of them. There was a right way of learning and a wrong way, and my mind has never been able to compartmentalize like that. “Today was a special day. An ice cream for lunch day.”
“What were you celebrating, Mom?” she asks as I open the door to my bedroom. A sigh of relief escapes me, because at least Flower hasn’t developed opposable thumbs.
There’s a sound of footfalls behind me, and I can feel Shane at my back. For a second, I have an insane impulse to lean back and soak in his warmth, but even though today has been a messed up day, I have enough presence of mind to hold back.
“Huh, sorry, Ruthie,” he says. “Looks like she got to your room too.”
I turn on him with a glower. He looks surprised for an instant and then like he’s about to burst into ill-advised laughter. “You’re telling me it always looks like this?” he asks.
“On a good day,” says Izzy matter-of-factly. “Mom spends all of her time making the rest of the apartment look nice. She forgets to spend time on herself. Except you didn’t forget today, Mom. You look like a princess.”
My heart feels like it’s taken up residence in my trachea, because when the hell did she get so grown up? She shouldn’t have to have these adult thoughts. She should only need to have kid thoughts about unicorns and ice cream for lunch. I was never allowed to be a kid, which makes me want it for her even more.
“Oh, Izzy,” I choke out. “You don’t have to worry about me, honey. You don’t ever have to worry about me. It’s my job to worry about you, not the other way around.”
Izzy rolls her eyes. “Mom, of course I worry about you. I worry about everyone I love. That’s what people do.”
There she goes again, being much too wise.
Shane surprises me by squeezing my shoulder, his grip hot and firm, and I feel it course through my body, as if it’s infusing me with strength for the conversation ahead. Given it’s Shane, I’m surprised he doesn’t follow us into the room and demand to lead the conversation, but instead he steps back to clean up after my disaster-area dog.
I feel unmoored by the day, by him, by my mother.
But I take my little girl’s hand and lead her past a pile of washed clothes I have yet to fold to sit on the bed. Which I made by pulling up the covers, thank you very much, Shane. Izzy sits down beside me.
“So, my mother came to speak to you at the playground, Izz? Was it definitely her?”
She scrunches her face. “I think so. She looked like those pictures you showed me, only her face was more like that apple that we found in the back of the refrigerator door. And she smelled like Uncle Tank did the morning he slept over at the apartment.”
So she was loaded. So much for the new leaf she’s turned over, not that I’m surprised. This is who my mother is—the kind of person who’d get drunk and approach her grandchild on a playground.
“I’m sorry that happened. What did she say to you?”
My heart thumps in my ears as she tells me. It thumps harder when she says my mother wanted to introduce her to someone.
Thank God Izzy’s okay. Thank God.
“Principal Smuthers says they’re going to keep better watch when you’re on the playground, okay?” I say, running a hand over her hair, needing to reassure myself again that she’s okay.
“Mom, why are you really wearing that dress? You don’t go to any dressy parties.”
“Uncle Shane invited me to one,” I say. “We’re going to be spending a bit more time with him over the next few weeks, if that’s okay.”
“It’s more than okay,” she says, bouncing a little on the bed. “Uncle Shane’s cool. When he read the Unicorn Diaries to me the other night, he gave all of the characters different voices. Can you do that for me, Mom?”
I feel choked up again, but this time for different reasons. Damn him for being such a confusing mix of parts. For being this wonderful person with my daughter and so insufferable with me most of the time.
But he wasn’t insufferable today, a voice in my head whispers. That’s not entirely true, but he has made himself useful. He’s stood up for me and also stood by my side. Maybe he did it for Danny, or for Izzy, but I’d like to believe that our relationship is as complicated for him as it is for me.
“I can try, sweetheart.”
That’s all I ever do, but most of the time I feel like I’m failing. Still, if I’m good at anything it’s getting back up, pulling on my big-girl pants, and trying again. So I stand and hold a hand out to my sweet, wise daughter. “What do you say you help me fold clothes volcano? Someone very wise recently told me that I’m not as good at taking care of myself as I am other people.”
She lets me lift her up. “First you should change out of that dress, Mom. It’s not really a working-around-the-house kind of dress. You have a lot of clothes that would be more appropriate for that.”
Indeed, I do.
