“I hit him in with one of my blocks.”
“Well, give me a second?—”
Junie, who’d been on the couch near the front room’s window, suddenly gasped. “Mom’s home!”
And just like that, the house became a flurry of excitement, while the tension left my shoulders in a rush.Finally.
Ivy hopped off the counter and rushed toward the front door, hot on the heels of Theo, who left his truck with me, both forgotten. I slumped, as if I’d been wound tight up until that moment. Mom was home. She’d take their attention. I could finally retreat to my room and take a breath.
Almost as soon as I thought it, guilt rushed through me in full force. Here Mom was, getting off a ten-hour shift, andIwas tired?Iwas ready to retreat to my bedroom? I’d had a day off school, had gotten ice cream with a friend, and Mom was probably running on fumes.
But I could hear her cheery voice from the entryway. “My babies!”
Mom did an amazing job putting on a mask, one I’d never noticed until Dad had died. She’d remained bright and chipper, even in the midst of losing her husband and becoming a single parent to five kids. But one night, I’d gone to her bedroom door downstairs after all the kidswere asleep and had heard her sobbing. The awful sound still echoed in my ears when things got too quiet.
At first, I’d thought she’d been talking to someone on the phone—and then I’d realized she’d been talking to Dad. “I can’t do this anymore,” she’d cried. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Not without you. I can’t handle it without you.”
The next morning, she’d been smiling with a full breakfast waiting for us on the table.
Mom and I were a lot alike in that regard. We both knew how to push the darkness down.
The kids’ chattering grew louder as Mom shuffled into the kitchen. Her red hair looked almost brown under the dull kitchen light, pinned up in the bun she always had it in.
Her eyes found mine, giving me a distracted smile.
“Mom, Mom,” Ivy said as she trailed in behind her, holding Mom’s purse. “I asked Daisy to make me waffles, but she threw the waffle maker away and said no.”
“Oh, why would you throw it away, Daisy?” Mom asked lightly, picking the thing out of the trash. “The cord just needs to be propped at the right angle.”
I scratched my arm. Of course Ivy would make me look bad to Mom. “Sounds like a house fire waiting to happen.”
“You have it plugged in for ten minutes, and you watch it.” She set it on the counter, plugged it in, and crinkled the cord until the red light on the waffle maker flicked on. “It’ll trip the breaker before it catches afire.”
“See, Daisy?” Ivy grinned her gapped smile at me. “Waffles!”
Junie, though, scrunched her nose. “I don’t want waffles.”
“Well, I don’t want pancakes.”
Junie frowned. “Who said anything about pancakes?”
Mom’s hand coasted along the back of my shoulders as she passed by me. “I’ll make the waffles,” she told me, going to wash her hands in the sink. She still turned and smiled. “Thank you for watching the kids.”
Even though she’d given me permission, I still hesitated, my guilty thoughts making it hard to pick my feet up. “Was work okay?” I asked, though my question was nearly drowned out by Junie and Ivy’s bickering.
Mom nodded. “Was school okay?”
Shehadforgotten about Skip Day today. But of course she had—she had a million other things to keep track of. I just nodded. “It was good.”
I didn’t need to tell Mom about hanging out with Jamie and running into Dalton. Talking about the ex-boyfriend was a weighted conversation, and she was probably emotionally drained as it was. She needed that energy for the little ones.
With that thought in mind, I retreated to the staircase. Penn was on the couch as I started up the steps, her headphones over her ears and her phone in hand, but her eyes were on me. Her expression was unreadable, and when I lifted a hand to wave, she immediately dropped her gaze.
My bedroom was my safe haven. It wasn’t the biggest room in the Carmichael house—Junie and Ivy shared thatone—but I’d made it perfect. The walls were adorned with pictures and posters and printouts of New York City streets, but overtop of them all, I’d doodled characters onto them. Outside of realism, one of my favorite styles to draw in was chibi, because the big features and small bodies were far more fun for me to relax with. My four walls were a vision board of sorts, with pictures of New York City street signs and my doodles decorating them.
New York University. Tisch’s undergrad program. That was my plan throughout high school as I’d perfected my portfolio, and in my mind, it’d been set in stone.
My mantra when life wrung me dry.
