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“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Hey,” Deana said. “What are you up to? Are you and the Ollster still out playing?”
I let out a snort of a laugh at her nickname for Olly. “We just finished up. I’m putting him in the car to head home.”
“What are you doing for dinner?” she asked.
“Olly will probably sleep for dinner,” I said, making her laugh. “He played pretty hard today. Those slides got a workout, and he was really into the sandbox, which, of course, is on the opposite side of the playground.”
“And he couldn’t possibly just focus on one at a time.”
“Of course not,” I said, climbing behind the wheel. “He had to go back and forth between them a thousand times. It never ceases to amaze me what those little legs are capable of. He moves so fast, and he can run across that playground all day and doesn’t seem to feel anything until the very end.”
“Just think. He’s only two now. Imagine what it’s going to be like trying to keep up with him in a few years when he’s bigger,” Deana said.
“Nope,” I said, pulling out of the parking lot. “I’m not going to. You can keep up with him. I’ll stick to all the quiet parenting tasks like baths and bedtime and dinner.”
Deana laughed. “Well, we’ll nail down the division of responsibilities later. But that was actually a really good transition.”
“Transition to what?”
“You’re coming over to my place for dinner,” she said.
“I am?” I asked with a laugh.
“Yes. I feel like we haven’t just stopped and hung out in forever. We’re both always so busy.”
“We hang out every morning.”
“Watching you try to down a cup of coffee as fast as you can without searing the insides of your throat is not hanging out,” she said. “The other day when you had those few extra minutes was so much fun. We need some actual time. Like some time when you aren’t racing off to get to work and I don’t have to sign on to the computer,” she said.
She was right. As long as I could remember, we’d been best friends for years, really, and we used to be inseparable. For a while when we were younger, I spent more time at her house than I had spent at home with my own mother. I was always incredibly grateful for the comfort and support I found at Deana’s house. If it wasn’t for Deana and her family, I would have spent the majority of my childhood and teenage years alone.
Most of the time, my mother wasn’t at home. I would often wake up to an empty house and get myself off to school, only to come home to an empty house again. I’d make myself dinner and sometimes put myself to bed as well. I wanted to think that it was because she was out working as hard as she could to give us a better life. As I grew up and listened to the talk of the town, I learned that wasn’t always the case.
She worked sometimes. She chased fun and a different life for herself far more. All of this left me with a complicated and very strained view of my mother and my childhood. As angry as I was for everything she’d done, as hurt as I was for the way she wrote me off before I even had a chance, and as much as it still hurt that I didn’t feel like I had a mother I could turn to, in the deepest corner of my mind, I knew she did, in her way, love me.
I also knew that I wasn’t what she envisioned for her life. I couldn’t count the number of times she’d told me about how she thought about her future when she was young. She would always describe those years as being before she knew any better, before she knew how the world really worked. That was when she thought about an adulthood that included finding her knight in shining armor and having a blissful marriage where he swept her out of the small town and showed her the world.
Children never really factored into that all. She never straight out told me that she didn’t want children at any point in her life, but it didn’t take too much reading between the lines to grasp that she didn’t see herself as the mother type, which was why falling for the first guy who showed her any attention and getting pregnant almost immediately threw a wrench in the plans.
She didn’t give up. She thought it was going to be a beautiful fairy-tale ending. We would all be a family. Only, my biological father didn’t stick around. He dropped her faster than she could show him the test, and I never even saw him. Things went downhill from there. And she was positive I was going to have the same fate.
