Her eyes catch on the strawberry cupcake on the counter, still in its pretty brown box with the colorful Sprinkles sticker, and her resolve stiffens. There’s no choice. Fifteen years she’s waited . . . prayed for this chance, and now, here it is. “This is it, Prince,” she says. The dog looks up. “Now or never, and never’s not an option.”
She sighs heavily and sets the onions aside. As she pulls the pizza dough from the warming drawer below the oven, the front door opens.
“Hi, honey,” she says as Mattie walks past the archway.
No answer. Footsteps travel away and up the stairs. Prince Charles pushes his old body up and lopes away to follow.
“I got you a cupcake!” she hollers after them. “Strawberry, your favorite.”
Mattie’s voice is so quiet Hadley almost doesn’t hear, but her hearing has always been exceptional when it comes to her kids. “I haven’t liked strawberry since I was twelve. You’d think she’d know that.”
Hadley looks at the box. She did know that, or at least she used to. Too sweet. Her daughter’s tastes evolved when she started middle school and acquired a taste for coffee—chai latte and Cuban coffee the only flavors she likes.
How did Hadley forget? She’s losing it. She really is.
She moves the cupcake to the fridge and returns to preparing the pizzas. She rolls out the dough and adds toppings to each: spicy red sauce, sausage, and pepperoni for Frank; peppers, onions, sundried tomatoes, and marinara for Mattie; Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce and pineapple for Skipper.
She smiles at the finished creations, the familiar satisfaction of cooking for her family washing over her. Making home-cooked meals is a tradition carried on from her mother and one of the few things she is proud of.
She walks to the backyard to start the fire in the pizza oven so it will be heated by the time Frank gets home—and freezes just outside the door. Her eyes fix on the gaping hole beneath the oven, the space where the wood is stored, and her pulse ticks up as her mind spins with the memory of Frank telling her they were out of wood. “Wanted to see how hot it could get,” he said a week ago. “Damn thing cranks. Took all the wood, but I almost got it to eight hundred.”
She forgot.
How could she have forgotten?
Pulse pounding, she returns to the kitchen, turns on the top oven as high as it will go, then slides the prepared pizzas into the lower oven so they are out of sight.
She scrubs the counters until they gleam, dims the lights so they are more flattering, and hurries upstairs to change. Frank expects her to look good when he gets home.
Frank expects a lot of things.
6
GRACE
Miles is screaming and Grace is close to losing it, her breakdown barely held in check as she carries Miles and his diaper bag toward their apartment. Her head pounds as she climbs the stairs, and she is nearly faint from hunger.
Mrs. McCreedy, the only neighbor in the complex whose name Grace knows, peeks her head out her door. “Oh my,” she says. “Do you need some help, dear?”
Borderline eccentric, Mrs. McCreedy is somewhere between fifty and a hundred, and her hair varies in color from magenta to blue, depending on the alignment of the stars. She has at least four cats, makes a living selling things on the internet, and goes by the name Mrs. McCreedy, though there’s no sign of a Mr. McCreedy or evidence of there ever having been one. Jimmy made friends with her when they first moved in. Of course, Jimmy makes friends with everyone.
“No, Mrs. McCreedy. Thank you, but I’m fine.”
This isn’t the first time Mrs. McCreedy has offered to lend a hand, and Grace wonders if Jimmy might have asked her to keep an eye on them while he was gone. A few weeks ago, when Grace was at her wits’ end, afraid she might break something, possibly her skull against the wall, she considered asking Mrs. McCreedy if she could watch Miles for a few minutes so she could run to the store. She decided against it. In Grace’s experience, it’s best to take care of yourself.
The problem with this thinking is that parenting is the hardest thing she’s ever done, and doing it on her own has turned out to be far more difficult than she ever would have thought. Until Miles came along, Grace considered herself tough. She’d survived years in the foster care system, then juvenile hall, even jail, but the moment the nurses placed an eight-pound helpless, wailing baby in her arms, all that toughness ran right out of her, and she turned into a trembling pool of putty, constantly on the verge of losing it and so tired she couldn’t think straight—a very disconcerting state that now makes her certain she’s blowing it and failing Miles miserably.
“Okay, dear,” Mrs. McCreedy says hesitantly, clearly not believing Grace is even close to fine. Miles howls and flails, clearly not believing it either. “I’m here if you need me.”
No wonder parenting is supposed to be a two-person job. Jimmy worried about it when they talked about him reenlisting, but Grace brushed it off. At the time, she believed she would be fine. Plus, there was really no choice. Reenlisting got Jimmy away from the trouble that was chasing him and kept him away from the temptation that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.
Or so they thought.
She shakes her head, trying to clear away the thought of his betrayal and to keep the tears she’s been holding from spilling out. It won’t do to have both her and Miles crying.
Swallowing back the emotions, she pushes open the door, drops the diaper bag to the floor, and pulls Miles against her. “Shhh,” she says, holding him tight. “You’re okay. Hang in there. We’re home now.”
He continues to scream, and she grits her teeth against it.
“Colic,” the pediatrician explained when Grace brought him in at three weeks old, distraught that her baby would not stop crying. “Nothing to do but weather the storm.” The woman said it with a smile, as if having a screeching, inconsolable child were no big deal, a delightful rite of parenthood to be embraced and celebrated like first steps or learning to ride a bike. Grace left the appointment more distressed than when she’d arrived.
She’s wanted so badly to love motherhood, to cherish each moment and relish her time with her son. But she can’t. Since Miles came into the world, it’s been such a struggle, so overwhelming and exhausting, that it’s all she can do to survive one moment to the next.
And she feels like Miles knows it, and that is why he cries. He realizes she is going through the motions with no real joy, that when she comes for him at the end of the day, she is so done in she has no energy left to play or read or sing, and that he knows that what she wants most is for him to fall asleep so she can fall asleep beside him.
“That’s it, buddy, let it all out,” she says, pacing back and forth as she pats his back and as he continues to howl, screaming at the top of his wee little lungs and working himself into a lather until they are both damp with sweat.
This is his pattern. The moment she lifts him from the car, it starts—a whimper, like he is uncomfortable, making her believe he is hungry, has gas, or needs his diaper changed. So, she sets about trying to remedy all those things, only to discover his misery has nothing to do with any of them. And by the time she is done, her nerves are frayed and he is wailing—uncontrollable sobbing that no amount of cuddling, cooing, or pacing can soothe.