The Unbearable Morning
.
I
know I screwed up last night and I’m kicking myself for not being up front with Jillian. But I got there and she was already in the van. And the boys were in there, all kumbaya on the reading, and I knew if I said anything, we might end up in a fight and if that happened I’d feel even worse. And I can make this up to Jillian, anyway. She will know, by my unselfish actions, that I put the boys and her first.
When we pull into the parking lot, I’m out first and I’ve got all the kids rallied around me before Jillian can say a word. I’ve got baby Ollie in one arm, I carry the cooler that’s so heavy it’s like it’s full of rocks, and the Double Minor trek right on my heels. I’m in a full sweat by the time we reach the tree at the top of the hill.
“Oh, hey Parker!” It’s Annelise. She’s just arrived and she looks, as my brother would say, like a cool drink of water. I’ve always liked her smile. “Can I hold the baby … uh … Ollie for you?”
I look back. Jillian must still be in the parking lot organizing the Hat Trick. If Annelise took Ollie and kept an eye on the Double Minor I could run down and help. “Come here Ollie.” She reaches out and takes him from me before I can say no. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I love kids. We know how to have fun!” I think it’s a bit strange that she’s there so early and without any of her friends, but right now I’ve got some ass kissing to do.
I am halfway down the hill when I meet up with Jillian. I take the bundle of towels from her and she thanks me and continues on, carrying the orange cones. I think it’s all going to be okay. We get within sighting distance of baby Ollie, who is gnawing on Annelise’s cell phone, and things change. Jillian walks fiercely. The Hat Trick start acting up, trying to hit each other with the hockey sticks. And I trip over an old guy tanning his wrinkles.
I reach the blanket just after Jillian and I’m ready to run interference when she says, “I’ll go set up the cones for the drills.” She leaves before I have a chance to do the right thing. Anything right. I follow her, pulling the Double Minor and the Hat Trick along with me.
An hour later the sun is baking us all, especially me and my sick stomach. The kids run their drills, knocking down cone after cone. Jillian tells them they can have a sixty-second water break. She keeps her eye on the timing watch.
“Jillian,” I say. “Let’s see if Will’s cake is here. It’ll be a good break.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“I think that’s what the boys want to do.” I point at them. They’re on their stomachs, chests heaving, their hair plastered to their heads.
“You know, Parker.” She targets me with her look. “What’s the point, really? So we’re going to have a hockey tournament in a couple of weeks. So what? It’s not going to change their lives if they play hockey. We raise a little bit of money. So what? What if it’s not worth all this work? I didn’t realize I was signing up for hockey bootcamp.”
My stomach is on fire. I need Gatorade, or milk, or pink medicine. “I don’t know how you can even question this. This is about putting effort into something bigger than us. We can make a difference, Jillian.”
“No offense, but you sound like Chantal.”
I thought Chantal was her best friend. “Grass roots. And we’re starting with your brothers. The kids are going to benefit the most from this. I guarantee it.” I do, don’t I? This is about them, isn’t it?
I convince her that the kids need a real break and we need to join the others, because I have a plan that is going to make this hockey tournament
the event
of the summer.
I’m the first guy to witness the scene at the blanket, but I wish like hell I wasn’t. I wonder when my punishment will end. Annelise has been babysitting Ollie who appears to be wearing a T-shirt of hers. It’s pink and she’s got it sort of belted below his baby stomach so that really, he appears to be wearing a dress. This is a minor issue. His hair, usually curly, sticks out from his head in dozens of ponytails. His lips, even from here, shine in bright red lip gloss. His eyes are blue and pink rainbows. His cheeks glow orange-red. And then it comes to me, a way to save my fate. “Oh, look,” I say. “Annelise has dressed Ollie up as …”
“Her identical baby sister …” Jillian says.
“I was going to say a clown.”
“But my joke was better.” She punches my shoulder. I realize it’s the first time she’s touched me, purposefully, since this morning.
“You’re not mad?”
“At Annelise’s makeover?” She shakes her head.
“No, at me.”
“Not about this.” And she walks ahead of me. I watch how she strides with confidence, purpose. We make a good team, Jillian and I. I need to tell her that.
By the time I get to the blanket, Jillian has taken baby Ollie to the bathroom to get cleaned up, leaving me to referee her brothers. They are digging into the cooler, and soon I figure out why.
Will sits up from his tanning position. He keeps telling us he’s saving his energy for the massive hours he’ll have to clock at the tournament. “No cake today. I’ve been telling everyone I have no idea who this girl is or if a cake is going to come at all, but they don’t believe me. Some rumor got started that I know who the secret admirer is … As if that would make sense.”
“I told you someone must have the cake and they’re late getting here. I’m texting everyone right now. Hardly anyone’s here. I guess you two weren’t the only ones having a late night out.” Annelise catches me looking at her and she winks. “Danielle saw you and Will weaving home.”
No. She is the wrong person to have that information. “Annelise.” I make sure that Jillian hasn’t come out of the bathroom yet. “Can you go for a walk with me?” I really need to do something about my stomach; it’s killing me.
Annelise follows me in the opposite direction of the bathrooms, farther up the hill. I’m not sure how I’m going to approach her, but I need her cooperation.
“Parker. That baby is so cute, isn’t he?” she asks.
“Yeah. It was really nice of you to help out like that.” I wince. It’s like a fist is squeezing my insides.
“Do you really mean that?” She stops and I don’t have a choice. Now we’re standing uh … chest to chest. The discomfort doubles. “I really want to show you how helpful I can be and that, you know, I really like kids and stuff.”
“Oh. I totally see that.” Oh God. She’s got those big eyes and I’m remembering the day I broke up with her and how she was convinced I showed up to surprise her. Her eyes are big with expectation. I remember that she’s going to benefit from the ultimate plan, too, she just can’t know how, yet. Right now, it’s all about getting the right people all in line. “But I need your help in a different way. I need the Cake Girl …”
“She’s the Cake Princess now, we changed her name.”
What a surprise, Princess Annelise. “Oh, I like it. Anyway, I really need her to keep delivering cakes to Will.”
“I think the cake is just late today.” She pulls her phone from her pocket, reads the latest news.
I watch her closely as I reveal my strategy. “Well, let’s hope so.
But we need to keep the cakes coming, all the way up to the hockey tournament.”
“I guess I could put a message on the fanpage.” Was she always this good at deception?
“Great. And, could you do me another big favor?” I touch her shoulder and she instantly loses interest in the phone. “I mean, this is so important and it will be so great for you.”
“For me?”
“Yeah, if this works out, you’ll get exactly what you’ve always wan ted.”
She takes a deep breath. And her chest … it really expands. “What is it?”
“The night of the hockey tournament, I want the Cake Princess to reveal who she is. Everyone will be there and she’ll be the most popular girl there.”
Her eyes shift from one of my eyes to the other, then over my shoulder. She’s thinking. My stomach pains double. I knew it was going too well. “But what if Will doesn’t really like his secret admirer? Won’t she be crushed? I don’t want her to get hurt. I like her.”
I know the “her” we’re talking about here is Annelise and she wants to know if I’m going to pick her at the end of the game. I have to find a way to tell her without telling her that she should trust me. “Well, she’ll bounce back. Think about the
Bachelor
and how he picked that girl, but it turns out she wasn’t the one. And then she got her own show.”
She nods. “The Cake Princess can get her own show. Very clever, Parker … I’ll work my magic.”
“Thanks for helping me out here.” I rub my stomach. “You have no idea what this is going to mean.”
“Actually, I think I do.” She winks at me. “But it will be our little secret.”
I can see Jillian’s returned to the blanket. “Oh and the part about
me being out late last night with Will, can that be our secret, too?” I explain that we were strategizing and I don’t want anyone else to know about it.
“Got it. I’ll go to the blanket first. You follow later. Just like old times.” I wonder if all the big game players get gut aches when they’re making the most important moves. The greater good has got to be someone’s vision, a future for the boys and a legacy for the high school. And the coach has to keep the team motivated; that’s all I’m doing. Annelise will get a payoff. Not my girlfriend. But girlfriend of the class president.
Sugar, Sugar Hangover
.
I
smelled her first: coffee, mint gum, and Burt’s Bees hand cream. The smell of organized efficiency. I stayed curled under my comforter, my eyes delicately closed. I wanted to feel what she would do. Her feet stepped across my carpet quickly enough that I got the sense she was glad to see me. And her hand, I know from the overwhelming smell of shea butter, hovered over my forehead. She was indecisive about whether to caress my forehead the way she did when I was small and I had nightmares. The air shifted and I knew that she’d lost her nerve to be the mom she used to be.
I opened my eyes. “Hey, Mom.” She turned around.
“Oh … Chantal. I was … I was … going to let you sleep a bit.”
I yawned and stretched, watching her observe me, my tangled hair, the pimple on my chin. I saw something in her face, disappointment or regret, but it was gone too soon to know for sure. She’d only been away for a week, but she looked different. The worry she always carried around was still etched in the tightness of her shoulders and jaw, and now I sensed something else. Sadness. Hurt. I was about to ask her if anything was wrong, but she spoke first.
“I brought you something.” She reached into the pocket of her Audrey Hepburn capris, and pulled out a rock. Gray with a white circle around it. I sat up and cradled it in my hands.
“You brought me a rock?” Her usual gifts of umbrellas, slippers, and pajamas were practical. “This will make a great paperweight.” I smiled. I was determined that I would find a way to make at least this morning pleasant. I thought about Mitch. My smile grew wider, even if it was misplaced.
“About the rock.” My mother pulls the end of a thick strand of hair through her fingers, in front of the first finger, behind the second, over and over, in a pattern that makes an eight or an infinity symbol. I long for cupcakes; my mother twists her hair. “That rock.” She points at it. “It felt right.”
“Oh.” Now she was sounding a bit like Jillian’s mother who claimed she felt the pull of the moon and the tides so acutely, she could feel the earth turning on its axis. “Thanks.” I smiled.
“I picked it up and it felt right.” She stared at her rock, my rock, while she talked. “When your father and I were dating we’d go on walks, down by the Columbia River and he’d choose a rock. He’d say, ‘This one feels like it’s meant for you.’ He knew what I needed. A rock lasts forever. And I needed that then.”
So it wasn’t just a rock, there’s some kind of lesson I’m supposed to learn. Or she was giving me a concealed message like she’s leaving my dad. Maybe he’s secretly gone to Lettuce Loaf on his own to avoid the conflict, the separation of belongings, the negotiation over me. “I thought you went for some course.” I knew my word choice—some course—would grate on her.
“We had free time.”
“And you collected rocks?” It was good to get her on another subject. We could argue about the rock instead of its hidden messages.
“I went out on walks. Like I used to. I needed to clear my head.” Again with the strange look on her face that I couldn’t read. This time I didn’t want to ask her what was wrong. She shook her head, tried on a smile. “It’s good to see you. To know that everything’s okay. Everything is okay, isn’t it?”
“Yep.” If I’d even imagined I might tell my mother how I’d changed my life in the past week, all thought of that was gone. I’m not some teenager who is under the misguided assumption that her mother would freak when she’d actually understand. We have a track record. And my mother has issues.
“Oh … good. So … there you go. A rock.”
“A rock.”
We smiled.
Two hours later, she’s at her office and I’m biking to Williamson’s Lake. We sort of agreed this morning that I wouldn’t tell her what’s really happening and she wouldn’t tell me. One day she’ll hunt me down, grill me with questions until she’s satisfied that I’m not the worst she fears: about to get fat, get pregnant, get a B in any subject, lose my interest in intellectual pursuits, or reject her.
My dad used to tell me she was high-strung. As I got older he used words like perfectionism and anxiety, phrases like, it was tough for her growing up. Someday she’ll tell me a piece of the truth about herself, offering up some explanation for her behavior. Maybe she’ll tell me that story again, the one that always makes me cry inside. When she was ten, her mother left her in charge of her four brothers and a sister who was two years old, but didn’t tell her where she was going or when she’d be back. My mother was afraid to ask her dad, since he was worried about his business having already gone bankrupt once. She did what she had to do. She lied to the teachers, told them all the kids were sick and she couldn’t go to school. After a week passed without even a phone call from her mother she thought she’d never go back again.
I wanted to go to school,
my mother says when she tells this story.
I was only ten years old.
That’s the part that gets me the most. Eventually her mother came back but my mother, her daughter, never stopped worrying about when she’d leave the next time. My mother keeps things inside and she worries over
everything, but she would never give up on me. Just like she never gave up on her siblings. At least that’s what I want to believe.
Suddenly I’m imagining how badly I’d get hurt if I rode my bike over the next steep drop or crashed into the snack shack at Williamson’s Lake. The longer I ride and tell myself that there is no problem, the faster my heart races. My hands begin to sweat.
Crud. Crud. Crud.
I haven’t felt this, panic, so acutely since before I started baking cakes. I need Jillian. She can always talk me down. I pedal faster. I do not look down.