“I’m a widow!” I shouted after the truck. As if on cue, the honker pulled into my space, just missing my shopping bag of new boots. “My husband always paid for everything.”
I felt the sting of tears streaming down. The honker, an old fat man obviously missing Santa’s joviality, got out of his car, avoided eye contact, and huffed off toward the mall entrance.
I was left with no choice. I had no excuse, no way to get home.
No job, no prospects. No money.
I needed bailing out again. I reached for the cell and dialed Kate.
“I don’t understand,” Kate said over a loudly crying Ellie as I opened the front door about to climb into her Lincoln Aviator. “How could you have forgotten the car payment? It’s due on the sixteenth of every month. You have to mail it by the ninth to get it there in time. We’ve been over this.”
I opened the back door to stow my bags, but then I realized that Ellie’s cries drowned out most of Kate’s lecture. I closed the front door and decided to sit in the backseat with the baby. Over the sound of Ellie’s cries, Kate sounded like the teacher on A Charlie Brown Christmas. Wah wah-wah, wah-waaah.
“Where are the kids?” No sign of my two.
“I left them home,” Kate shouted over the din. “It’s a five-minute ride. They’ll be fine.”
“I guess.” I’d never left them home alone. I knew it was a five-minute ride, but who knew what could happen in five short minutes? Some maniac could break in, shoot them both, and be gone in two minutes or less. Or kidnap them. Or, okay, even just scare them. Finding a strange guy in your house trying to steal your presents, how terrifying is that? In real life, the little Whos down in Whoville would have been absolutely traumatized, not merely amused.
It had only taken Patrick a moment to lose control of the car, veer off the road, and end life as we knew it. I’d been left behind, with a new sense of the power of time, even the barest intervals.
I turned my attention to comforting Ellie in an effort to ignore my own urge to let the tears flow. I gave her the crook of my thumb to suck while I checked in the folds of her snowsuit for her woobie, which Kate insisted I call a pacifier. Too many parenting manuals and long, lonely nights had turned Kate on to all the “proper” parenting techniques, like using adult words, no baby talk. I’d baby-talked to my kids and they were just fine, thank you. Spencer had always been at the top of his class, and Sarah was honor roll every report card. Wasn’t it more important you talked to them at all?
I couldn’t find Ellie’s woobie, but I couldn’t resist sticking my finger in her belly button region just to see if she was poppin’ fresh. All in white, she looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. She laughed like him, too, all of a sudden. No more crying. Ellie and I had always had a special bond. And why not? We shared a common enemy, her mother.
Not that Kate was my enemy, most of the time. Only when she thought she knew it all, which was at least half of the time. I caught Kate’s glare in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t figure out if the malice in her gaze was because I made Ellie stop crying without much effort, or because she was still stuck on the car thing, or both.
“I lost track of time,” I said, sounding helpless and young, and feeling stupid. “I didn’t realize I hadn’t paid.”
The tears hovered, but didn’t fall. I kept a meticulous kitchen. I’d had the holiday cookie baking schedule charted out weeks ago. Why was it so hard for me to stay organized when it came to money?
“I know, honey. I know,” Kate said, all traces of anger vanishing. “We’ll take care of it.”
I noticed her “we” instead of “I” and it made me feel better that she meant to include me in the process. So often, she steamrolled right over me in her attempt to fix things and make it better. That she was such a capable fixer made the know-it-all part of her more tolerable.
Patrick used to do the same thing. He would fix things so that I didn’t have to trouble or worry myself. He thought he was protecting me. To be honest, he made me feel incapable. I wasn’t sure if it was worth having things fixed only to have lost that part of me that believed I could straighten things out for myself.
“I’ll fix it. I appreciate your help, but I have to start working things out on my own.” I had no idea where the voice came from. Was it even mine? But I guessed it had to be mine, didn’t it? Ellie wasn’t old enough to talk.
Kate, apparently as surprised by the declaration as I was, found the road again in time to brake instead of running the light. At the sudden stop, Ellie’s baby face crumpled as if she was about to bellow again. I tweaked her stomach and she laughed in response.
“You have the money to work it out? How far behind are you?”
“Three months,” I admitted too easily. “I have it. It’s no big deal.”
I didn’t have it. It was a huge deal. I had no idea what I was going to do, exactly.
“Do you? The way we’ve set up your investments, you don’t have a lot of cash for frivolous spending and I notice you’ve been doing a lot of shopping lately.”
“True. It’s Christmas. I have a lot of gifts to buy.” I shrugged. Kate had no response. For all she knew, I could be telling the truth. I could imagine her in the Dolce & Gabbana boots. Merry Christmas, Kate!
“You should have another check coming in for the first of the year. In the meantime, why don’t you let me go over your accounts, see what we can do? I can move some things around, set up the car payment as an automatic withdrawal, and maybe even free up a little extra for holiday spending.”
My mind latched on to the part about the check coming on the first of the year. As in, after Christmas. What good would it do me then? I had to make it through six weeks when I knew Kate’s idea of “a little extra for holiday spending” wouldn’t begin to cover all the things I planned to buy for the kids. I miscalculated when the check was due to come in, my own stupid mistake. Again.
My lip started to quiver and I took a shaky breath. As if sensing my desperation, Ellie raised a chubby fist, held out her missing woobie, and smiled as if she were offering me the moon in consolation.
I couldn’t help but smile back. I might have been lacking in finances, but I had a little angel niece who loved me and two growing angels of my own at home. I could be the biggest failure in the world, with no money to buy presents, and the children in my life would always love me. Maybe my situation wasn’t so dire after all.
I thought the worst of my day was behind me.
And then Kate dropped me off and I entered my bedroom in time to catch my adolescent son trying on my lipstick.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said, quickly putting the cap back on my favorite tube of Lancôme’s Ginger Flower.
“What does it look like?” I asked, thinking it looked like I might have to hide the new boots, and any of the designer dresses he might decide to try on with them. At twelve, he was barely old enough to go to the movies alone with a girl, let alone consider his dating preferences.
“I’m not gay,” he said matter-of-factly as he reached for the eyeliner. “I’m going Goth.”
“Goth? Like, walking dead, black is the new black, vampire wannabe stuff?”
“Like, Shelley Miles is experimenting with becoming a witch and she needs a warlock stuff. I like her, Mom. I think if I do the Goth thing, she may get interested.”
I stifled a sigh of relief and took a seat on the edge of my bed. “So you’re wearing makeup for a girl?”
“You got it.” He pointed at me with two fingers and a cocked thumb, game show host style. “A really, really hot