Heart Like Mine (10 page)

“It’s what we agreed on!” There was a loud clank of something landing in the bathroom sink, and I jumped, slapping my hand over my mouth so they didn’t hear my surprised yelp. “We agreed that my opening the Loft was the way to get us where we really want to go. We agreed that you’d stay home with the kids. I know I’ve been busy, but I really don’t understand what you’re complaining about. I’m working so hard for us. For our family.”

“I miss you. That’s all.” Mama’s voice was so soft I could barely hear her. “I didn’t realize you’d be gone so much of the time. I need help.”

“What kind of help? What else can I do?” Daddy’s voice got quieter, too, and the icky feeling that had started to make me sick to my stomach began to get better. “Kelli, honey. Tell me what you want from me.”

“I don’t know,” she said, but her words were all crackly. “I wish my parents were here. Maybe I should call and ask them to come.” She paused and her tone suddenly lifted. “Maybe they’ve changed their minds.”

Daddy sighed. “Sweetie, you haven’t seen them in over ten years. They didn’t even want to meet their
grandchildren
. I don’t understand why you keep letting them hurt you.”

“They’re my parents,” Mama whimpered. “I miss them.”

“I understand that. I miss my mother every day. And I’m really sorry to say this, but if yours missed you, do you think we’d be having this conversation?”

A second later, Mama rushed past me in the hall, not even noticing I was on the floor. She was crying. I didn’t like how Daddy
sounded when he talked with Mama lately. He never used to be mean to her, and now he said things that made her cry. But then, lots of things made her cry. Burned toast, or a messy bathroom. I rubbed her back for her when she got like this, the same way she did for me when I was upset about something, but it didn’t help. She cried harder when I touched her. I made it worse.

Now I waited a minute, then crawled into the bathroom on my hands and knees, pretending to be a cat. Mama had allergies so we couldn’t get a real kitten; pretending I was one was the next-best thing.

“Meow,” I said to my daddy, who was leaning against the bathroom wall, staring up at the ceiling. He looked back down at me and smiled when he heard the noise. “Meow,” I said again, pretending to lick the side of my hand and rubbing my face with it, then inched my way over to press my body against his long legs.

“What’s this?” he said. “An eight-year-old, brown-haired, blue-eyed cat?”

“Meow,” I said. “Almost nine.”

He squatted down and cupped the back of my head in his hand. “Here, kitty kitty.”

I noticed he still had white foam near his ears from shaving, so I grabbed the towel off the rack and wiped it away for him. “Why don’t Gramma and Grampa want to see Mama?” I asked. It scared me to think that my parents could someday not want to see me.

He frowned. “Were you eavesdropping again, young lady? We’ve talked about that a hundred times. Not okay.” He gave the end of my nose a light pinch.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. I was just walking down the hall.”

“Uh-huh,” Daddy said, but winked at me, too, so I knew he
wasn’t really angry. Daddy never stayed mad at me or Max for very long; Mama was the one who took away TV privileges or sent us to our rooms when we misbehaved. With Daddy, I knew I could get away with pretty much everything.

I tried again. “Are Gramma and Grampa
mad
at Mama? Bree got mad at me once and didn’t talk to me for a whole week.”

“It’s complicated, sweetie. Sometimes grown-ups have problems in their relationships that kids really can’t understand.”

“Like I don’t understand division?”

He chuckled. “Sort of.” He grabbed the towel from me. “Now, you need to scoot so I can finish getting ready.”

“Do you
have
to go to work?” I asked, carefully searching his face with my eyes. He had brown hair and gray eyes and long, dark lashes. He was the handsomest man in the world.

He gave me a small smile, making his dimple show up. I wanted to stick my finger in it. “I do, kitten,” he said. “It’s how I take care of you guys.”

“But do you have to be gone so long?” I whispered, not looking at him.

He sighed. “As long as it takes to get the business on its feet, baby girl. I know it’s hard, but we’re a family, and we’re going to go through some rough times.”

“Mama’s tired,” I said, still in a whisper. “She cries sometimes, in the middle of the day, she’s so tired.”

Daddy was quiet a minute, pressing his lips together and breathing slowly, through his nose. Then he spoke. “I’ll take care of your mama, okay, Ava? Don’t you worry.”

Nodding my head felt like lying, but I did it anyway. I told my daddy exactly what he wanted to hear.

When Jason Winkler sat down next to Kelli in Algebra I, she took it as a sign that they were meant to be together. He was by far the cutest boy in the school—everyone thought so. He was tall but not skinny. His dark hair fell over his blue eyes in a way that made Kelli want to reach out and brush it back with the tips of her fingers, then let them slide down the warmth of his cheek. He had a lopsided smile that was almost always accompanied by a wink—Kelli was pretty sure that on the first day of class, he’d smiled more than once at her before sauntering to the back row and plopping into the chair beside her. He was a junior but spent more time at basketball practice than studying, so this was the third time he was taking the introductory class. Kelli was just a freshman and didn’t care about that. She only cared that of all the open spots in the room, he picked the one next to her.

“Hey,” he said this morning, swinging his head around to look at her. There it was. The smile . . . and the wink. Kelli felt the space between her legs get warm and she blushed.

“Hey,” she echoed, tucking the sheet of her long blond hair behind one ear. It was her pride and joy, that hair. Sleek and shiny, not an ounce of frizz or split ends. She spent hours brushing it at night, staring in the mirror, practicing imagined red-carpet
speeches into her comb. Her parents said she was vain; she preferred to think of it as optimistic.

“You get the assignment done?” Jason asked as he stretched his long legs out straight beneath the desk and crossed one ankle over the other.

She rolled her eyes. “Kind of. It was totally hard.” She hoped he noticed the outfit she’d changed into in the school bathroom—peg-legged Levi’s and a tight pink sweater, borrowed from her friend Nancy. They were clothes other girls took for granted, but her parents would have screamed at her for wearing them. Their idea of appropriate clothes for school included two colors, black and white, and one shape—boxy.

“Maybe you need a tutor,” Jason said.

She smiled like she knew a secret and raised one of her eyebrows, another thing she’d practiced in front of her mirror. “Are
you
interested in the job?” she asked him. She couldn’t believe how bold she was being, but all of the articles she read in
Cosmopolitan
said men liked it when a woman showed confidence. In order to read the magazine, she had to sneak to the library after school, telling her parents she was doing homework. She
was
studying . . . in a way. Brushing up on how to get a boyfriend.

“That’s not the
only
job I’m interested in,” Jason said, and his friends Mike and Rory, who sat on the other side of him, snickered.

Kelli blushed again—her
Cosmo
textbook had taught her exactly what he meant—but kept smiling as she directed her attention to the front of the room, where their teacher was about to start class. Jason leaned over and nudged her leg with his fist. “You going to the basketball game Friday night?”

She shook her head. Her parents made her go to youth group at their church on Fridays, which was just about the most boring thing in the world.

“You should come,” Jason said. “I’m on the starting lineup this week. Maybe we could do something after.”

He was asking her out on a date! She forced herself to shrug, knowing boys also liked it if you played just a little bit hard to get. “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll see if I can.”

“Cool,” he said.

For the rest of class, Kelli didn’t hear a word of what was said. All she could think about was talking with Nancy, seeing if her friend could help her figure out a way to get to that basketball game. Nancy’s parents weren’t old, like Kelli’s. Nancy’s mother ran a local coffee shop and loved to tell jokes; her father was a sociology professor at Cal Poly who wore jeans to class just like his students. Kelli’s father was a bank manager who wore the same black slacks and white, short-sleeved shirt with a plaid bow tie to work every day. Her mother stayed home, shopping for groceries and cleaning their house, and hadn’t worn a pair of jeans in her life. They’d met at church in downtown San Luis Obispo more than thirty-five years ago and quickly married, thinking they’d start a family as soon as possible. Kelli hadn’t arrived for another twenty years—something they hadn’t expected, having already grown accustomed to a life on their own. Kelli was a blond ball of energy, bouncing into their lives and disrupting the peace. She’d always felt like they didn’t know what to do with her. They hoped for a daughter who liked to sit quietly and listen to stories; they had a daughter who raced into mud puddles. Kelli learned to separate herself into two different people—the one they wanted her to be and the one she was. As she got older, the side of her they didn’t approve of seemed harder to hide. Now that she was in high school especially, and there were dances to go to and dates to be had. She loved her parents, but she wasn’t sure how much longer she could pretend to be the girl they imagined her to be.

Kelli sighed when the bell rang, thinking about how hard it would be to make it to the game on Friday, but gave Jason one last smile, letting her gaze linger on his for a moment, just to keep him interested. “Don’t forget,” he said, and she nodded, thrilled by the possibility that she might get to fall in love.

*  *  *

Kelli was only six when she realized her parents were different. Her mother would take her to the park after school, but while the other moms and dads chased after their children on the playground, Kelli’s would settle on a bench with a book, urging her to go play on her own. The other mothers chatted and laughed together, but Kelli’s mom tended to keep to herself. She had a few friends from their church, but none of them had children Kelli’s age.

One night, as her mother tucked her into bed and read her a story, Kelli noticed that her mother had wisps of silver strung through the honey-blond locks she had given her daughter. “Why do you have gray in your hair, Mama?” Kelli asked, and her mother leaned down to kiss Kelli’s forehead, as she did every night. When she pulled back, she smiled at Kelli.

“Because I’m forty-eight, sweet girl,” she said.

“Why doesn’t
Janie’s
mama have silver hair?” Kelli thought her mother’s hair was beautiful, like it belonged to one of the princesses from the fairy tales Kelli loved to read.

“Because I’m older than Janie’s mama,” her mother said, still smiling. “Most people have babies when they’re very young, but your father and I didn’t. You surprised us.”

Kelli thought about this, knitting her eyebrows together. “Was I an accident?” Kelli’s friend Pete had told her about how he overheard his parents talking about
him
as an accident—a baby they hadn’t wanted.

Her mother sat down on the edge of her bed and ran her hand along the side of Kelli’s cheek. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You weren’t an accident. You were a surprise. There’s a difference.”

“What
kind
of difference?”

“An accident is something you didn’t want. A surprise is something you didn’t realize how
much
you wanted it until it came along.”

Kelli had gone to sleep that night feeling loved. It was hard to remember it now, at fourteen, when her parents seemed so far away from her—so impossible to reach. She wondered sometimes if she’d been given to them by mistake. If she was adopted instead of born to them, simply because she was so fundamentally different from them both. She’d always tried to please them—to be quiet and respectful and comply with their requests. She was obedient, accompanying them to church every Sunday, helping her mother clean the house, leaving her father alone in the den so he could read his paper every night in peace. And yet . . . she imagined another family—the one she was meant to live with. Her fantasy mother would laugh more than she scolded; her father would gather her up for a cuddle on the couch, then help her with her homework. They’d have a dog and two cats, and maybe even another daughter so Kelli would have someone to giggle with in her bedroom into the wee hours of morning. She imagined a loud, messy house filled with happiness and love. A house entirely different from the one she lived in now.

She loved her parents, but she knew they didn’t understand her. Kelli had big dreams—she wanted the kind of passion she read about in the romance novels at the library. She longed for the rush of attraction, the kind of connection she never saw between her mother and father. They never held hands, never kissed more than a swift, dry peck on the lips. They followed strict routines,
waking at five each morning to read the Bible and pray together—something Kelli had begun refusing to do just this year. She wasn’t sure she believed everything they believed. She didn’t feel Jesus the way they said she should, even though she had asked Him into her heart seven times, just to be sure He took.

Just last Sunday after church, as they’d walked home together, she’d even been courageous enough to ask her father how he knew there really was a God. He’d looked at her with a cloudy expression, his pale blue eyes narrowing. “I know because I know,” he said, and Kelli thought that was a meaningless response. She tried again.

“But how do you
know
? I don’t understand how you can believe in something you can’t see.”

Her father stopped, grabbed her arm, and gave her another stern look. “It’s called having faith, young lady. You don’t see God, you feel Him. Do you understand?”