Little Mercies

“That doesn’t sound like a trip,” Jenny said miserably, staring down at her pancakes, the whipped cream already sliding from the stack in a buttery sludge. She pushed her plate to the middle of the table. “That sounds like moving.” She suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore.

“It’s right on the Mississippi River. We can go fishing, maybe even buy a boat someday. Imagine that, Peanut.” Her father stabbed his fork at a piece of sausage, a wide grin on his face. “We could live on a houseboat if we wanted to.”

This was an interesting thought. A houseboat. But Jenny pushed the thought aside. “What’s the name of this place,” Jenny asked grumpily, pulling her plate back and pinching off a piece of the pancake with her fingers.

“Dubuque. And besides the Mississippi River, there’s a dog track and a river museum with otters and alligators and all kinds of cool things.”

Silently, Jenny began eating—she wasn’t sure when she and her father would get their next decent meal. Eight hours from now they would most likely be splitting a bag of chips and a stick of beef jerky. Her belly felt uncomfortably full, her tongue thick with syrup. Her father was going on and on about how great Iowa was going to be, how the John Deere plant paid fifteen dollars an hour, how they’d move into an apartment, but just for a while. Once they were settled they could move into a house where she would have her own room and a backyard. Jenny wanted to ask him if there would be a breakfast nook. It sounded so cozy and comfortable, a small corner of the kitchen, surrounded by sun-filled windows. But her stomach hurt and she didn’t want him to think that she approved of his plan in any way. Jenny licked her syrupy fingers one by one. “When do we leave?” she asked in resignation.

“How ’bout tonight?” her father asked, smiling broadly, his right cheek collapsing into a deep dimple that women loved. Then, leaning in so closely that she could smell sausage intermingled with this afternoon’s beer, he lowered his voice. “You run on home and start packing. I’ll pay and catch up with you in a few minutes. We got a bus to catch at midnight.”

Jenny knew that her father wasn’t going to pay for their supper, but at least he was letting her get out of the restaurant before embarrassing her to death. He was thoughtful that way.

Chapter 3

I creep down the hallway, the wooden floor sighing creakily beneath my bare feet. I peek into the kids’ rooms. First Leah’s and then Lucas’s. Leah is tented beneath her thin white sheet, her bright pink comforter covered with multicolored peace symbols kicked to the end of the bed. A faint glow shines through the cotton and I’m hoping that she has a flashlight beneath the covers reading a book like I used to when I was little. But I know my daughter too well. It’s her handheld video game, one that Adam’s parents, Hank and Theresa, gave her a few months ago for her ninth birthday. A confusing game where the avatar goes back in time, trying to save the stolen prince and return him safely to the enchanted kingdom. It’s a lot like what you do for a living, El, Hank told me happily after Leah opened the brightly wrapped package, whooped with joy and called to thank her grandparents.

Now that would be a superpower, I think to myself. To be able to step into a time machine and travel back a week, an hour, a minute, a second before some indescribable thing happens to a child. To stand before a parent brandishing a cigarette, a stepparent with a lurid leer, a caregiver with a raised fist and say, “Do you really want to do this?”

“Hey, Leah,” I whisper, closing the bedroom door behind me and trying not to wake Lucas who, across the hall, is buried beneath his own blanket like a wooly bear caterpillar, even though it’s still eighty degrees outside and the air conditioner is less than reliable. Neither Adam nor I have had the time to call the repairman. I peer beneath her sheet and smile at my firstborn daughter. She looks up guiltily at me from beneath a forelock of dark hair damply pasted against her forehead.

“It’s nearly midnight, turn that thing off,” I chide, holding out my hand for the game. She presses a button and suddenly we’re plunged into darkness but for the star-shaped night-light plugged into the receptacle next to her bed.

“I can’t sleep though,” she protests in her gravelly voice.

“Want me to rub your back?” I ask

“Too hot,” she answers grumpily.

“Sing you a song?”

“Um, no,” she says shortly. I’m not surprised at this response. My singing is a long-running family joke. Still, I hum a few bars of a song that is Leah’s current favorite and wiggle my hips. Even in the dark I can tell that she is rolling her eyes.

“How about a cold washcloth for your forehead and another fan brought up here?”

“I guess,” she says with a jaw-breaking yawn.

By the time I go downstairs, lug up the oscillating fan, wet a washcloth beneath the cold-water faucet and return to Leah’s bedroom, she is fast asleep. I slap the washcloth on the back of my own sweaty neck, plug in the fan and position it so that the marginally cooler air is focused squarely on her sleeping form. I lean over and lightly press my lips to Leah’s cheek and she doesn’t stir. I tiptoe across the hall to Lucas’s bedroom, stoop down to kiss his forehead and he waves a hand as if trying to swat away a pesky mosquito.

I pull the washcloth from my neck, its coolness already absorbed into my hot skin, and I turn to see my husband’s silhouette in the doorway, a sleepy Avery in his arms. “Ellen, everything okay?” Adam whispers.

I put a finger to my lips and silently cross the bedroom, step out into the hall and pull the door shut behind me. “I’m okay, it’s too hot for anyone to sleep.” I lay a hand on his arm and brush Avery’s hair from her forehead and she smiles sleepily up at me.

“Thanks for coming to the game tonight,” he says as we move through the hallway toward Avery’s room.

“Oh, I like watching the boys play. They’re really improving.” Adam is the coach for East High School boys’ varsity baseball team.

“Yeah, they are,” Adam says proudly.

Though I’ve been a social worker for nearly fifteen years, the job weighs heavily on my chest. I’ve thought about quitting, thought about getting a job where I wouldn’t hear the voice of a client shouting in my ear or weeping for the children I’ve taken away from them. One where I wouldn’t hear the cries of children in my sleep. But of course I don’t. I know my job is important, I know I help children.

Adam presses Avery into my arms and, as I hold my daughter, I kiss the fine, silky strands of the dark hair that tops her head. She wraps her plump arms around my neck, and her even, steady heartbeat is a metronome, calming the galloping thud against my chest. I push away all thoughts of the children I work with and focus on the one in my arms and the two that are sound asleep just a few steps away. Despite the craziness of life, the long hours, the endless housework, the sleepless nights, for now all is right in my world and for this I am so grateful.

Chapter 4

Jenny sat on the wobbly chair at the bus station, her red backpack at her feet. Inside it held all her worldly possessions: some clothing, a few toy figurines, a cheap plastic wallet and an old birthday card from her grandmother. Closing her eyes, she could almost imagine the swaying porch swing they would have once they were settled into a house in their new town. Though it was nearly midnight and her eyes felt scratchy and heavy, Jenny felt a bubbling anticipation that came with something new. She rocked back and forth in the lopsided chair, punctuated with a satisfying thunk each time the chair legs hit the floor, until the old woman sitting next to her started making impatient clucking sounds with her tongue. Jenny reluctantly opened her eyes to find the tsking woman wearing a red-and-pink-flowered sundress and a scowl. The woman was frowning so deeply at Jenny that the corners of her down-turned mouth seemed to have collapsed into her thick neck.

Jenny pretended not to notice and rocked the chair a few more times for good measure and then hopped to her feet to join her father, who was deep in conversation with a young woman with midnight-black hair, an intricate tattoo that crept up the woman’s arm and a nose ring. Jenny was accustomed to this, her father striking up conversations with strange women. Jenny always knew when he was going to make his move. He would run his fingers through his shaggy, brown hair shot through with copper and rub his palms against his cheeks as if checking the length of his stubble, and there was always stubble. Women loved her father. At least for a while anyway. He was almost movie-star handsome, but not quite, which made people like him all the more. His nose was a bit too prominent and slightly off center. His skin was tanned and deeply trenched lines scored his forehead and the corners of his blue eyes, making him appear much older than his thirty years. In the past six months a parade of women had come in and out of their lives. There was the checkout girl at the grocery store that always slid a pack of gum into their bag for Jenny. “My treat,” she said, not even looking at Jenny, keeping her smile brightly focused on Billy. There was the bank teller, the lady who decorated cakes at the bakery and even the nurse at the emergency room, who spent more time chatting with Billy than attending to the three-inch gash that Jenny got when she ran into the metal frame of the opened screen door. The nurse, a lively redhead with the pretty face and the curves Jenny knew her father favored, pressed a wad of gauze into Jenny’s fingers. “Hold that against your head, sweetie. The doctor will be here in a few minutes to stitch you up,” the nurse told her while glancing surreptitiously at her father’s ringless left hand.

“Stitches?” Jenny squawked.

“Won’t hurt a bit,” the nurse assured her. “We’re good here.” The nurse was right—it was, for the most part, painless. Instead of stitches, the doctor applied a thin layer of medical glue to her forehead, fusing the wound together. The worst part was lying on her back waiting for the glue to dry while her father stood on one side of the examination table and the nurse on the other, making plans to meet after her shift was over.

Then there was Jenny’s favorite friend-girl (she refused to call them his girlfriends), Connie, who he dated last winter. She was a curvy woman who always wore a sweet, dimpled smile and her curly brown hair pulled back in a high ponytail. Connie had long, perfectly shaped fingernails that she had manicured every single Thursday after she got off work from her job at a hardware store. Holding Connie’s small, feminine hand in his, Jenny’s father used to laugh that such pretty fingers could handle a hammer much better than he ever could. Sometimes Connie would come from the salon with her nail tips painted a crisp white; sometimes they were lacquered neon-green or painted in a shimmery blue. Jenny’s favorite was when she came from the salon and there would be tiny jewels inset into each of her nails. One day, to Jenny’s surprise, when Jenny had finally gotten used to finding Connie blow-drying her hair in the apartment’s small bathroom or coming home from school to the smell of the turtle brownies that Connie was baking, Connie invited Jenny to go with her to the salon. Jenny picked out a pearly lilac-purple shade and minuscule silver gems that formed a butterfly on the nail of each of her thumbs.

By the time the last of the sparkling jewels fell away, the polish chipped and peeling, Connie was gone. Jenny demanded that her father tell her what had happened. Did they have an argument? Say you’re sorry. Jenny asked her father if he was drinking again. You said you weren’t going to do that anymore! Her father winced as if Jenny had slapped him when she asked him if Connie left them because of his drinking. He insisted that wasn’t the case and Jenny knew that he was telling the truth. He got up each morning, walked her to school, went off to work as a painter for an area contractor, came home each night by six. Connie would often join them for supper and they would watch TV, even play board games together. And even though his hands shook sometimes and once in a while his eyes flashed desperately for a brief moment, he didn’t act like he was drinking. Then what was it? Jenny asked. Did Jenny do something that made Connie leave? I’ll say I’m sorry. Jenny knew that some of her father’s friend-girls thought she was a pest, always in the way, but not Connie. She always made a point to invite Jenny on their outings even when it was clear that her father wanted Jenny to skedaddle.

For about six months, Connie and her father had been inseparable and Jenny thought that they actually might get married. Though she never said anything to her father, Jenny imagined being the flower girl in their wedding and living together in Connie’s tidy little house. Unfortunately, their relationship ended as all her father’s relationships did. Badly.

“No,” her father had said when Jenny worried out loud that she was the one who had driven Connie away. He pulled her into a tight hug. “It has nothing to do with you. It just didn’t work out.” Jenny remembered stiffening against her father’s embrace, not quite believing him.

A few days after Connie left, Jenny discovered the real reason for her departure. She tumbled out of bed and padded out of her little room into her father’s bedroom to wake him up for work. She found him in bed intertwined with a slim, pale-skinned woman with curly hair that fell down her naked back. The room smelled of sweat and beer and of something that Jenny knew had to do with being naked and in bed. She tripped out of the room and ran to the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. She turned on the shower and sat on the lid of the toilet and cried.

But still, Jenny found herself looking for Connie’s face among crowds of people, hoping to see her again if even for a minute.

Jenny stepped in between her father and the tattooed woman who were talking about how it was too bad that they were both leaving Benton tonight on different buses. Jenny tugged on her father’s sleeve, but on and on they went.

“Hey, Jenny Penny,” her father finally said, dragging his eyes away from the woman. “Why don’t you see if you can find our seats on the bus?” He handed her a ticket and his heavy duffel bag.

Jenny had never been on such a big bus before. School buses and city buses, certainly. But this enormous silver-and-blue bus with the sleek dog on the side was very different from her typical modes of transportation. The mustard-yellow school bus that squealed, groaned and belched black smoke when it picked her up on the corner of Fremont Street just down the road from their last apartment, always smelled vaguely of peanut butter sandwiches and body odor.

This bus was three times as big as the motel room they left behind and smelled, Jenny realized happily, breathing in deeply, like nothing. Jenny, setting her book bag and her father’s duffel bag in the aisle, slid into one of the high-backed seats that was covered in peacock-blue fabric and looked out the window. Her father was still outside talking to the lady with the tattooed arm, so she turned her attention to her immediate surroundings and stepped out into the aisle that intersected the two halves of the bus.

Jenny, surprised that so many people had somewhere to go at midnight on a Monday, surveyed the passengers already seated on the bus: a woman with skin the color of cinnamon and a hopeful smile, a sad-eyed woman with four children, three of which needed a tissue, a man in a black suit and red tie already slumped in sleep. And to her dismay, the frowning old woman in the red-and-pink sundress. Before the woman could notice her, Jenny, clutching the book bag and duffel, dashed to the rear of the bus and plunked into the last seat on the right and waited for her father. From behind the high-backed seat, Jenny watched as the final cluster of passengers boarded the bus. There was a dazed-looking grandmotherly type with sugar-spun white hair, a blissfully happy-looking young man holding the hand of a pretty girl wearing jeans and a diaphanous bridal veil, and a stooped elderly man with thick glasses and an intricately carved wooden cane. Jenny pressed her nose against the cool, tinted window to see if her father was still talking to the tattoo lady. She was still there, leaning against the brick building, illuminated beneath the parking lot lights, but there was no sign of her father.

The bus was steadily filling with people and, despite her reluctance, Jenny was beginning to feel excited about the trip. The prospect of her father having a steady, well-paying job meant that there would be no more mortifying trips to the food pantry, no more of the teacher’s helper who scanned her lunch ticket at school and slipped bags of Goldfish Crackers and baggies of carrot sticks into her locker each day. No more collecting and rationing foodstuff for when her father was having one of his bad spells.

As the passengers embarked, Jenny braced herself for being kicked out of her seat, relegated to sitting next to the frowning woman or the old woman with hair so white that Jenny had to wonder what had frightened her so badly that it would turn her hair that color. To her surprise, no one tried to rouse her from her seat and she began to relax a bit.

“Good evening, folks,” the driver said into the loudspeaker, his voice booming throughout the bus. “Please find your seats and we’ll be on our way.” Jenny squirmed in her seat and considered getting off the bus to go and find her father, who was probably in the bathroom or, more likely, talking to another woman. Jenny arranged her book bag and her father’s duffel carefully across the blue plush seats so as to cause no question that these seats were taken. As she looked out the window she suddenly caught a glimpse of her father, head down, walking quickly around the corner of the bus station and out of sight. Jenny sighed. She had no idea what her father was up to, but it was becoming very clear that they were not going anywhere today. With a huff that blew the bangs off her forehead, Jenny made the decision to get off the bus and rejoin her father.

Jenny stood and hooked her book bag around her shoulder and was halfway bent over to retrieve the duffel when out of the corner of her eye she saw a tall, weedy, ponytailed man turn the corner just behind her father. She straightened and watched in disbelief as her father emerged from behind the other side of the bus station casting furtive glances over his shoulder. Two more men appeared and her father stopped short, hands up in placation as they circled around him, fingers poking at his chest. Jenny’s first instinct was to rush off the bus and to her father’s side but found that she couldn’t move, could barely breathe. The meanest looking of the men, barrel-chested and shaped like a fire hydrant, grabbed her father’s face between his thick fingers, causing his lips to pucker as if preparing for a kiss.

Just as the bus rumbled to life, the hum of its engine vibrating in her ears, Jenny tried to call out, “Wait,” but words stuck drily in the back of her throat. The bus lurched forward and, off balance, Jenny fell back into her seat just as sirens filled the air. Immediately she slouched low in her seat. Her father hated the police and didn’t hesitate to share his distrust with Jenny. “See the cops coming,” he would say, “go the other direction.”

“Why?” Jenny would probe.

Her father would just shake his head. “Best they don’t find you. You don’t want to end up in foster care again, do you?”

Jenny most definitely did not want to be sent off to a foster family again. Not that it had anything to do with her father. Her stint in foster care was just before she came to live with her father. No, that was her mother’s doing. And the man who stole her mother away from her. Foster care was an experience that she didn’t want to relive, though she was only four at the time and had only scant recollections. Snapshots of half-formed memories that she tried to blink away.

Through the rear window, she saw her father lifted roughly to his feet by a police officer. She could see that he was speaking earnestly to the officer, bobbing his head frantically toward the departing bus. She should holler out to the bus driver to stop. That she needed to get off. Instead, Jenny stayed silent, turned her head the other way, just like her father told her to when it came to the police, and hunkered down in her seat, last row, right side. She pulled her book bag onto her lap, leaned forward and pressed her cheek into the seat in front of her, now damp with her tears, and watched as the buildings, the houses, the streets of Benton sped past.

Chapter 5

I awake with a start. The room is too bright, the light streaming across my face much too warm for six in the morning, even though it’s the middle of July and the hottest summer on record in more than a decade. “Adam,” I say, looking over at my husband who, jaw slack in sleep, is snoring. I used to, when I had time, in those brief moments when the children were asleep, when work could wait, watch my husband while he slept. The way his brown hair curled around his ears, the dark shadow that magically appeared on his chin during the night. The way, through the years, his face became fuller, more creased, like a love letter folded over and over and opened to be read and reread.

“Adam,” I say, leaping from the bed. “It’s almost eight o’clock! Get up!” He pops up, eyes wide.

“Jesus, I’ve got practice in a half an hour!” He is already heading toward the bathroom. “Did you set the alarm?”

“I thought I set it!” I say, trying to recall.

“Remember you’re dropping Avery off at the sitter’s and I’ll take Leah and Lucas with me to practice,” Adam says as my cell phone begins to ring. I grab it from my bedside table. Checking the display, I see an unfamiliar number and I ignore it.

“Yeah, okay.” I scramble from the bed. The night before is a haze. All I remember is falling into bed exhausted. “I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. I can’t be late again.” But I’m talking to the closed bathroom door, my voice drowned out by the sound of the shower. I rush to the extra bathroom that the kids use and strip off the t-shirt that is still damp with last night’s heat. I step beneath the showerhead, letting the cold spray envelope my body. I don’t bother to wash my hair but run the bar of soap across my skin, scrubbing the salt of my sweat away. I rinse quickly, avoid looking at my stomach, still slack from giving birth eleven months earlier, and wrap a towel around myself and briefly mourn the loss of my once fit body, uninterrupted sleep, time alone with my husband and evenings out with my friends. “Leah, Lucas, it’s time to get up!” I holler as I make my way back to my bedroom.

Adam is sitting on the bed, pulling on his socks. “The kids are up already. I sent them down to grab something to eat before we leave.”

“Avery?” I ask, pulling on the first outfit I see in my closet as I step into a pair of sandals.

“Leah changed her diaper and got her dressed. She’s in her crib. I’ll bring her down,” he says, rising from the bed and then hurrying from the room.

“Thanks,” I say and run a hand through my cropped hair, once again glad that I keep it short. I finish dressing as my cell phone sitting in its charger on the bedside table begins to vibrate. “Damn,” I murmur, and check the display. It’s my mother. I meant to call her back last night, but between the baseball game and feeding and bathing the kids, I had forgotten. Again.

I think of the morning after my father had died. My mother rose early, as she normally did, and moved quietly from the bedroom to the kitchen, trying not to awaken me and my brothers ensconced in our childhood bedrooms. She didn’t hear me as I followed behind her, silently observing. I watched as she absentmindedly opened the freezer stuffed full of all the things that my father loved best, the foods that he would never be able to eat again. My mother blinked back tears and pulled out the date-nut bread, double wrapped in aluminum foil, the Danish meatballs in Tupperware, and a small container of rice and salmon casserole, and set them on the kitchen counter. Lastly, she pulled out the unopened pint-size container of banana-flavored ice cream dotted with chocolate chunks and walnuts that was my father’s favorite.