squeeze hers back.
“You’re going to love kindergarten,” I lean down and tell her.
“You’ll love your teacher. And you’re going to make tons of new friends.”
She won’t, though. She’ll go to school and move her big, slow eyes around
the room and hardly answer when the kids talk to her and she’ll stammer
when they try to teach her to read and she’ll bumble around on the
playground, singing to herself and not noticing when they laugh at her.
But I don’t know that yet, and even if I suspect it, I can’t ever say it to her.
Besides, it’s nice to pretend.
The bus roars and groans as it maneuvers around the corner,
coming to a slow, heavy stop right in front of us. I lean down on one
knee to look my daughter in the face. She doesn’t look at me and doesn’t
say anything, but she sniffles, and I realize she’s crying. I hug her to me
closely, my hand on the back of her head pulling her in closer.
“Mommy loves you so, so much, Jamie,” I say. “You know that,
right?”
Jamie nods into my neck and mutters, the first thing she says
all day: “Love you too.” She wipes her nose with the back of her hand,
leaving it slick with snot as I let go and gently push her toward the bus.
The fat, mustachioed bus driver smiles at her, ignoring her tears, and
shuts the door behind her. I stand motionless at the corner and watch as
the bus drives away.
Tonight I will be short with Jamie after I get Ted’s check with no
note and after I’ve been shouted at for being late for work. I’ll make her
macaroni and cheese but forget about it and I won’t microwave it when
I remember, so she’ll have to eat it cold. I’ll have a few beers and roll my
eyes when she asks me to read her a bedtime story. Later this week, she
will uncap a fistful of magic markers and trail them like comet tails along
the white walls of the upstairs hallway, and I will curse at her for the first
time, and even though she won’t know what it means, she’ll hear me call
her “the most stupid fucking child I’ve ever laid my eyes on” and she’ll
know that I’m trying to hurt her. Maybe I can’t help it, and in my own
way, I’ll love her the whole time. It’ll just get so hard for me to remember
how to sometimes.
But this morning, I’m just Jamie’s mom. I’m Jamie’s mom who
held her hand at the bus stop and whose heart lurched like the beginning
of a rollercoaster when I saw her crying. Who slept on her back, for no
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