Home Front(12)

“Are you okay?” Tami said, sidling up to her, bumping her hip to hip.

“Of course,” she answered too quickly.

“I’m here for you,” Tami said softly, as if she knew everything that was turning through Jolene’s mind. “We all are.”

“I know,” Jolene said, looking around at the people who mattered so much to her. Everyone she looked at smiled and waved. They loved her, cared about her; these people were as much her family as Michael and the girls. She had so many blessings in her life.

It was okay that Michael wasn’t here; they were married people, not conjoined twins. They didn’t have to share every aspect of their lives.





Three



On Wednesday morning, Jolene returned from her run to find Betsy standing on the porch, wearing a robe she’d outgrown over flannel pajamas and a pair of pink Ugg boots. Her face was scrunched in irritation—a familiar expression these days.

Jolene ran up the driveway, breathing hard, her breath clouding in front of her. “What’s wrong?”

“Today’s Wednesday,” Betsy said in the same tone of voice you’d use to whisper the words you have cancer.

Oh. That. “Shoo.” Jolene herded Betsy back into the house, where it was warm.

“You can’t go, Mom. I’ll say you are sick.”

“I’m going to career day, Betsy,” Jolene said, turning on the coffeepot.

Betsy practically shrieked with displeasure. “Fine. Ruin my life.” She stomped out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She slammed her bedroom door shut.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Jolene muttered, following her daughter’s route up the stairs. At the closed bedroom door on the second floor, she knocked hard.

“Go away.”

Jolene knocked again.

“Fine. Come in. You will anyway. There’s no privacy in this stupid house.”

Jolene accepted the lovely invitation and opened the door.

Betsy’s bedroom was a reflection both of the twelve-year-old who currently inhabited it and the tomboy who’d lived here only a few months ago. The walls were still the pale wheat-yellow color that Jolene had chosen nearly a decade ago. Long gone were the white crib and dressing table and framed Winnie the Pooh prints. In their place were a four-postered bed covered in denim bedding, an antique yellow dresser with blue knobs, and posters of mop-headed boys from teenybopper bands. The war between childhood and adolescence showed everywhere: on the nightstand lay a tangle of makeup (which she wasn’t allowed to wear outside the house), a mason jar full of beach glass and agates, and a once-favorite bug catcher that Seth had given her for her eighth birthday. Piles of clothes—tried on and discarded before school yesterday—lay in heaps on the floor.

Betsy sat on her bed, looking pissed off, with her knees drawn up to her chest.

Jolene sat down on the edge of the bed. Her heart went out to her daughter, who had been so undone by middle school. This once-buoyant, confident tomboy had become lost in a sea of mean girls and impossible social choices; lately she was so unsure of herself that nothing came easily and no decision could stand without peer approval. Nothing mattered more than fitting in, and clearly that was not going well.

“Why don’t you want me to go to career day?”

“It’s embarrassing. I told you: no one cool has a mom who’s a soldier.”

Jolene didn’t want to let it hurt her, and she was mostly successful. It was just a tiny sting, like the prick from a needle. “You don’t know embarrassing,” she said softly, remembering her own mother, stumbling drunkenly into a parent-teacher conference, saying whad she do in a slurry voice.

“Sierra will make fun of me.”

“Then she’s not much of a friend, is she? Why don’t you tell me what’s happening, Bets. You and Sierra and Zoe used to do everything together.”

“You don’t let me do anything. They get to wear makeup and go to the mall on the weekends.”

This old argument. “You’re too young to wear makeup. Thirteen is our deal for makeup and pierced ears. You know that.”

“Like I agreed,” Betsy said bitterly.

“If they don’t like you because you don’t wear mascara—”

“You don’t understand anything.”

“Bets,” Jolene said in her gentlest voice. “What happened?”

That did it, the gentleness. Betsy burst into tears. Jolene scooted over on the bed and took Betsy in her arms, holding her while she cried. This had been a long time coming. Betsy cried as if her heart were breaking, as if someone she loved were dying. Jolene held her tightly, stroking her curly hair.

“Si-Si-erra brought cigarettes to school last week,” Betsy said between sobs. “Wh-when I told her it was against the rules, she ca-ca-lled me a loser and dared me to smoke one.”

Jolene took a calming breath. “And did you?”

“No, but now they won’t talk to me. They call me Goody Two-shoes.”

She wanted to hold her daughter until these dangers passed, until Betsy was old enough to handle them with grace and ease. Jolene needed to say the right thing now, the perfect motherly thing, but she was out of her element. Until the army—with its rigid rules of behavior—she had never fit in anywhere. The kids in her school had known she was different—probably it had been the out-of-date clothes or the events she could never go to, or maybe it had been because she couldn’t invite anyone home. Who knew? Kids were like Jedi in that way; they could sense the slightest disturbance in the Force. Jolene had found a way even then, as a girl, to compartmentalize her feelings and bury them.