Darling Rose Gold(34)

“Can I help you?” he asks, feigning politeness, pretending he doesn’t remember me.

“Do you remember my daughter?” I say.

He scratches his pockmarked face. “I’m sorry. I don’t. Did we go to school together?”

“She left school because of you.” I keep my voice low so he has to lean in to hear me.

Josh Burrows squints, confused. I should have known he’d grow up to be a dunce.

I sigh in frustration. “Just tell me where the stuffing is.”

“Aisle nine,” he says with a smile, glad to have an answer. “You have a nice day.”

I roll my eyes and push the cart toward aisle nine.

That March afternoon when Rose Gold was in first grade, I’d allowed myself a rare couple of hours to relax. I think I had almost finished a crossword when I received a call from the school administrative office asking me to please come by, because Rose Gold was “okay but unwell.” They’d adopted this phrase over the course of two years, having phoned me dozens of times. Unwell is not okay, I wanted to snarl.

I raced over to the school, where I found Rose Gold gasping for breath with tears streaming down her face. Her wig was in her hands, covered with dirt. She strangled the dirty golden locks with her fists, shaved scalp exposed. “It hurts, Mommy,” she cried, clutching the wig to her chest. I noticed someone had put Band-Aids over scratches on her knees. The scratches hadn’t been there that morning.

“What hurts, baby?” I said, tugging her toward me. The question was redundant, a stall tactic. The reality was everything hurt: her chest, her lungs, her stomach, her head. If the pain lessened in one area, a different region gobbled it up, intensified the flame. The pain never disappeared, just shifted in levels of manageability. The tide was always high with my daughter. She exhausted me.

Rose Gold shook her head, refusing to answer. The school staff asked me to sit down for a meeting, but I ignored them. I carried Rose Gold to our beat-up old van, cradling her like I had when she was an infant. I buckled her into the backseat and put the key in the ignition. On the drive home, I watched the rearview mirror, my eyes focused backward more often than not. My little girl stared out the window, silent.

I pulled into the garage and turned off the ignition, letting my head rest against the seat for a minute. Closing my eyes, I imagined finishing the crossword, taking my daughter to the park, cheering her on as she descended a slide headfirst.

“Darling, why is your wig dirty?” I asked with a sinking feeling, already knowing the answer.

Behind me, Rose Gold began to whisper. “At recess Josh Burrows said my hair is fake, and he pulled off my wig to prove it. And then he and the other boys kept throwing it but I couldn’t catch it and it fell in the dirt and I tried to get it but Josh pushed me and I fell in the dirt too. Then they all shoved dirt in my mouth. To match my teeth, they said.” A solitary tear slid down her cheek. “Mommy, what are cooties?”

Josh Burrows and his cronies had been bullying Rose Gold for months, spilling ketchup on her clothes, leaving dead bugs in her backpack, and calling her cruel nicknames the rest of the students picked up on. This was the first time they had physically hurt her. I wished those boys a thousand fiery deaths that day and have every day since. It mattered not one whit to me that Josh was seven years old.

I had tried to teach my daughter how to defend herself, but she was an easy target with all her ailments. I was a bit clueless in this department—I had been popular in school, getting straight A’s and learning the art of self-deprecation at a young age. Rose Gold was too sensitive to laugh anything off.

I relaxed my fists into hands. “Your hair is beautiful, sweetheart. And you don’t have cooties. Josh Burrows is the one with cooties.” (Undoubtedly the wrong lesson to teach in that moment, but I am, after all, human.)

Growing up, my father had preached resourcefulness above all else. No use listening to someone’s problems if you couldn’t fix them. I could fix my daughter. I ached to help. “Do you want to stay home with Mommy from now on? What if Mommy was your new teacher?”

Rose Gold hesitated. She had mentioned last week that she loved her teacher, and there was a girl in class she talked about a lot. Maybe the two of them were friends for the time being, but how long until that girl turned on her too?

This transition would make both our lives easier. I could squeeze in classroom lessons during those interminable waiting room visits. I could make the doctor’s office an opportunity for fun, rather than something she dreaded. As long as those checks kept coming every month, we would make this work.

Rose Gold took off her glasses with the clear frames and cleaned them on her Tweety Bird T-shirt. This gesture always made me smile—such a wise old action for a child. I’d grown to love those glasses. Her eyes looked beady without them, as if they might scamper off her face without the frames to hold them in place.

“What do you think?” I asked again.

She put the glasses back on and watched me. “Can we still have recess?”

My heart swelled, imagining her participation in recess these past two years. I pictured her standing off to the side of red rover and tag, more out of breath than her classmates, who were running around.

I jutted out my chin, toughened the shell. “Of course we can, sweetheart. We’ll have two recesses a day. How about that?”

Rose Gold nodded and took off her seat belt. I hoped Josh Burrows and his goons were already fading from her memory. Supermom had saved the day again.