Shayla’s mind had been so stimulated by her first pick-up game that she couldn’t seem to stop talking. She talked about her rock, she talked about oranges, she talked about hanging from the rim, she talked about a cat that crossed the street in front of us and about the bright-green shoelaces on her sneakers. She talked, in other words.
As much as I craved silence, I found solace in her chattering. In the days following her enrollment in kindergarten, Shayla had become subdued and pensive, but the last week had marked a change. After Bev and I had talked with her teacher and encouraged her to acknowledge Shayla’s English questions and respond to them in German rather than ignoring them altogether, an awkward, bilingual dialogue had begun between them. Some of the girls in the class had started to include Shayla in their playground antics, and the newness of German kindergarten rituals had become less startling to her. She no longer cried herself to sleep, and though she wasn’t always excited about going to school in the morning, it didn’t terrify her anymore. Which was good for both of us—she had fewer meltdowns and I had fewer guilt-ridden, sleepless nights. So we were both a little happier.
But as Shayla talked all the way home from the gym that evening, my mind wasn’t really on her brighter spirits or on the meal I still had to make. It was on the abrupt and frightening end of my conversation with Scott. I couldn’t understand what had led from A to B, from bearable present to intolerable past, from relatively sane Shelby to raving-lunatic Shelby. I didn’t have any answers. Scott’s bullheadedness had made me put up my defenses; that much I knew and understood. But losing it that fast over a harmless invitation to a castle? That was perplexing—and, given my gene pool, terrifying, too. I remembered the heat of anger that had suffused my face and how it had made my voice shaky and my hand too firm around Shayla’s, and a familiar fear gripped me. The apple and the tree.
Shayla and I retired Martha Stewart for the evening and had cereal for supper. This made Shayla happy, in part because she could eat immediately and in part because of the sugar high cereal gave her. Go figure. Consequently, our bedtime ritual became a little more drawn out and a lot more competitive. Shayla wanted to color instead of brushing her teeth. She wanted to sit on the floor and pout instead of picking up her toys. She wanted to point out the window at nothing instead of getting into bed. When she decided she’d rather belt out the Barney song at the top of her lungs, singing over my admonitions and squirming out of my grip instead of saying her prayers, I again felt that flush of anger, that quickening in the chest and stomach that made me want to slap myself . . . or her.
I left the room with Shayla still blasting “I love you, you love me. We’re a happy family” in a way that might have scared Barney back into prehistory and, closing both her bedroom door and mine, reached for the phone.
It was midafternoon in Illinois, and Trey was at his post at L’Envie.
He picked up the phone and did his business-owner greeting.
“I’m turning into Dad.”
“Sounds like a personal problem.”
“Trey . . .”
“Hey, Shell. How are you doing? Things going well over there?”
“Guess that was a bit abrupt.”
“Just a tad.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Are you busy?”
“I’ll let you know when the Japanese tour bus gets here to buy me out of house and bakery.”
“So it’s a slow day is what you’re saying.”
“Slow time of day. It’ll pick up later.”
“I went to the gym tonight . . .”
“I’m sorry, let me replace the batteries in my hearing aid.”
“Trey . . .”
“Sorry.”
“I went to the gym to get something for Shayla to eat after school tonight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I lost it.”
“You lost Shayla?”
“I lost my temper. Over nothing.”
“Okay . . .”
“And now Shayla is in her bedroom shrieking a heavy-metal version of the Barney song and I can’t get her to stop, and when I grabbed her arm to make her lie down for the hundredth time . . . Trey, I wanted to . . . I mean, I almost . . . I wanted to just plaster her to the mattress and hold her there—hard.” I felt the emotion tightening my