Elise off at day care, she steeled herself and tried to think what her mother would say—You’re doing the right thing! You’re being an excellent role model! She’ll be fine! and not what her mother-in-law would say—What are you, crazy?
By early November, she had started to think that her mother-in-law might be right. She felt crazy. She was exhausted. Elise rotated through illnesses: colds, pinkeye, bronchitis, pneumonia, the flu. The day care director said it was typical, with her being around so many other children. Natalie used up all her sick days and family days for the entire year before Thanksgiving. Even Dan took a day off, in the middle of trial, but he couldn’t pull that more than once.
When she wanted to complain about how tired she was, she called Dan’s mother, and not her own; even as she dialed, she knew what this meant, which direction she was already leaning.
“I wish I could have stayed home with my babies,” Leni said, and this time, her voice did not rise up at the end, and there was no hint at all of a question. “I never had the option. I had to work. We couldn’t have paid someone to help at the store. But if I could have stayed home with my boys, of course I would have.” She had to set down the phone for a moment—Dan’s father was already shaky on his legs and needed her help to get down the stairs. When she got back on the phone, her voice was curt.
“Natalie, honey. I have to go. And I love you. You’re already a daughter to me. But I have to ask you, why are you doing this? You know? Why make a good life hard?”
Right after the divorce, when Natalie didn’t yet understand just how poor she would turn out to be, she’d paid fifty dollars to go to something called a Career Empowerment Seminar. For her money, she’d gotten lunch, including a salad and dessert, a laminated list of empowering mantras, and hours of advice that pretty much boiled down to the speaker’s favorite phrase: Do what you love, and the money will come.
The other women in the audience seemed encouraged. Natalie seemed to be the only one who knew the formula wasn’t universally true.
All those years, when the girls were little, she had been doing what she loved. She had mothered with passion. She had comforted and dressed and bathed and taught her young daughters every day of the week, because she believed she could do it with more caring than anyone else in the world. And she had loved it all, or at least most of it—the hikes to the park, the winter days inside, the making of snowmen and sock puppets. When the girls had field days in grade school, she volunteered to help hand out water balloons or retrieve Frisbees, and her own girls always seemed so happy to see her there at school that she felt sorry for other kids whose parents couldn’t make it—they either didn’t want to be there or they couldn’t be there. She felt lucky that neither was true for her. In that way, in many ways, her mother-in-law had been right.
And later, there were the days she spent with Leni, and also her own mother, during the years when they both needed help. Natalie wouldn’t say she loved those days the way she had loved the days with her children, but again, she was grateful that she got to be there. No one else would have looked after those two old women as carefully. The workers at the homes did the heavy lifting, and she was grateful for that as well, but she got to sit at her mother’s side for two weeks straight at the very end. You couldn’t hire someone to do that. And she was with Leni at the end, too, which was good, because who could they have hired to keep vigil so many days in a row, and to care enough to go find the nurse and remind her that Mrs. Von Holten really did need more morphine, PLEASE, now?
If that wasn’t passion, what was?
And yet, look where she was now.
It was hard to know what Leni, if she weren’t dead, might say if she could see Natalie parked in this booth with the decaf and the classifieds. She might have some sympathy. During the last years of her life, she was closer to Natalie than she was to