there were days when Scott glared at the clutter of baby paraphernalia in their home, the spit-up stains scattered on the rugs and their clothing, with the resentful eyes of a prison convict. What? Did you expect it to be easy? This sagging you feel around your eyes, the ache in your arms, that is called parenthood, and it is no longer the exclusive province of women. Then came the scattered moments of aggression when his toddlers committed minor sins, when Brandon was a two-year-old just learning the power of felt-tip pens to deface freshly painted walls, or when Keenan tossed a wine glass on the floor, and Scott blared a too-loud “No!” When she was halfway into carrying Samantha, he punched the wall, leaving a crater for a week before fixing it, never bothering to explain what had set him off. It’s true what my mother said. You can think you know someone as intimately as they can be known, you can commune happily with their odors and their idiosyncrasies for years, but then they show you something distasteful, something frightening precisely at the moment when you’re too far in to get out. Maureen’s father was old Missouri Irish and the hurtful memory of his living room explosions had led her to adopt her mother’s maiden name when she was eight een. Now the neighbors had likely heard Scott too, they knew that his wife and children were inside cowering. They all knew.
Maureen felt the curtains of an ancient, unerasable shame being drawn across the windows of this bright home. I have to flee. Again. When she was eleven Maureen walked out and no one heard the slap of the screen door because her older sister and her mother were in full-throated battle with her father. On that day she ran out in her spring sundress and sandals, jumping down the steps, running to the corner, and then walking when she looked over her shoulder and saw no one was following, past other small houses like hers in that Missouri river town, underneath the impossible pinks of the flowering dogwoods, past the lonely Baptist church and the venerable, abandoned gas station and its gravel bays. Past the fields at the edge of town, with pebbles in her sandals, she walked slowly toward the unfettered horizon that loomed over the stubs of early corn, feeling comfort in the promise of other fields fallow and freshly plowed, and then to the hills where tractors cut plow lines that flowed around the undulating contours of the landscape, until she finally stood alone at the entrance to a solitary farm. Two silos stood guard there, each looking like a man with steel-pipe arms and a tin-roof hat, and she thought how much better it would be to have a father who was as tall and stately and silent. She thought these things until tires rolled on the dirt path behind her, and she turned and saw the police car that would take her home.
Now Maureen would leave and stay gone for a few days, and her absence would teach Scott a lesson. She would leave and decide later whether, and under what conditions, she would come back. But how would she cope on the road with three children, driving on the interstate?
How long could she even control her boys in a claustrophobic hotel room? She envisioned herself with her three children at a nearby hotel suite, the boys pushing each other backward into the fold-out couch, the minibar, in subconscious imitation of their father. Did she really want to be around that boy energy, their unpredictable physicality? A woman alone with two boys and a baby girl would not work. Her mother was in St. Louis, and if Scott was right about the credit cards Maureen wouldn’t be able to buy plane tickets to get there. Maureen went over her options during a mostly sleepless night and in the last hour before dawn she knew exactly what she would do: she would raid the emergency cash that the ever-cautious Scott kept in a washroom drawer next to the earthquake kit. And then she would leave with Samantha for a few days, allowing Scott to contemplate her absence and take care of the boys. Araceli would be there to keep the household from falling apart and the boys from going hungry. It was what she had always wanted to do anyway, to take off with Samantha for a few days, for a “girls’ vacation.”
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