her off at school. It will counteract an entire adolescence of breakfasts that Aubrey slept through. It will welcome my daughter into her eighteenth year of life and send her off to college.
Aubrey named this creation when she was eighteen months old, back when I was a stay-at-home mom who still had a husband and time to make special breakfasts. Aubrey was with me in the kitchen, strapped into the blue plastic high chair that Martin called the Space Pod. With the intensity of a heart surgeon, she was occupied chasing bits of pear, slippery as goldfish, around the tray. When I put the Mickey Mouse cutout toast filled with egg on the high chair tray, Aubrey had gazed up at me, her mouth rounded in a perfect O of awed amazement. Then I’d painted eyes and a big smile on the egg Mickey with a bottle of ketchup and, dazzled by my magical skills, Aubrey had cooed, “Miggy Moo.”
Why hadn’t I made Miggy Moo for my daughter every day of her life?
“Where’s my inhaler?” Aubrey bursts into the kitchen, sucking in broken, staccato breaths that pull her pale, freckled shoulders up to her ears and scoop out shadowed hollows behind her collarbones.
I squelch my desire to sing “Happy Birthday,” jump up and down, hug her, and congratulate her for coming home; I know she’s short on sleep and that makes her grouchy. Plus she’s told me repeatedly that she doesn’t want me to do anything for her birthday. Cool as a double agent trying to act normal, I answer casually, “There’s an extra inhaler in my purse.”
As she dumps out a flurry of old grocery receipts, wadded-up tissues, and an assortment of nonworking pens, I analyze Aubrey’s face. I check her color and listen to her breathing to gauge how serious the attack is. For a moment, all I register is her beauty. The simple, luminescent beauty of youth, the beauty of her being mine and still being under my roof. I complete my analysis and exhale. This is a serious attack of annoyance more than asthma.
Aubrey is wearing an old T-shirt of Tyler’s and one of the many pairs of ridiculously overpriced Nike shorts she inexplicably squandered her Lark Hill money on during her senior year. Her hair is squashed down on one side and feathers up in a cock’s comb on the other. We used to laugh at the comical forms her baby-fine hair took during the night. But it’s been a long time since we laughed together about much of anything, and it certainly doesn’t appear as if we’ll start this morning.
Still, whether she likes it or not, I hug my baby and whisper, “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”
For just a second, she relaxes into my embrace and I am certain that we have reached a turning point. That it is all going to be fine. Really fine. But then I add, “We’ll head over to the bank right after we eat,” and she stiffens and pirouettes out of my arms. At least she didn’t refuse. Right after we claim the money, I’ll take her to Best Buy and see what kind of laptop I can afford. A girl going away to college, a birthday girl, needs her own laptop. I’ll pick up a cake while we’re out. Maybe set up a farewell dinner and see if she’ll invite Tyler over.
When she can’t find an inhaler in my purse, she rummages through hers, pulling out three kinds of lip gloss, several tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, a white bib apron with coffee stains dribbled down the front, and more keys than most janitors carry. All held together by a chain with Tyler’s senior picture in a small pewter frame in the shape of half a heart. Of course, Tyler carries the other half.
An inhaler finally rattles out. Aubrey shakes it, huffs on it a couple times, and her shoulders relax. Without a word, she brushes past me, tears my list of college reminders off the magnetic pad on the front of the fridge, and on a clean sheet writes, “Refill inhalers!!!!”
The fourth exclamation mark is overkill. Unneeded. All the fourth exclamation point communicates is Aubrey’s belief that I am a loser dipshit airhead who can’t be counted on to do things like keep her alive.
Being blamed for the lack of refills makes me ask, “You’ve sort of been going through the inhalers lately, haven’t you?”