Summertime Guests - Wendy Francis Page 0,23

back to her dad.

Claire can’t help but smile because oh, how she remembers those early years with Amber and Ben! As if they were only yesterday. Probably because those days were all about pure survival—both for her and the kids. Surviving multiple rounds of strep, pink eye and then the chicken pox. The interminable struggle to get the kids into their winter jackets, the battles over teeth-brushing and hair-combing. Endless hours spent negotiating with tiny people who marched around her house as if they were Napoleon (but with high, squeaky voices). It was all she could do to wrestle her children into bed at the end of each day—and keep them there.

When Walt would arrive home around eight or nine from work, disdain would sweep over her, and Claire would demand “Where have you been?” even though she knew full well that his job as an accountant demanded long hours. He always apologized, but beyond that, he had little to offer in the parenting category. Especially during the preschool years, which were so exhausting, so hard. It was then that the first kernel of jealousy was planted, Walt getting to pursue his career while Claire neglected hers to care for the kids. She’d missed the buzz of the newsroom, the adrenaline surge of chasing a story. That her days were suddenly filled with feeding schedules and nap schedules and bath time...well, the sheer boredom of it could be mind-numbing.

Her reward had come in the relatively peaceful stretch that followed, the kids falling into the easy rhythms of elementary school and Claire going back to work once again. Likewise, her relationship with Walt, like a river that had nearly run dry, found its way back almost to its original level. They went out to dinner again, just the two of them, even enjoyed an odd movie together. Babysitters were cheap, and when Claire thinks back to some of the young girls—not even teenagers—she’d left Ben and Amber with! Well, it was a good thing child protective services wasn’t checking up on her. But those dates had been necessary, critical to her sanity.

And then the middle-school and high-school years hit—at least, that’s how she thinks of them. As if a giant meteor collided with her marriage, her family. Awkward, stressful, soul-sapping years. Walt was constantly working, Claire was trying to get ahead at the paper and Amber, for some reason, had decided to stop eating. One day her daughter had lifted up her shirt to go shower, and Claire, hovering at Amber’s bedroom door, could discern the alarming, gentle curve of her ribs beneath the skin. Three years and thousands of dollars of therapy later, Amber began eating again, as if nothing at all had happened, leaving Claire to wonder if they’d really lived through that hellish time or if she’d dreamed it.

The little girl has returned to the pool’s edge, but before her mom can even outstretch her arms to catch her, she scurries back to her dad again. Claire’s eyes connect with the mother, who shakes her head and lifts her hands, as if to say What can you do?

By the time Ben left for Columbia (Amber had already graduated from Bates), Claire was leading her own team at the Dealer, her name creeping up the masthead. And she and Walter were barely talking to each other. Still, she supposes it was marginally better than those years when the kids were in high school and they’d mostly argued. Oh, he could make her so angry! Like no one else in the world.

Especially when it came to Ben, the boy whom Claire loved with a ferociousness but who could never seem to measure up in Walt’s eyes. Naturally a quiet child, Ben wasn’t prone to the big gesture or to being the big man on campus. Unlike his father, who’d been an all-star athlete on both the basketball and baseball teams in high school and then at the University of Rhode Island, Ben was miserable at sports. When he managed to get cut from the high-school JV soccer team (a team almost everyone made), Walt had made some callous remark about how even Amber could have made the team. How furious Claire had been!

“Words have meaning,” she’d shouted at him in their bedroom later that night. “You are destroying your son one word at a time. Why can’t you just let him be?”

And then when Ben called home freshman year of college to say that he was choosing health sciences and