Don't Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder

Author:Alexandra Auder [Auder, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Now

She is attacking a long sheath of white drawing paper.

“I’m going to paint with the kids. Where are those brushes I sent you?”

I tense up. Dread creeps in.

Let her do her thing, I coach myself. This is her forte. Art with the kids! Stay out of it.

She is aggressively prodding the art supplies.

“You probably threw the brushes out,” she says, matter-of-factly when I don’t reply.

“Oh my God, of course we didn’t,” I say.

But where are those fucking brushes?

If she had sent us a fifty-cent dream catcher forty years ago, she would want us to be able to locate it immediately. Once she sends us something, she starts calling us about it, telling us when it should arrive, asking if it has arrived yet. Everything that arrives is protected from inclement weather and thieves by a box sealed in a pound of packing tape and notes written all over it in her big loopy cursive: DROP AT DOOR. FRAGILE. FOR MIKO. DO NOT LET PAINT DRY ON BRISTLES. LEAVE BOX IF NO ONE ANSWERS. She also loves to have things sent to her. After a visit, I’ll get a call about something she left behind, something she needs me to find and send back to her, something like a single disintegrating water shoe. “Did you find it, honey?” she will ask. “No, it’s not here,” I will say, looking right at it, because, unlike her, I’m allergic to the post office.

Now she starts frantically pulling stuff out of the art cupboard and throwing it to the floor.

I’m proud of the art supply cupboard, though the kids rarely use it.

“Here they are!” she yells. “And they’re ruined!”

She is holding out the brushes she sent months ago—now caked with dried-up red acrylic paint—like severed heads.

“Miko, you have to clean the brushes right after you paint, or keep the bristles in water!”

I look at Miko and smile. I say with my eyes, Don’t worry about it, nothing is ruined, though if my mother weren’t here, I’d be haranguing him about the same thing.

She arranges Rosy and Miko with the white paper and a selection of acrylic colors on a plate, and she draws them while they paint. She’s wearing a down coat and a hat with ear flaps.

I realize I’m nervous because she might start arguing with the kids. Let her do her thing with the kids, I remind myself again. She’s great with kids, right? When I had Lui, I still believed she was magic with babies.

When Lui was a newborn, she had colic—or whatever it is we now call the inconsolable crying of babies. I was also inconsolable when nursing her didn’t work. I thought I knew everything about raising an infant. If you give the babies what they want, my mother had said, when they want it, they’ll be happy. Wasn’t that what we said when Gaby was born? But that “method” wasn’t working!

My mother arrived to help. She seemed worried about Lui’s cries. I thought she would be mellow, unperturbed by any of these postnatal hiccups.

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