She Poured Out Her Heart by Jean Thompson

Author:Jean Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-27T14:22:48+00:00

family time

Robbie said he was hungry right now, and Jane said they had to wait for Daddy. Robbie said he did not want to wait and he wanted macaroni and cheese. Jane said that he could not always eat macaroni and cheese. Robbie said what was that smell, it smelled yucky. Jane said it was dinner and there was nothing wrong with it. She cut up some apple slices and put them on a paper plate and told him he could eat them if he was hungry and Robbie said he was not hungry for apples. “Then you aren’t that hungry.” Jane sent him off to watch television. “You share those with your sister if she wants any,” Jane told him, but she didn’t hear any answer back from him, only the television’s happy noise.

She supposed she could call Eric and try to find out when he might get home, but either he wouldn’t know or wouldn’t answer his phone. There were times when he knew he would be too late to eat with them, and then he did call, but more often Jane kept a hopeless vigil in the kitchen, monitoring the food until she judged it was just on the verge of overcooked, or sometimes past that. Telling the children another five minutes and then another, until the effort collapsed in on itself and she fed them a hurry-up meal, just the three of them, and covered Eric’s food with aluminum foil so that it could be reheated later.

She was taking a different antidepressant now, one considered more suitable for moms. There had been some concern about side effects from the original prescription, meaning she had alarmed people by talking too much about the death of the self and the all-encompassing spirit. Her new pills made life both easier and harder. Easier to keep up with the things you had to do to get through a day. Harder to remember why any of it might be important. It was like living in a very busy train station with people constantly coming and going, while you yourself went nowhere.

Tonight she’d fixed halibut steaks with lemon and parsley and bread crumbs, an iffy thing for the kids in the first place, since even the blandest fish tasted like, well, fish. There was white rice (brown had triggered some memorable scenes), and a selection of vegetables served in separate receptacles to accommodate the child who would not eat carrots and the one who would eat carrots but not broccoli and there was corn, which everybody ate, and some chopped-up iceberg lettuce with the gloppy pink bottled salad dressing they liked. Sometimes she added a little flaxseed oil or pumpkin seeds because she had to be sneaky about anything hard-core nutritious. Her kids were like anybody else’s kids. They’d live on Cocoa Puffs and chicken nuggets if she let them. Food in, food out. It was a constant effort to keep them fed, requiring guile and vigilance. Young humans seemed intent on either starving or poisoning themselves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.