M. Stelmack - A Roof Over Their Heads

She reached for Matt, banded her fingers around his upper arm. “Take Amy. Run into the house. Stay there.” She groped for Amy who, good girl that she was, had already shimmied out of her sleeping bag. Alexi hauled a sleeping bag up and over their heads. “Okay. Hold it up. Keep together.” She widened the tent flap for them. “Go. Don’t stop.”

She didn’t wait to see if they made it. She needed to get Callie inside and then twice in one day, call the police for the exact same reason. A runaway. There would be a report this time. Payback, payback, payback.

At least she had enough charge to call. She tucked her phone down inside her bra, and using both hands, since there was no way on God’s green earth Callie would let go anyway, she settled her bath towel above their heads.

“Okay, Callie, on the count of three, I will run to the house and you just hold on tight to me with your arms and legs, okay?” Callie flattened herself even more against Alexi, the sides of her knees like hammerheads against Alexi’s ribs. “One, two, three!”

And they were off. The wind immediately snatched the towel from her hands, and hailstones pummeled her. She shaped one arm into an umbrella over Callie and hobbled double-quick. On the back stairs, her bare feet skidded on hailstones and she flung out her arms to grab hold of the railing.

Exposed to the ice chunks, Callie howled. Alexi hauled herself and Callie up the last remaining steps and to the door illuminated by the outdoor light.

It was flung open as she approached, but not by Matt.

“Bryn! You’re here!”

He hadn’t run off. Common sense or Matt had prevailed. Either way, it was a gift, a break, a win. She fell back against the door.

“Yep,” he said to the obvious.

The inside lights were turned on, so she could see that they were all safe and sound. And wet, their pajamas stuck darkly to their upper bodies. She’d left the windows open so it was every bit as cold as outside, but it no longer stunk as much. Not that they had a choice of accommodation.

She knelt, taking care with her hurt ankle. “Okay, guys, wait here. I’ll run out and get the sleeping bags and we’ll sleep here for the rest of the night. It’s dry here, there’s a roof over our heads. And in the morning—” she looked at Bryn “—we’ll figure out the rest.”

Callie stuck to her, a damp, flesh-and-bone magnet. “I want to go home.”

Alexi said what she’d been repeating all through the packing. “Home is where we’re all together, sweetie.”

Only the promise of a warm, cozy sleeping bag and the wheedling of the other kids persuaded Callie to loosen her grip on Alexi. Once free, she lost no time plunging back outside. The fall of hailstones had thinned but they were up to her ankles. The tent roof was so weighted down that she had to hunch as she wadded all the sleeping bags into hers.

She drew a deep breath, gave herself a one-two-three count and dashed back as fast as her hurt, numbed body would allow. She dumped the bags on the kitchen floor with quick instructions to Matt, and then plunged outside again to retrieve the pillows. When she got back, Matt was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Callie curled in his lap while the other two were laying the bags out.

This time, she arranged herself like a mother cat, the kids stretched out perpendicular to her, their heads against her belly side, all easy to reach in the night if she needed to. And like tired kittens they all fell asleep almost instantly, even Bryn.

Of course, now she was overtired and couldn’t sleep. She knew why. She hadn’t said good-night to Richard. Talking to him would completely drain the battery, leaving her unable to make even an emergency call. And hadn’t she moved, put herself and the kids through this whole ordeal, in order for them to start to construct a new life without him? Hadn’t she promised herself that to recognize the necessity of moving on she’d stop this self-destructive habit on the one-year anniversary of his death?

Except who could’ve predicted a day like today? God knows what she would’ve done if Seth Greene hadn’t come to the rescue. Tall and contained and so serious. Normal people greeted other people with a smile. He watched and, she was pretty sure, judged. Whatever. She had no reason to see him again.

Or anyone, for that matter.

Alexi felt a sudden fluttering in her chest that rose to a wild battering, like she’d swallowed a bit of the storm.

If she were to get through the night, and the next morning, she needed something—someone—to bring her a thin sliver of peace.

She slid open the phone and tapped to full screen Richard’s picture. Not the one she’d wallpapered with him at the playground rope hive with the kids hanging around him. This was the one she’d taken the morning after their wedding, fifteen years ago. She’d called to get his attention and he’d looked over his shoulder at her, a smile already in place. He’d smiled all the time.

What else is a man to do, he said, when he’s looking at you?

Seth Greene could’ve told him.

The battery icon slipped to 1 percent.

“Hi, Richard,” she whispered. “I tried not to do this but I can’t. Today has been...too much. I tried to do alone what we’d always done together. You and I moved to Calgary to make a home because we never had a real one. We’d made a family because we never had one. And it all made sense when you were alive. Now it’s me. Alone. With the kids, and Matt not yet ours. Or, I guess, mine. And today was rotten. The house is not a home. It’s not even a house. Tonight was worse. There was a hailstorm and—and—I think I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have moved the kids from our home in Calgary. I thought I could move on. But look at me. It’s been a year and I still don’t know how to get through without you. There’s going to be so many bad—”

The screen went black and the battery icon flashed on. Gone. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this, Richard,” she whispered into the dark. “I really don’t.”

* * *

MATT WASN’T ASLEEP. He’d almost been there, warm and limp in the sleeping bag like a wiener in a hotdog, rain drumming his brain to mush, but then Mom’s whispers set up a steady drip on his senses, until all else sank away except for her voice.

She talked to Daddy-R every night. When he was working up north, her voice, low and breathy and inaudible, would drift down the hallway and put him to sleep. After Daddy-R died, she carried right on talking to him. Matt hadn’t known she was talking to a phone pic of him or exactly what she said.

Until tonight. Tonight he heard how sad and lonely Mom was. That all her smiles and peanut butter cookies were fake.

It was all his fault.

Before living with Mom and Daddy-R, he’d run away twice. Not the way Bryn ran, a sudden bolting and a quick corralling. No, he planned his escapes. The first time it was to get away from his mom and to his dad. The second time it was to get away from his dad to his grandfather. Then when his grandfather died and he was stuck in a foster home, it was to his new dad. He hadn’t known who his new dad was, only that his gut said he was at Walmart, so every day Matt walked along streets, across a field and a parking lot to the store and, while families shopped for cereal and lightbulbs, he shopped for a dad.

His gut was right. He found Daddy-R in the shoe aisle, buying running shoes for three kids, and Matt, spying through the racks in another aisle, watched him get his kids exactly what they wanted. With each kid holding their shoe box, he had said, Now. How about we find the most beautiful woman in the store and take her home with us?

The kids knew it was their mom, and Matt had trailed after them to where she was in the fruit section loading an already heaping cart with apples, oranges, strawberries, everything.