Free In Broken Places by Michèle Phoenix Page B

hair clip her daddy gave her. It’s a matter of grief.”
    I laughed without humor and sank lower in my chair, my head against the backrest, the strain of the last two weeks suddenly weighing heavy on my limbs. I was doing my best to handle teaching in a new school and not knowing the language and directing a play that so far had only one actor. But a four-year-old child whose grief was making her leg hurt and her teeth feel weird? It felt like the proverbial last straw, and I could hear the camel’s back straining. “She hates being here,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    I took a long, deep, resigned breath. “Maybe we should’ve . . .”
    “Don’t you go second-guessing yourself, Shelby.” Bev’s voice was soft but firm.
    “I knew it might be too soon. . . . I knew it before we came.”
    “And you haven’t been here long enough to gauge anything yet. Give yourself time.”
    “But Shayla’s . . .”
    “Shayla has lost her dad.”
    “And her country and her day care friends and her Wonder Bread . . .”
    Bev leaned across the coffee table, grabbed my hand and pulled it toward her, clasping it in both of hers. “Shayla has lost her dad,” she repeated, more firmly this time. “All the rest is just more losses that remind her of that one. She’s not accumulating loss; she’s reliving it. And there are going to be days like today when the loss makes her life feel a little less red than she wants it to be.”
    “I’m still pretty new at this mothering thing, Bev. How do I know if I’m doing it right?”
    “You are doing it right. You’re setting firm boundaries and loving her fiercely,” she assured me, squeezing my hand in hers. “That worry you’re feeling in the pit of your stomach? It means you’ve got the most important part right.”
    “Play season starts next week.” I felt backed into a corner. “I’ll be getting home late and . . .”
    “So she’ll have a few more days like today and she’ll throw a temper tantrum or two and you’ll reassure her that you love her and she’ll still love you no matter what.”
    I sighed and straightened. “I promised her we wouldn’t stay if it got too hard.”
    “And I promise you I’ll let you know when you have real cause to be worried. Right now, she’s just acting exactly the way she should under these circumstances.”
    “Are you sure?”
    She smiled. “I’m sure.”
    The mystery and responsibility of motherhood both baffled and exhausted me. “How old were your kids when you finally figured it all out?”
    “Oh, twenty and twenty-two.” She laughed. “It’s not a learning curve , Shelby. It’s a learning slope . It just keeps on going up.”
    When I entered the kitchen, Shayla was slumped over her drawing in her fuzzy pink coat, fast asleep.
    “You want Gus to drive you home when he gets back from the store?”
    I shook my head. There were few things in life that brought me the kind of marrow-deep peace I felt when I held Shayla’s softness in my arms. When I picked her up, partially waking her in the process, she wrapped her legs around my waist and both her arms around my neck and held on tight. And we walked home like that, me embracing her and her embracing me, me rescuing her and her rescuing me. And the sun setting over Kandern seemed just a little redder somehow.

5
    SIX MONTHS EARLIER
    “Nice,” Trey said.
    I looked around the condo and wondered what he was seeing that I wasn’t. Nice? The walls were straight and the windows were clean, I’d give him that. The laminate floors weren’t bad either and the fairly new kitchen held definite potential, but nice? No. The condo was an eclectic collection of old-man smells and single-guy knickknacks and way too many small-child toys. The only draperies I’d seen were in the balloon-themed bedroom upstairs, and the furniture from top to bottom was a tribute to the worst the ’70s had to offer.
    “Sure, Trey,” I said. “This is nice. Nice like All in