Free Ever After by William Wharton

and Wills on a pillow. Friends are going to pick those up the next day.
    In the dark, Bert turns toward me.
    â€œYou know, Kate, I thought I’d never learn to like old Krautland, but if it weren’t for my mother being alone, and Wills going to live with Danny, and the fact we don’t have any furniture, I’d go right back to Stan and tell him I’m going to stay after all. These people here at the school are even nicer than Oregonians and that’s saying something.”
    Traveling with kids is never fun, and this trip starts out wrong. First, we need to wait six hours in Munich before the plane is allowed to take off. On the trip to Paris, strong winds make the plane dip and roll. The flight from Paris to New York is even worse. And then I get sick. I haven’t been sick on a plane since I was twelve years old, but I go into the tiny plastic restroom and vomit till I think I’m going to die. One of the attendants hears me, or maybe Bert sends her back, but she knocks and I manage to pull back the lever to let her in.
    She’s nice and considerate, and puts me in one of the seats reserved for the crew, tips it back and gives me a pill. She asks if I’m pregnant. I point up the aisle toward Bert, Mia, Day, and Wills.
    â€œThey’re mine.”
    I’m sure the stewardess thinks I’m either some kind of Arkansas hick or a fanatic Catholic. But she, like everyone else, is so kind. Different attendants help Bert and Wills with the babies during the whole trip.
    When we finally land at JFK, we’re six hours late.
    Mom is waiting at the airport, and has been for almost six hours. She’s come up from the beachhouse they have in New Jersey, where they’ve spent the last seven summers. It’s a really old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned town called Ocean Grove. I loved it when I visited them there about five years ago. But it would’ve cost 700 additional dollars to make the stopover this time, and we couldn’t afford it.
    I get off the plane dead white, Mia in my arms, Bert’s balancing Dayiel and our hand luggage. Wills is toting another bag. It’s a deep, low point. And there’s Mom, smiling as ever, as if she’d just met us on the street by accident. I cry. I don’t feel much like a grown-up. I feel like a little girl who’s gotten lost and just found her Mommy.
    When it all settles down, Bert is looking at our tickets.
    â€œWell, Babe, we’ve missed our connecting flight. Could I leave Dayiel with you while I go see what’s happening?”
    I can only nod. Mia is nursing. I’ll bet the milk she’s getting is sour. But it keeps her quiet. When Mia drops off to sleep, Mom takes her. She watches Wills watching Day, and I drop off, dead to the world.
    When I wake, Bert’s back and he’s all smiles.
    â€œThey were going to put us up in a Hilton Hotel or something until tomorrow, but I told them we have a place to stay if they could just hold us over until the flight next week.
    â€œThere was a whole bunch of palaver, but in the end we agreed, so if it’s OK with Rosemary, we’re on our way to Ocean Grove, in a car, yet. Think of that.”
    We arrive in Ocean Grove after midnight. Dad’s asleep. He jumps out of bed the way he does, stark naked. He says he’d held the place at the banquet they were supposed to be attending, until the lady took the food away. Then he came home, worried, checked at the airport, found the flight from Munich was delayed, then decided to grab some sleep and worry more in the morning. The idea of catastrophes happening in our family just never seems to come up. Somehow we’ve all lived in a kind of never-never land where nothing ever happens to us, only to other people.
    For twenty years, while Dad was supporting the family as a painter, we lived without life assurance, car insurance: we had no liability insurance of any kind, no social security, nothing but