“What are his things doing in MY room?” Kelly yelled from her bedroom.
From the kitchen, I glanced from into the TV room where Molly and John, Molly’s boyfriend, sat on the couch. I hoped he hadn’t heard Kelly—who couldn’t?—over the sputtering of the burgers in the broiler and the MTV program they were watching. Quietly I tiptoed out of the kitchen to Kelly’s room where she stood near the doorway away from John’s suitcase as if it was contaminated. She looked young even though she was now taller than me at 5′7″ with her athletic natural build. Tears sparkled in her deep brown eyes.
By this time, Molly had come into the room.
“What is his crap doing in my room?” Kelly asked again.
My stomach turned. It was the first day, the first few hours, of John’s visit to our home during winter break and it was already going badly. In my mind I pictured this going better. Since my trip up to Sacramento the month before, I was easing my way into the changing relationship between Molly and me. I’d begun to accept Molly was an adult who was making good adult decisions. I wanted to trust Molly and her decisions, including the one about having a relationship with John.
But Kelly was fifteen and she was still Molly’s baby sister AND John was the enemy.
Molly moved with a huff around me, and grabbed John’s suitcase.
“Whatever,” Molly said. “I’ll move him to my room.”
“Wait,” I said. I grabbed the suitcase handle from Molly, and felt the weight of the bag in my hand. “Wait. Kel, we discussed this. Remember? John will sleep in here and you and Mo will sleep in Molly’s room.”
Our house is ridiculous. Built as the first house in the area in 1926, it had been added on and adapted from the original two bedroom ranch house overseeing chickens and avocado groves to a twenty seven hundred square foot house with three bedrooms on three different corners of the house. Jack had a walkthrough bedroom which used to be the original dining room between the grand room and Molly’s bedroom, the original kitchen. I loved the old coved doorways, the crown molded ceilings, and the overall funkiness and charm of our Spanish-style house. But right now there was nothing charming about it when trying to accommodate Molly’s boyfriend and Kelly’s jealousy.
“I DON’T WANT HIM IN MY ROOM.”
“What’s your problem?” Molly yelled at Kelly. “You were just out in the living room being nice to John, and now you’re acting stupid.”
“Shut up,” Kelly said. “This is my room and I want to sleep in my own room. He can sleep…wherever.”
“Stop,” I said. “I can’t think with all your talking.” By having John sleep in Kelly’s room, this would have allowed the most freedom for him to go to the bathroom which was right down the hall compared to way on the other side of the house from Molly’s room. Molly and John could hang out together in the TV room or the rest of the house without disturbing Jack by going back and forth through his room. But clearly Kelly wanted her room back, and no amount of reasoning would change that.
“Here.” I handed John’s suitcase to Molly. “Take it to your room. John will sleep in your room and you can sleep with Kelly in here.”
But something got lost in the translation…
That night after Molly assured John that everything was cool with where he was sleeping and Kelly was chill, after we all ate our burgers and made polite dinner conversation, after we’d put Jack to bed, and Kelly went to bed, Molly and John went out for the evening with some of Molly’s friends.
Molly poked her head into David and my room before leaving for the party, and said, “We’ll be back.”
“Okay, have a good time,” I said, barely able to keep my eyes open from the stress of playing peacekeeper for the evening. “Be safe.”
“Well, that went well,” David said as soon as the front door clicked shut.
“Ah, how refreshing…sarcasm,” I said.
I sat up in bed. Who was I fooling? I couldn’t sleep. I was amped from the events of the evening. I felt the familiar tension of trying to walk a tightrope between two opposing forces. This time Molly and Kelly tugged on each end. This was what I got for letting go, relaxing for a minute. I’d convinced myself I was done with parenting Molly. We’d moved into an mother-adult child relationship. But the words David said before Molly went to college came back and shook me alert, “You will always be Molly’s mom.” He’d said this phrase a lot in the beginning of Molly’s school year, as I lamented about not being Molly’s mom anymore, that she wouldn’t need me once she was at college. And maybe she didn’t in the same way she had when she lived in our house. But now that she was back under my roof, our old roles surfaced. The fact was she couldn’t run willy nilly like she’d done up in Sacramento. Molly was part of the family. She was the oldest child of three and I was her mother.
Obviously there were growing pains to this “new” Molly. Clearly transitioning Molly back into the household was filled with bumps and potholes. So many things had changed. Molly was used to living on her own, eating Taco Bell whenever she wanted, going to sleep at three in the morning because that’s what kids in college did. But Molly mistook this freedom for maturity. “Now that I’m living on my own…” (Note to college student: This attitude slays me since living in a dorm with a cafeteria card where everything is paid for by your parents is not exactly living on your own). Regardless, perception is reality. And Molly’s reality was she’d been making her own rules and coming and going as she pleased up in Sacramento.
This played out the next morning at our house. I woke early to make sure Kelly was up for school. Not a morning person, I saw Kelly’s long arms and legs spread across her entire queen-sized bed. It took my sleepy brain only a second to realize something was missing from the scenario. Or more accurately someone.
“Where’s Molly?” I asked Kelly, whose face was hidden by her long curly hair and a pillow.
“WHERE’S MOLLY?” I asked louder.
“What? What?” Kelly pushed her thick hair out of her face. She blinked her eyes a couple of times, looked around her bed as if she might find another hundred and fifty pound person in it, and then flung herself back under the pillow, blocking the January sunlight.
“Mom, it’s too cold to get out of bed.” She burrowed deeper under the covers. I flung them off.
“Where is Molly?”
“Mom, it’s soooooooooooooooooo cold.”
“Where is Molly?”
“Hell if I know.” She pulled her bedcover over her again. “She came home last night, didn’t she?”
Didn’t she?
Yes, I heard Molly and John come through the old wooden front door near David’s and my bedroom. I remember the squeak and the rub of the bottom of the heavy door on the Mexican tiled floor. Yes, Molly came in and said goodnight and then what? Did they go back out?
My heart thrummed in my chest.
Wait. No…no…it couldn’t be.
“Kel, get up,” I said as I walked out her door. “You’ll be late for school.”
Jack wasn’t up yet, so I stood outside his door, waiting. What if Molly and John were in Molly’s room? Were they? No. I went to the TV room, but there was no Molly or John asleep on the couch. In the cold morning, I went outside without my robe or slippers. There was Molly’s car parked in the driveway. I walked on my heels across the frigid cement back toward the house trying to prevent hypothermia in my toes. Maybe John stayed at one of Molly’s guy friend’s house. Yeah, right. When I got in the kitchen, I jumped up and down on the tile, partly to warm up, partly to be distracted from what I needed to do. I marched to Jack’s closed door again. I pressed my ear to his door. Through it I heard his deep breathing. Shoot, I couldn’t barge in and wake up Jack to get to Molly’s room.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped at David’s whisper behind me. I grabbed his arm and hustled him back to our room.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Shh, I don’t want Kelly to hear us.”
“You mean the girl who has her hip hop music on full blast in the bathroom with the blow dryer on?” he asked. “The one who has been thudding up and down the hallway?”
For a thin girl, Kelly had the presence of a three hundred pound man.
“Yes. Yes, I don’t want Kelly to hear…” I lowered my voice. “That Molly and John…” I lowered my voice to a hush. “…are sleeping…” I mouthed. “…in the same room.”
“What?”
I repeated the sentence.
“What”
“MOLLY AND JOHN ARE SLEEPING IN THE SAME ROOM.”
David nodded.
I paced.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
I paced.
“What’s there to say?” Sometimes, oftentimes, David was infuriatingly calm.
“She directly disobeyed me,” I said, still pacing. “She KNEW she was supposed to sleep with Kelly. What the hell? If Bill lived here, this would have never happened. She would have never slept in the same room with John if Bill was here. Now what do I do?”
“You take a deep breath and wait until Jack is awake. Then you can go back there and—”
“And what?”
“Hi Mama. Hi Papa,” Jack said walking between where David and I stood. He jumped up on our bed with his menagerie of toy rifles, teddy bears and a blanket.
“Hey, Kookie,” I said. I stopped pacing and smiled at him. Jack was cheery in the morning, and he chattered nonstop. His golden-brown eyes shone with light and energy.
“Can you turn on SpongeBob? Can you get me breakfast? Can you go back to my room and get my dinosaur pillow?”
“I’ll get him breakfast,” David said, as he kissed Jack on his forehead, and then looked at me. “And you can get his pillow. That way you can talk with Molly and—”
“Shh.” I put my index finger up to my mouth. “Otnay inay ontfray ofay ackJay.”
“Like he’s not going to kno—”
I gave him the cut sign across my neck. David rolled his eyes at me in a way that suggested I was making a mountain out of mole hill.
I tiptoed to Jack’s room. I didn’t want to wake up Molly and John because I didn’t want to have the confrontation in front of John. I wanted to be able to pull Molly aside and give her the what for. Once in Jack’s room, I hummed not wanting to hear anything coming from her room. There are two things you never, ever want to happen: You never, ever want to catch your parents having sex (I dodged that bullet but my sister didn’t) and you don’t want to find your kids in a comprising situation.
Oh, God. I scanned Jack’s room. Where was his dinosaur pillow? Where could it be? What if Molly and John were naked? Where was Jack’s pillow? I started to sweat. Naked. What if… I looked on his top bunk bed and found the pillow. For all my intentions, I fell back to the floor with a thud. Oh, no. What if Molly came out from the room, disheveled and…and naked? I ran out of the room.
“Here.” I tossed the pillow at Jack who sat next to David, both watching SpongeBob on TV.
David looked at me. “Why are you panting?”
“I sprinted here,” I said and then I ran to the kitchen which fortunately was on the other side of the house from Molly’s room.
Distracted, I made Kelly’s lunch and then breakfast for everyone. I refreshed Reese’s and Chewy’s bowls with water and dog food, watered the plants, picked up dog poop outside, filled the fountain in the front yard.
When I got back inside, it was eight-thirty. I’d only managed to be busy for an hour. Molly and John wouldn’t be up for awhile. Tick. Tock. And then what?
Finally after playing army men with Jack and defeating the Germans for the hundredth time, Molly woke up. Dressed in her pajamas, she shuffled across the living room, past where Jack and I were playing on the floor, to the bathroom. I waited for her to come out of the bathroom. And waited…
“Honey, you make sure the Germans are retreating,” I said to Jack. “I need to talk to Molly.”
Before she got to her room, I grabbed her elbow. “You’re coming with me, Missy.”
Molly wrestled her arm away from me. “Chill out, Mom,” Molly said. “What’s your problem?”
I escorted her to Kelly’s room. “Do you recognize this room?”
Molly sunk down to the bed. “Funny.”
“Do you?”
“What’s your deal?”
Molly’s hair was mussed. Was it messed up more than usual? I surveyed her neck for hickeys.
“My deal is that you disobeyed me.”
“Disobeyed you?” She stood up from the bed towering over me. I stepped closer forcing her to sit back down on the bed. She sat. “It’s too early for this…”
“It’s eleven in the morning, almost afternoon.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to get up.”
“Okay.”
“You and John slept in the same room.”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean ‘okay?’ ”
“I mean we got home late last night. I didn’t want to bother Kelly since she had school.”
“Please.”
“I didn’t. Plus what’s the big deal? We live three doors down from each other in the dorm.”
Damn, those coed dorms.
“This isn’t a dorm. This is a home with a fifteen- and four-year-old,” I said. “I don’t want you sleeping in the same room. You will sleep with Kelly tonight.
Molly shrugged her shoulders. “Fine. No big deal. I’ll sleep in Kelly’s room.”
***
John got sick that afternoon, the flu and cold. Molly started sniffling, too.
“I’m not sleeping with Molly,” Kelly said. Kelly was a germophobe. When she was in grade school and into middle school, she never went anywhere without her bottles of antibacterial hand wash. Her hands were chronically chapped from “washing” her hands in rubbing alcohol. She panicked if someone coughed around her. And if she thought you were sick, like Jack, she wouldn’t come within fifty feet of him.
“There is no way I’m sleeping with Molly. She can sleep with John in her room. They can be sick together.” And that’s the way it was…for the next three days John and Molly laid around the house sick. Molly’s room became the infirmary. At least they couldn’t have sex when they were sick and the door was open…Could they?