Atonement

Sticky fingers grab at the backs of chairs and wipe across the top of their kitchen table. Two small voices rise as her boys fight over whose gingerbread house looks better. Both houses are in varying states of collapse and have frosting melting across the hard slabs of precut walls. There is frosting in piles on the table, hardening into rock. She bought the kits on a whim the previous afternoon when they’d left the house as a distraction; atonement. (Here this will be fun, right boys?)

Each boy has frosting collecting in the corners of their mouths and melted candy coating their cheeks. Breakfast. “Have you been eating the candy?” she asks them. She can’t help it, neither boy would think of her as the fun parent.

“No mommy!” they say in unison, their faces serious, their mouths in tight lines. The youngest one begins to smile, but the older one shoots him a look: the two of them are in this together. She stares at the youngest one with her sternest “Mommy” face, but he shakes his head, the older one nodding at him with small quick nods that Mommy isn’t supposed to see.

They are up so early that her eyes look ringed in black. So dark, that the oldest one whispers in her ear to ask, “Are you OK?”

She nods and smiles, “Everything is fine! Mommy just needs more coffee!” she sings to him, which makes him smile. Both boys know that Mommy always needs more coffee, which to them smells bitter and ugly. No sugar, just black with a splash of milk that explodes like clouds (their favorite part).

The youngest one insists on helping. “I want to push the button, Mommy! Pick me up!” His weight is almost too great for her now. She leans him against the counter, his belly flattened by the granite. She supports the rest of his body with her thigh, how much longer he seems already, this one that’s supposed to be her baby. He presses the button and they both watch as the coffee streams into the mug: rich, warm.

He runs back to the kitchen table and grabs the tube of royal icing, squeezing it so hard that the back explodes leaving drifts of it dripping down his shirt. The oldest reaches over and uses his finger as a spoon, smacking his lips with the sugar. With an inward sigh, she opens another tube and hands it to the youngest reminding him to be gentle. This is the same phrase she uses whenever he is around the dog or anything at her in law’s house or the glass-paneled doors that open into her husband’s office. He nods and snatches the tube, not gentle, but she doesn’t say anything. She is trying to be fun. He squeezes icing over what’s left of his gingerbread, most of it now broken into jagged pieces and smashed into his chair or the floor.

A few of the remaining pieces have imprints of his teeth around their edges like the mice she found living in her attic.

A fuzzy little family nibbling on the beams above their master bedroom. She would wake up to small scratching noises in the middle of the night that made her jump. She had tried to rouse her husband (Do you hear that?), but each time, he would tell her to go back to sleep, that the noise must be in her head. Finally, she had gone up to the attic herself, beady eyes blinking at the sudden light from her phone, scurrying into corners, into the insulation. She’d had an exterminator come set traps.

The man had returned yesterday, his big boots coming down the stairs, a black trash bag in his hand. “Got ‘em, Ma’am!” he had told her with a smile. “Quite a few! Want to see?” he asked, holding the bag out towards her. She’d covered her mouth, hot tears in her eyes, both boys wailing at her feet, “You killed them, Mommy! Killed them!” The man had laughed in an awkward pitch that ended in coughing and some mumbling and then had taken her payment information without another word spoken between them. She was sure she had left tear stains on the receipt he had asked her to sign.

The boys throw M&Ms at one another, the shells of their bodies hitting the floor in little dings; candy shrapnel. She pops a handful into her mouth to keep herself from shouting at them to stop making such a mess. The chocolate is cloyingly sweet and she very much wants to spit it out, but instead, she quickly swallows. An M&M pings off her glasses and both boys laugh, both able to agree on how funny Mommy’s face looks when she’s mad. She knows that her husband would laugh this off, No big deal guys! Here, catch this!” And since she is trying to make them all forget about the mice, she too laughs and subtly shuffles the ones near her feet into a small pile on the floor to clean up later.