Page 15 of Big Island Neighbors
“What have you been telling our children?” His voice was so loud that she jumped and held the phone away from her ear.
“Excuse me?”
“You told them I’m never coming home?” he demanded. “Paige just called me crying!”
“I told them that you weren’t coming back. Yet,” she added after a beat.
“Why would you say that?” he demanded.
“What was I supposed to say?”
“Make something up!”
“I’m not going to lie to our kids, Mitch.”
“You shouldn’t have told them without me there.”
“You didn’t leave me much of a choice.”
He went quiet for a moment. “I can’t believe you’re trying to turn our kids against me.”
A sound escaped her, something between a bark of shock and a laugh. “You’re doing a good job of that all on your own.”
He hung up, and she felt a strange lightness. She almost laughed aloud, and realized that she was grinning.
Am I finally coming unhinged?she wondered. The pressure of running this place all on her own, keeping the animals alive and the lights on… was she starting to crack under the strain?
But she didn’t feel overwhelmed in that moment. She felt a heady sense of liberation.
And she realized that she didn’twantMitch to come back. Ever.
To the island, sure. For the kids’ sake. That would be fine.
But she didn’t want him here in her home. In her bed. She didn’t want him shouting at the kids about worksheets or haranguing Cody for hiding out in his room. She didn’t want the heavy weight of him on the couch night after night, drinking beer and staring at the TV screen in a stupor.
Tara tossed her gloves aside and marched up to the house. She went into the living room, wrapped her arms around the big boxy TV that no one watched but Mitch, and loaded it into the back of her van. She would take it to the transfer station on her next trash run.
Then, while she was chopping veggies for her goat stew, she called and canceled their satellite service. The kids only watched things online, anyway. They’d gotten the expensive satellite package so that Mitch could watch baseball.
It took a solid hour of wrangling, but by the time that the stew was prepped and lunch was made, she had one less bill to worry about.
“Lunch!” she shouted down the hallway.
Cody appeared first, his long legs making quick work of the space between his room and the kitchen. Lunch was a dozen different things spread out on an oversized cutting board: veggies and dip, homemade pâté, fresh goat cheese.
It was her way of bringing everyone together for a moment in the middle of their busy day.
So when Cody scraped half of the food onto a plate to take to his room, she let out a small huff of exasperation.
“I’m only halfway throughDemon Copperhead,” he told her, “and we’re supposed to be finished with it before the next class.”
“Go on then.” She turned to Paige, who was picking at a piece of cucumber. “Where’s your sister?”
Paige looked at her and shrugged, and Tara felt a stab of guilt when she saw that her eyes were pink from crying. Here she was reveling in her husband’s absence, and her children were in pain. How could she celebrate anything that was so traumatic for them?
“She’s out front,” Cody said over his shoulder, already halfway down the hall. “Manning the lemonade stand.”
“She resurrected the lemonade stand?” Tara asked. But neither of her children answered her.
