“And we thank you, O Lord, for your gifts and pray that we will always be pleasing in Your sight. Amen.” Matt erects his head and begins to eat. “This is delicious.”
“Is this a potato, or did you just bake a rock?” Luke says, his face scrunched.
“Luke!” Matt scolds his son.
“I’m kidding! I’m sorry. I was watching some of the old reruns of TV show from you guys’s era, and some of the jokes were about moms being bad cooks.”
Caroline pipes in, “Well, a lot of them were about…” She is cut off by a death stare from her mom. “So, anyway… can I dye my hair black?”
Amber almost choked, but pretends not to, “Why would you want to do that? Your hair is such a lovely color.”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that… I don’t like it as much as black. I think black would better soot my personality. It’s mellow, reserved, individual.”
“Evil,” chimes in Luke.
He is greeted by one of his mother’s death stares.
“Mom, you always told me Dad’s best personality trait was his sense of humor.”
Caroline, eyes toward her food, lightly comments, “Not what I heard.”
Amber turns her head at this, “And about the black hair…” She exhales, “Matt, I’m tired. You tell her.”
“Sure, Honey.”
Amber cocks her head to the right, at her husband, “Matt!”
“What?”
“You’re supposed to take my side.”
“Honey, just ‘cause we’re married doesn’t mean I’m always going to take your side. Plus, I thought you were going to say okay. It’s not like she getting a nose ring.”
“Can I?” Caroline prompts.
She is answered by a sharp, unison “No!” from both parents.
“Shut up while you’ll ahead,” chirps
Amber looks at her younger daughter, “Alright, you can dye your hair black, on two conditions. I’ll pay for the first one, but if want to keep it, you’re paying for it from now on.”
Caroline nods, “I can deal with that. What’s the second?”
“You will have a baby with red hair,” states Amber, then quickly adds, “…after you married, and in several years.”
Matt jumps in, “And just for clarification, several means ten.”
“Eight,” Caroline proposed.
Matt looks over to his wife, who answers, “Take it, Matt. When she’s twenty-one, she’ll be mature enough to know if she really wants kids that early. Hopefully.” Amber continues to stare intently at her middle child.
Caroline, overly aware of this scrutinizing, says, “What?”
* * *
Amber knocks before entering Caroline’s room. Caroline is at her computer, headphones over her now blackened hair, bouncing with the music. Amber looks to her desk and sees Caroline’s algebra homework. It appears done, but she dreads to look closer in case of a page full of random numbers, letter, symbols, and doodles. She looks back at her daughter, trying to despise the color of her hair, but finding herself admiring it. I wasn’t the jet black color she had expected. It was instead a warm, perfectly dark brown. It was tied in a short ponytail high on her head. Amber muses about her outgoing daughter. The new hair color was not as terrible as she had feared. In fact, it was outright decent, but Amber smirked at the idea of her wanting this at age thirteen. She’d never…
Amber lightly taps her daughter’s shoulder; she jumps slightly, pulling off her headphones and looking back. “Mom,” she complains, “I told you to knock.”
“I did. Homework done?”
Caroline pauses quickly, and forces out a “Yes.”
Unconvinced, Amber stares down her daughter, picks up her algebra homework, “It may have been a couple decades since I took algebra, but I still find it a bit strange that you can get an answer of… 2s for a problem that started out with only x’s.”
Caroline snatches the paper back from her mom. “Okay, I get it.” She begins to read her math textbook and scribbles down more numbers. Amber, not quite satisfied, but tired already, walks out of Caroline’s room, but trips on her backpack.
Amber looks down, stating in a perfectly motherly tone, “Caroline, you need to clean up your… oh, my G—” Amber stops, picking up the cigarette packet from the floor. “What are these?”
Caroline spins around in her chair. ‘Always a mom,’ she thinks. Seeing the packet, she grits her teeth and looks away. “Cambry, I could kill you,” she mutters. “Mom, they’re cigarettes,” she says with a fake smile in response.
“So now you’re smoking?”
Flatly and plainly, Caroline replies, “No.”
Amber is surprised by the lack of waver her daughter’s voice. ‘Teenagers learn to be good liars,’ she reassures herself. “Then why do you have…”
“‘…them in your backpack?’” Caroline finishes her mother’s sentence, “They’re Cambry’s. Apparently she thinks I’m her scapegoat.”
“You’re grounded.”
“But…”
“No but’s.”
“Can you talk to me like a mature adult?”
“Sure,” Amber says, raising her voice, “you want know what to know what these things do to you?”
“Danae’s teeth and eyes are yellow. And her teeth are on the verge of brown, now. She smells worse than a campfire. She’s broke. Plus, they taste awful!”
“And how would you know?” Amber replies, her voice still raised and high.
“I tried one yesterday. I’m telling you, it was my last. I didn’t even finish the godforsaken thing.”
“I don’t believe you, Caroline. Don’t you know…”
“MOM!!!” Caroline screams, for the first time, “You’re not listening. I am never going to smoke a cigarette again. It’ll give me lung cancer or God knows what. Cigarettes bad, I got it.” She is now disheveled with anger.
Amber pauses, her eyebrows lowered in thought; she almost smiles. “Carrie, you’re a lot smarter and a lot more mature than anyone, even I, give you credit for. There’s a list of about a billion things that I want to teach you before you go off by yourself in life. This is two of them. You know cigarettes are bad for you. I didn’t even have to teach that to you. You got it. Scratch it off my list. But what you don’t get yet is that bad choices warrant consequences. You’re not grounded because you smoked a cigarette. You’re grounded because you made a bad decision. You should never been punished again for cigarettes. This is it.”
Caroline nods, “’Kay. Thanks, Mom. How long?”
“Two weeks, I suppose.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m excited about it.”
“Do your homework.”
“Leave my room,” she replies in the same tone. “Oh, please. That was supposed to have been checked off years ago.”
Amber smiles and exits the room. “God,” she prays, “why can’t they all be that easy?” Without waiting for an answer, she goes downstairs.
* * *
Amber pulls off her yellow rubber gloves and sits down at the table, with Matt, who is looking through the mail. “Stamps are going up three cents.”
“Well, it’s all the postal system can do to keep up with e-mail, which is unlimited under an internet service provider agreement.” This is almost monotone and quick, almost subconscious.
“Well, if you ask Miss Manners…”
“…she’d want to write letters with a fountain pen, squeezed from the blackberries from your own backyard.” Amber looks to her own small backyard, which is nothing but grass and a few young trees amidst a mess of Luke’s recreational sports equipment.
Matt picks up another letter, “Electricity is going up 5%.”
Amber’s face drops, “Now, that we can’t afford to happen. Mail may be going out of style, but electricity is all the rage. Matt, how can we be having minor financial troubles when you have a high-tech job?”
“Simple. There is one high-tech job wage-earner in this family, as opposed to two in 30% of American families. Two, webpage design is getting to be the bottom of high-tech jobs. Even hardcore programming is slipping into second tier.”
“What’s first tier?”
“The stuff they haven’t finished inventing, yet. Mecha theoretica is all the rage.”
“Matt, what are we going to do? We’ll secure for now, but our profit margin…”
Matt, not so much interrupting, but thinking aloud, “Old habits die hard.”
“We’re about to spend more than we bring in.” Amber sighs, “Well, what should we do? I’ve already been as frugal as I can.”
“Pray…”
The mention of faith silences the room, when even the buzz of the electric analog clock, which was advertised as being so quiet, could be heard.
“Matt, I already pray, every night.”
“It’s not working,” Matt states.
Voice rising, she snaps back at her husband’s unusual lack of faith, “Matt, I do not pray to a God who lends a deaf ear.”
“Maybe He’s not the one lending the deaf ear.” The conversation changes course.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we’ve taken control of our lives. I suggest we give Him the ten percent he asks for and let him take care of things.”
“Matt, that’s cr—We can’t afford ten percent. We can barely afford what we’re giving now.” She pauses, grabbing the neck of her shirt, then continues, “You know, Caroline told me the same thing. I don’t listen enough.” After a long pause, “Leap of faith, it is. I don’t like it, but if I can’t trust God, who can I?”
“Miracles don’t happen unless you let them. Ready to jump?”
Amber grabs and squeezes her husband’s hand, nodding.
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