Just 18 Summers

by Rene Gutteridge

Yeah, well, life has a way of making sure you don’t see what’s coming.

Tippy had listened to him complain all morning, and now they were on the topic of Ava’s movie-viewing habits. “It was called The Glitter Ponies.” “Was it about what it sounds like it was about?” Tippy asked as he heaved another sack of concrete out of the truck and onto a pallet. “Exactly. It was a movie about ponies covered in glitter.” “What did they do? Fight crime?” “No. They helped other animals that don’t have glitter.” “Did the glitter give them special powers?” “As far as I could tell, the glitter was only aesthetic.” “Did they come from a special glitter planet?” “Unclear. Truthfully, the whole story line was hard to follow. And I think that’s because there was no story line at all. There was no purpose for this movie other than to sell Glitter Pony dolls.” Butch sighed. “But Ava loved it.” He paused for a moment, stretching his back out. They still had a dozen more bags to unload. His muscles ached, but it was his mind that was bent. “I think I’m going to rent some World War I and II DVDs. She needs to know about Winston Churchill. Is Schindler’s List too hard to follow for her age?” “Probably too disturbing.” “Oh. Sure.” “You should ease into it. She’s at the bottom with glitter animals, so maybe next you should try Secretariat, then Where the Red Fern Grows, and then Of Mice and Men. Maybe throw Charlotte’s Web in there.” “Sure. She makes it through those and then we’re right at Band of Brothers.” “I don’t think she could do the whole boxed set in a weekend. Ma...

Larry, she knew, was incapable of feeling hysteria. He barely worried, which was medically provable by blood pressure numbers that rivaled men half his age. Beth, on the other hand, had worried plenty over the years. But maybe she had worried in all the wrong places, about all the wrong things. She had worried about stains. And bills. And report cards. And all the things she thought she should—all the things the parenting magazines paid experts to write about. She’d bought books about how and what to pray over her children. It surprised her to find prayers about things like their attitude on personal hygiene. She’d never even considered that, but she prayed about it all. But she never thought to pray about a pizza boy named Marvin. She never saw it coming. How could she have seen that coming? Now her firstborn had ambitions to be a wife. And didn’t know a single way to make an egg. Beth burst into tears.

“Promise me, Tippy, that we won’t be those parents.” “What parents?” “The kind whose kid throws a fit in a grocery store while they do nothing about it. We live in a cul-de-sac, not a jungle. Lily should take into consideration that there are other people living within earshot. That’s all I’m saying.” “Well, I for one love to hear kids laugh and play outside. It seems the world is right when they do.” “You realize our children won’t be playing in the front yard until they’re sixteen.” Tippy nodded. “Of course.”

“Tippy, our little one is going to be here soon. I know this all feels extreme, but you and I are getting ready to be in charge of a life. We have to protect this child from dust mites and bedbugs. From illiteracy and attention disorders. All before kindergarten. And those are just the tangibles. What about the intangibles? What about our child’s spirituality and his or her life philosophy? We really need to plant deep-seated ambitions early on, like at six months, or our kid is going to be one of those people who deliver pizza well into their forties. You don’t want that, do you?” “It’d mean free pizza for life, right?” Tippy’s grin dropped off his face. “No. Right. Obviously. Probably should have him stay away from the entire food industry to avoid obesity in general.”

She thought about Jenny—how she had been robbed of all the time in front of her. In a split second, she was gone from the earth and didn’t have as much as a minute to say good-bye. And here Beth stood, with time to be had. What was she going to do with it?

“Oh no!” Chip said. Beth’s attention returned to her boys. “What did you get?” Nathan asked as Chip held up the Candy Land card. “Queen Frostine!” “Get him!” Larry and Nathan shouted, and yelling like banshees, they all poured off the porch and onto the lawn. Nathan, with his long legs, caught Chip before he made it to the sidewalk, tackling him to the ground. For a moment all that could be seen were arms and legs rolling over the grass. “Beth!” Larry called, pointing to the whipped cream can. “Hurry!” Beth jumped off the porch and ran toward the chaos, her hamstring reminding her that jumping and running, particularly at the same time, had consequences that required ice packs. But at the moment she didn’t care. Nathan held down Chip, who was giggling so hard he was barely fighting it. Beth sprayed a crown of whipped cream on his head as Larry simultaneously dropped cherries on top. The giggling was suddenly undone by a loud, pointed clearing of the throat. Helen now stood at the fence. Queen Frostine in the flesh. Beth dropped the can into Larry’s hand as the chaos continued, then walked over to the property line, wiping the cream from her fingers onto her jeans. “Hi, Helen.” “What are you doing?” Helen’s eyes widened by the second as she observed the boys tumbling around the front yard. “Playing Candy Land!” Larry shouted as he whizzed past. Beth marveled at his speed. When was the last time he chased the boys around?

“Taking Madison to gymnastics. Hannah has pageant practice. Cory has a soccer game.” Her voice was low and her words clipped, as if it were a sin to show any kind of a drawl. Then her tone lowered even further. “It wouldn’t hurt to get your kids in some summer activities. Keeping kids busy prevents things like—” she gazed toward the boys—“spontaneous childishness. After all, Nathan is eighteen now. Shouldn’t he be—?” A horrible sound, like a pig rooting around in mush, cut Helen off. She gasped and guarded her pearls with her free hand. But it was only Nathan, attempting to eat the whipped cream off Chip’s cheek. Helen raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t he be looking into packing for that college he got into?”

Hannah had always been the one she worried the most about, the true “free spirit” of the bunch. Helen knew there was nothing more detrimental to a life plan than a free spirit. She glanced at the door, hopeful to hear a car door shut, but it was quiet. They kept eating, but Helen’s thoughts soon turned to their mortgage and their bills. Charles had such a good job—and now a promotion—yet they were still stretched to the max with all the kids’ activities and college expenses coming up. Madison had gotten a full scholarship, but there were many, many costs. Charles had questioned the children’s activity level early on, but Helen knew it was their best chance at scholarships. Plus, there was nothing worse than a bored kid.

As she cleaned the kitchen, she wished Hannah—and all her children, for that matter—better understood her intentions. She simply wanted to give them their best shot, afford them all the opportunities she didn’t have. As she scrubbed the last pot, she lamented where those opportunities could’ve taken her, had she had them. Her life could’ve been different. She could’ve owned a business, she was sure. She’d had a lot of great ideas when she was younger. Her aunt once predicted she’d be an entrepreneur. Now what was she? A station wagon in motion, according to Madison. A bakery on demand. A chef at everyone’s service. She dressed as if she were of great importance, as if she were more than the source of her children’s angst, but what was the point, really?

Helen turned off the water. Suddenly her feet hurt from the heels she’d worn all day, but she tried to make it a habit to greet Charles fully dressed. Next door she heard her neighbor Beth take out the trash. Beth seemed unable to break the jeans-and-sweats cycle, wearing one or the other, and a ponytail, virtually every day. Beth was everything that Helen didn’t want to happen to her . . . to become lost in motherhood with no sense of who she used to be. But she had to wonder if Beth felt the guilt that cast a long shadow across Helen’s heart. When the children were younger, she could be stern but then end the day with a hug and a kiss on the cheek and all was forgotten. Now, it seemed, nothing was forgotten, by any of them.

Beth wiped her hands and turned, leaning against the sink. “I don’t know. I’m crying a lot lately. It turns out that Robin is getting married and she doesn’t even know how to make an omelet.” “Oh, congratulations.” Daphne blinked. “Is that a requirement? The omelet?” “She’s not prepared for this world. I haven’t done my job. Any decent mother shows her daughter how to cook. It’s part of the deal. You teach them to shave their legs, pluck their eyebrows, and make an omelet.” Daphne looked frightened as her gaze roamed over the ingredients on the counter. “Well, Robin is really smart, you know. Savvy. You’ve taught her a lot of things. She goes to church, she helps at the food pantry . . .” “I haven’t done anything for her. She can’t sew on a button. She can’t iron a shirt.” Beth covered her mouth. Another sob was about to escape. “She can’t hem, Daphne! And I know it sounds like I just stepped out of 1950, but she has no idea what to do as a wife.”

“Unlike a crooked nose or being a size A, you can’t fix other people. You can only fix how you view them, the lens by which you see them. You can pray for your children, guide them, live a good example in front of them. But you can’t fix them.”

The two were quiet for a moment, with Butch hating that grief never bothered to knock—it just barged its way in anytime it wanted to.

“When your child is born, eighteen years seems like they’ll last forever. But it goes by in a blink.” His knobby finger traced the fishing line. “You have just eighteen summers to make memories together. You can’t go back and rewind those days.”

“The hardest thing to realize is that from the day they are born, you’re training them up to leave you.”

“Once you understand you’ve changed somebody’s life, no gift you’ll ever receive will stack up. Nothing can compare to what you feel the day you look someone in the eye and show them they were worth all your effort, that they were worthy of everything you could give.”

“And I think all the tears were for . . . were . . . I realized all these years I’ve prayed and I’ve prayed and I’ve prayed, but I never really trusted. I never trusted God because sometimes—most of the time—it felt like I didn’t have to. I had full control. They were under our roof. They were dependent on our money. The things that were hard in their lives, I could make easier by doing something special for them. I think at the end of the day I trusted in . . . me. And God’s called me on it, you know? I’m spinning out of control because I trust in me: to be a good mom, to keep them safe and fed, to raise them as productive human beings. But you know what? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t ever me. They’re the people they are because of God’s grace in our lives. God’s mercy in my life, to be the parent I was to them. If I did anything good at all, it was because of Him.”