The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

She also told me stuff she believed, like how you were supposed to have as much fun as you could. You had to find work that was like play, and then you could be having fun all the time. Some people didn’t know that life wasn’t supposed to be hard. “Which is fine for them,” she said. “If people want to think that life is hard for them, then they are welcome to that idea, believe me. But you don’t have to see it that way. You can look for good things instead.” Look for good things.

I don’t answer. I say I should go, I’ve got to salt the eggplant. I don’t want to be on the phone when he tells me he has to hang up because the guy is there right now. I don’t want to be shut down. I will do the shutting down, thank you very much.

Tenaj never did come back for me, and from that I figured out that grief is something you can get used to. You shrink it down, put it in your pocket, like a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper, and maybe after a while, you just leave it in your drawer and don’t carry it with you at all.

She shrugs. “Being a stepmother is never what you think it’s going to be. You have it in your mind that you’re the rescuer, and that even though fairy tales are full of wicked stepmothers, that everyone will see that you are different, because you mean well. And then one day you hear yourself screaming, and everyone’s looking at you with hatred and fear in their eyes, and you realize that you never can afford to get even one thing wrong. You’re not the real mom, and nobody gives you the benefit of the doubt.” “Oh, Mags, you tried so hard. And we were terrible. I was terrible.” “Yeah,” she says with a short, harsh laugh. “You were. Though I wasn’t all that wonderful at it. But, hey, look at us now. Together. We made it through. And the funny thing is—I’ve gotten over all that feeling of being mad about how I had to do all the hard parts of raising you guys, and she got to float around through space, being perfect because she wasn’t there. So . . . there’s progress. I was the one who got to watch you grow up, front-row seat. She missed out on that.”