Page 54 of Unbreakable
“Does your tummy hurt, Daddy? Do you need to go poop?” Bella asked, expressing the utmost concern for me, her folded-in-half father. A woman passed by and bugged out her eyes to try not to laugh.
Another voice chimed in from behind me. “Hey, aren’t you Dylan Sorrento?”
Could the timing have been any worse? I nodded and waved a hand from my hunched-over position.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?” I wheezed.
“It’s okay if you have to go poop. We just go to the potty and go.”
Dammit, she is her mother.
Her mother managed the potty training for all three of our kids. I hadn’t even been involved in that aspect. My discomfort stabbed a little deeper at that thought.
I rested my forehead on the cart’s handle, working my way back up to standing. “Thanks, Bella. I’ll keep that in mind.”
TWENTY-THREE
DYLAN
NOW | NOVEMBER
Hey. I don’t know how else to say this. Jeanine left me.
You might want to have Rach check on her
Chappy
I’m calling you on my way home
“What do you mean, she left?”Ma’s hand was pressed to her chest. “I’m supposed to take care of these three alone?”
My mom was not handling the news of Jeanine’s departure well. Frankly, neither was I, having sat up most of the night trying to figure out why I didn’t see the signs that it was worse than I thought. Even though I was furious, and most of all, hurt, I felt the need to defend J to my mom.
Mom arrived while I was cooking dinner. It was a lemon chicken and rice skillet that Jeannie leaned on when time was tight. How did she get the rice done, though? I’d been cooking the shit for over thirty minutes and it still seemed like the rice was fresh out of the bag.
Bella was also attached to me during this whole process. She was being extra clingy since we got home from Target and she realized Mommy really wasn’t going to be home for a while. She complained that her tummy hurt.
So did mine, but you can’t take tummy-hurt breaks when you’re holding together a house of four.
“Gangee has death breath,” Bella whispered in my ear after Ma entered the house. “She’s scary.”
I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing. I strummed my fingers over her belly. “It’s probably your toots, sis.”
That made Bella giggle. She had entered the stage in which farts became the peak of humor. Given a good percentage of locker room humor had to do with bodily functions, I’m not sure I ever left that stage.
“I think she just needed some time away. She’s been under a lot of pressure,” I said to Ma.
“Pressure?” Ma blustered. “She’s a housewife with all the money in the world!”
Clearly, my mother learned nothing from our discussion at Thanksgiving. Maybe Jeanine was right about her being difficult.
Ah, fuck. And I’d done the exact same thing to her.
“What’s a housewife?” Alice chimed in from her seat at the island, where she and Grey watched all this go down.
“That’s not what Mommy is,” I said sternly, glaring at Mom. “Mommy does a lot of things.”
