The Education of Hailey Kendrick - Eileen Cook [7]
Kelsie clapped her hands together and jumped off her bed. “Deal. I’ll fire up the cappuccino machine in the lounge and make you a killer latte.” She stopped in her doorway. “I’ll make this up to you,” she promised.
“Don’t worry about it.” I knew Kelsie. She wasn’t the kind to clog up her brain with a lot of worry and stress anyway, so it was better to be nice about it. She believed stress led to breakouts, and she wasn’t going to risk a zit for a war that happened hundreds of years ago. Freaking out was more my domain. I grabbed an extra KitKat. I was going to need the sugar rush to get through the night.
3
I wasn’t always someone who worried about everything. As a kid I assumed things would generally work out okay. My mom took care of everything. She could banish the monsters under my bed, and if I fell off my bike, she would blow on my skinned knees, which magically made them hurt less. At that age I was unaware of the dangers of septicemia (blood poisoning) and was content with a Band-Aid. Now I buy Neosporin in bulk.
While my mom was great, I thought my dad was a hero. I used to be a total daddy’s girl. When I was growing up, he would take me out on Saturday afternoons so my mom could have some time to herself. He would pick me up at my bedroom door with flowers. He would always plan something for us to do, but not little-kid stuff. He would take me to fancy restaurants, the planetarium, or to the art museum. We even went to the opera a couple of times. He asked me my opinion and really listened to what I had to say.
My dad used to say that he wanted to spend all the time he could with me, because once I became a teenager, I wouldn’t want to hang out with him anymore. That’s not how it worked out in the end. My mom died when I was twelve. She was supposed to pick me up from school, but she didn’t show up. I wasn’t worried. My mom was the übermom. She made her own bread, sewed princess costumes for me to play dress-up in, and was never, ever late. A teacher found me sitting on the steps of the school hours later and called my dad when she couldn’t reach my mom. The teacher wanted to know why I’d waited so long without talking to anyone. I didn’t know how to explain that it didn’t occur to me that anything might be really wrong. That was the last time I can remember ever feeling completely safe.
A drunk driver hit my mom. She had bought fancy decorated cupcakes for my gymnastics club meeting and was running across the street to her car. He was rushing home after spending the afternoon in the bar. She was in the crosswalk and it was a bright sunny day. There was no reason for him to have hit her, no reason for her not to have dodged out of his way. The police officer told my dad it was just a case of bad luck. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were a zillion variables that might have changed things. If she hadn’t stopped at the bakery, if the baker hadn’t been so busy and forced her to wait, if she had stopped before crossing the street instead of assuming My grandparents moved in for a few weeks right after Mom died, to take care of things and help arrange the funeral. The first couple of days, my dad didn’t even come out of his room. I would walk slowly past his bedroom, and he would be lying there staring up as if he could see straight through the ceiling into the sky and all the way to heaven, where my mom would be looking back. There