Chapter 32

SYDNEY, "Mummy, can we go home now? Please!"

Loretta had heard those words too many times in the last hour. She understood Mia, though. The kid was tired of being at the restaurant. Loretta had to admit that they'd been here too much lately.

For the past few hours, Mia had been hanging out in William's small office. She got tired of being out in the crowd. Loretta visited her frequently in-between helping William, watching the twin's broadcast, and chatting with customers.

Each time she visited Mia, she got pestered repeatedly about leaving. For the most part, Loretta was fine with this. because she couldn’t very well blame her daughter for wanting to leave.

Mia was fine when she was picked up after school and spent the afternoon and evening in the restaurant. But right now it was the winter holidays, and she was losing her love of being at the restaurant from morning to late evening.

And it wasn’t as if Loretta absolutely needed to be there. They had enough staff to take care of things. It's more that she wanted to be there.

They had become famous. The restaurant was a top tourist attraction in Sydney. Loretta couldn’t help but love that.

Though loving it so much made her feel cheap; and when she kept her daughter at the restaurant too long, she felt like an awful mother.

"Mummy, can we go home now? Please."

"Are you sure you don't want to stay longer? Just a little bit?"

"No!" Mia stomped her foot. "Think about it. If I wanted to stay here longer, would I be repeatedly nagging you?"

"No." Loretta sighed. "Sorry."

"I like it here, and I understand you like it here. But I'm a child, and a child needs a well-rounded life."

"I'm failing you as a mother, aren't I?"

Mia nodded. "Yes, and it's tragic. Now come on."

"Let's just say good-bye to your dad."

"Then we'll go?"

 "Yes."

Mia groans. "Finally!" Then she added, "Well, no. I'll believe it when I see it.

 *** 

They went into the kitchen where William was so hassled and overwhelmed, he barely seemed to recognize them.

His eyes were going out in a million directions. 

He did manage to kiss them both on the cheek and say, "I love you." Then he was off again, rushing. Stressed.

Loretta wasn’t annoyed by it. In fact, it turned her on for some reason. Maybe because she knew when he came home, his attention would no longer be divided. He was all hers.

Sometimes he was too tired, but usually he had enough energy left for a little bit more…action.

 *** 

When they got home, Mia insisted on playing Apples to Apples.

You were supposed to play with at least four people, but Mia ignored that rule. She had invented a way to play with just two. It was less of a game and more of an activity.

They picked the green apple card with the adjective; then together they looked through a pile of red noun cards and each decided what card they preferred.

The last time they played, Loretta had tried to expand the exercise by having them pick only one card between them; then fight for their noun with an intelligent persuasive argument.

Mia hadn't been interested. So they played it her way.

Loretta hoped Mia would get tired and go to bed soon. She wanted some time to herself. It had been several hours since she had checked her email.

She also wanted to do a little dancing. She had stopped teaching her classes and had been really lacking in the exercise department.

She had also been eating more junk food and drinking less herbal tea.

So yeah. Her life had turned to crap. But she was really enjoying it.

"Mummy, it's your turn to pick the adjective."

"One more; then it's time for you to go to bed." She hoped her voice had enough parental authority in it to be effective.

"One more for me; then one more for you." Mia insisted.

Loretta knew she should stand her ground.  But…. "Okay. One more card for me. Then one more card for you."

"You sure give in easily," Mia said with a grin.

"Don't push it." Loretta tried to give a menacing look.

Mia giggled.

Loretta bopped her daughter on the head with her left hand while using her right hand to pick up a card.

"Fabulous."

Mia started looking through the cards. "Come on, Mummy." Because Loretta didn’t start looking for her noun card right away.

"Tell me when you find the card that has my name on it," Loretta said. "I'll go with that."

"Ha! You're funny." Mia continued to look through the cards.

Loretta joined in the search. She picked "having a baby"not just because it was true, but because she wanted to win some mothering points.

What did Mia pick?

Dandruff.

"Dandruff? Really?"

Mia giggled..

"How is that fabulous?"

"Jayne in my class has it sometimes, and it's like her own private little snow storm."

"Well, maybe Jayne needs to buy some special shampoo."

Mia scratch her head and shakes it back and forth. "Do I have any?" 

"I'm not even looking," Loretta said,  because she didn’t want to know at this point. "Now your turn."

Mia picked a card. "Sensual," Mia said. And with a wicked smile, she read the description. "Tactile, pleasing, sexual." 

"Pick another card please," Loretta said. Maybe they needed to buy the kid's version of the game. There was one, wasn’t there? Loretta couldn’t remember for sure.

"I know about sex," Mia said.

"I know you do."  But....

What was a parent supposed to do in this situation?

Mia looked through the red noun cards.

Loretta didn’t join her. "Mia, can you please humor me and pick another card?"

"Fine." She picked again. "Phony."

Without comment, they both looked through the red cards. Loretta couldn’t really find anything she liked, so she decided to be clever. Or tried to be clever. "Anthony Hopkins." It wasn’t that he was fake in a bad way. But he was an actor and he pretended to be different people. So wasn’t that phony?

Loretta had to admit she was bending things a bit, but she wanted this activity to end. Hopefully, Mia wouldn’t argue against the card.

She didn’t. She was too eager to share her own card—Freckles.

"Why are freckles phony?"

"Jill. Remember her?" Another girl from Mia's class. 

"Yes." Loretta knew about all the kids in Mia's class. She talked about them so often. "She has freckles, and she's phony."

"So you associate phony with freckles."

"Yes." "But you know, Mia. There are lots of people who have freckles, and they're not phony."

Mia sighed dramatically. "I'm not ignorant!"

Loretta smiled at her daughter. "Of course not."

Mia yawned.

"Come on," Loretta said. "Let's get you to bed."

To her relief, Mia didn’t protest.

*** 

The whole going-to-bed process took Loretta longer than she would have liked, because once Mia's head hit the pillow, she got a second wind.

Suddenly, the kid had a lot more to say. The little queen of gossip reported that:

One of the waiters, at the restaurant, had kept scratching his armpits, and it made him look like a chimpanzee.

Daddy had come to visit her in the office one time and broke wind. It was a silent but deadly one, and he had snuck out without taking ownership.

Once when she had been walking around the restaurant, she overheard some girls saying they had a crush on Hayden. They fought over him.

"What about Zachary?" Loretta asked Mia.

"Hayden's the more popular one."

Loretta hadn't realized that.

When Mia finished with the restaurant gossip, she moved onto her classmates.

Matilda and Ted had been having a lot of drama, but Matilda might move to Melbourne.

On that subject, Whitney had moved to Perth, and they wouldn’t be seeing her anymore after the winter holidays.

"Will you miss her?" Loretta asked.

Mia shrugged her shoulders. "Probably not. We weren't that close."

Loretta had the idea that her daughter wasn’t particularly close to anyone in the class. It worried her a little. She wondered if she should worry more.

She probably should.

"I need to go to the toilet."

Oh yeah. Of course. "Go ahead," Loretta said. She waited on Mia's bed and used that wait time to do some worrying.

***

When Mia returned, Loretta kissed her daughter goodnight; got a hug and kiss in return, turned off the light, and went into the living room.

She sat on the couch and picked up her laptop from the floor. She opened it and clicked on her email. 

There's one from her brother-in-law titled Important!!! Open Immediately! 

Did Phillip not realize he sounded like spam? What was so important? 

Loretta figured it was just the way he was.  He was the head of a company and felt whatever he had to say was more important than what anyone else had to say.

Out of protest, she didn’t open his email first. She read the one from her Hawaiian email friend, Christina. They usually emailed each other about every other day, but Loretta hadn’t heard from Christina in several days.

The poor woman wasn’t doing well, but she didn’t go into great detail. She apologized for not writing sooner and said they were in a really stressful situation. A spiritual drama.. Christina gave her that much. She also talked about how she could really use her father right now, but that he’d become so distant. And that she had realized she didn’t have any real local (living) friends and regretted she hadn't made more of an effort with that.

Despite Christina’s own troubles, she made space in her email to ask how Loretta was and asked about Mia, William, the restaurant, etc.

Loretta wrote her back. It was hard, because she was a bit lost about what was happening.  She tried to be as comforting as possible but wasn’t sure if her words fit the situation.

One thing she said that she hoped was effective was: 

I know we live awfully far from each other. I'm not exactly a local friend. But I want you to know that I consider you a real friend.  I'm here for you, and you can always come to me–at least via email.

Loretta hoped her words would bring Christina at least a little bit of comfort.

When she finished with that email, she opened Brenda's next. Her mother-in-law had enclosed three pictures of her cats and a picture of a Passionfruit Pavlova she had made. Loretta wrote her back and complemented both the cats and the Pav.

She next opened up an email that looked innocent and friendly enough, seeing that the subject read simply Hello!

But when Loretta opened it, she found an attack. This man from Texas was watching a broadcast of A Nightmare on Elm Street and right when they were getting to the good part, the show was interrupted by an ambitious spirit who wanted to show off her singing talent. She had sung the Cup song without cups. (It was hard for spirits to get props sometimes).

The man blamed Loretta and her family, because it was their restaurant that had started it all. If it just involved her, she'd probably ignore the email or better yet write something sarcastic and/or condescending back. But the restaurant was their livelihood, and she had the responsibility to be professional about all this.

She wrote a short polite email back that was sympathetic about his situation but did not take responsibility for the problem. She briefly explained that the twins broadcast to the restaurant only. That was all they knew how to do and were not responsible for the mass broadcasts.

She had already explained this a zillion times before, to other complainers.  So yeah. It was getting old.

Now it was time to read Phillip's email.

She opened it and saw it wasn’t for her personally. It was a group email that had gone out to her, William, Brenda, Arthur, Bernard, and some other people she didn’t know.

Maybe his parents?

No, probably not. He hardly talked about them. They were away somewhere in a retirement home that he paid for.

The body of the email said:

Greetings, my wonderful family! I am sending this out to those who are most important to us, because I want to keep you in the loop. There's going to be a huge press release in the next few days. I'm saying…HUGE! I felt it was right for you to know before the general public.

I am on a team that is working to expand communication between the us and the OS/EB world.

I know what you're thinking! We have enough already. Why ask for more? 

Well, the thing about progress is it should never stop! We keep taking steps forward, and sometimes we take leaps! There's not much I can tell you now, but I will give you more information in the near future. Just imagine a world where your relationship with your loved ones is not constrained by the internet! I am very excited about all this, and I know you will be too!

Phillip had succeeded in stimulating her curiosity. He also exhausted her. She had to agree with him. Progress for the most part was a good thing. Though there were usually side effects. 

It was like medication. Were there any drugs that didn’t have the ability to cause problems? That pill might take away your headache but keep taking them, and you'll destroy your kidneys. That was one of the reasons Loretta medicated with herbal tea, for the most part. But even that could cause problems for some people. 

On the subject of tea—Loretta decided to have something with chamomile before going to bed. Just the idea of the tea brought her some relaxation and comfort.

She felt even better as she drank it. But it succeeded in making her sleepy, and she missed out on her husband's homecoming.

Continue to Chapter Thirty-Three

Go Back to Chapter Thirty-One