I don’t mind the clock, completely oblivious to the aluminum hand that spins around the circular face, pointing at this Roman numeral, and then that. This Roman number, and then that. I hear neighbors in the hallway, coming home from work; I smell their dinners wafting under the door and through the walls: enchiladas and baked chicken, pork chops. My phone rings, and then rings again, but I can’t be bothered to rise from the chair and answer it, convincing myself it’s merely some telemarketer, or an automated message from Zoe’s superintendent about some upcoming meeting at the school which doesn’t concern me, pertaining only to graduating seniors or to the parents of students with special needs.

And then the front door bursts open, suddenly, violently, and there Zoe stands in her pink jersey and pink shorts, her feet cloaked in a pair of muddy cleats. Her shin guards are on, the hot-pink socks that stretch all the way to her knees caked with mud. Her hair is woven into a double French braid, a unifying hairdo one of the team mothers has taken to giving the Lucky Charms each and every game day, complete with some kind of homemade scrunchie that matches their uniforms.

And she demands, “Where were you?” while tossing her backpack to the hardwood floor with a thud. She’s glaring at me from the open doorway and I watch as, behind her, a neighbor passes by with a pizza box in hand, trying hard to ignore the angry tone of Zoe’s voice. The smell of it drifts into the room to greet me, and it’s then that I realize I’m hungry. “You missed my game,” she says, not giving me a chance to come up with some counterfeit response to the initial question. I forgot or I got caught up at work and couldn’t leave.

Instead, all I can manage is, “I’m sorry,” knowing the words sound fraudulent because, in fact, they are. I’m not sorry, not sorry that I missed Zoe’s game because then I wouldn’t have had this time with Ruby, rocking here in this chair with Ruby in my arms.

“I tried calling you,” she says. Her hands are placed on her hips, and there’s a pout on her face. She looks to the kitchen and back again, aware that I’ve started nothing for dinner, aware that in the near twilight, I’m all but sitting in the dark. She flips a light switch on over the kitchen table, and I find myself blinded by the light, waiting for my eyes to adjust.

The baby lets out a moan, and I coo, “There now,” wondering if it’s the bright light or the surly tone of Zoe’s voice that upsets her.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Zoe barks out then. “I tried calling you. You missed the game. You missed the game completely,” she cries and for a second, I picture it: Zoe, at her game, with the rest of the Lucky Charms, refusing to acknowledge her mother’s presence, as is the case each and every game. It’s quite the quandary, it is: she doesn’t want me there, and yet, she doesn’t want to be the only one without a mother in tow.

But I don’t answer this. I don’t answer Zoe’s question: Why didn’t you answer your phone? Instead, I ask, “How did you get home?”

“Do you hear me, Mom?” she asks, and I realize that I don’t like that tone of her voice one bit. That sour tone of voice she’s taken with me as if she’s in charge and I’m the pliant one.

“Yes, Zoe, I heard you, but I asked you a question, as well. How did you get home?”

There’s a huff. A retreat into the kitchen to ransack cabinets for something to eat, slamming this one and that. And then, “Coach paid for a cab. He couldn’t stay there all night, waiting, you know? Like the other night. He has a life.” A pause, followed by, “You owe him fourteen dollars.” She yanks a bottle of water from the refrigerator door and states, “Ms. Marcue says she’s been trying to call you. She says you haven’t returned her calls.” Then, with a box of Saltine crackers and the water, Zoe heads out of the room. She’s gone about five feet when she pauses, stops dead in her tracks beside the closed office door and asks, “Why haven’t you returned her calls?”

“I’ve been busy, Zoe. You know that,” I respond, knowing that in Zoe’s preteen mind she can’t make sense of it, how caring for an infant could classify as busy. Busy is doodling on a forearm and texting friends, eluding homework and salivating over the handsome Coach Sam. Busy is not the inexhaustible hours it takes to raise a child.

“Well, are you going to call her back?” she asks. Her French braids hang long, their tail ends wrapping around the sides of her neck. She looks older to me than twelve, when she isn’t smiling and I can’t see the braces that remind me she’s still a child. I’m aware, for the first time in forever, of the sudden arrival of breasts. Were they there all along, and I simply failed to notice? Or has she turned into a young woman overnight?

“Yes,” I say, “of course.”

“When?” she interrogates.

“Soon. I will call her soon.”

“That baby’s not yours, you know,” she says out of nowhere, noticing the tender way I cradle Ruby in my arms, the way I massage her head.

“Why would you say such a thing?” I ask, my voice quiet, hurt.

“It’s like you think she’s yours or something. It’s weird,” and then, “Where’s Willow?” she asks drily, as if her words didn’t just blindside me, didn’t just punch me in the gut, and I say, sullenly, winded by the abuse, “She wasn’t feeling well. She went to bed early,” stating it in a hushed tone so that Zoe will believe.

“The flu,” I say, “it’s going around.”

But Zoe, thinking perhaps about my fraudulent phone calls to Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, rolls her eyes and says cynically, “Yeah, right,” and then she leaves, down the hall and into her bedroom, banging the door closed.

And I return to Ruby, on my lap, rocking until blackness takes over the sky, until there is nothing left to see out that window but a smattering of stars and the electrified buildings here, there and everywhere.

WILLOW

I started seeing more and more of Matthew. Most often we went to the library where we sneaked down one aisle or another to read books, sometimes, and to kiss. We went as early as we could, after Joseph and Isaac had left that Omaha home, because if we waited too long there would be kids from schools filling the study tables at the ends of the aisles, loud and obnoxious, even up by the engineering books where no one else cared to go. But when we got there earlier in the day, around noon, the library was almost silent, kids at school, adults working, and we could move about that aisle as if we were the only souls in the whole entire world. Even the librarians stayed away—since no one ever checked out the engineering books, there were never any books to shelve. Only once did some librarian stop us and ask, with a tone more curious than disapproving, “No school today?” And though I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart forgetting to beat—absolutely certain she was gonna send me back to Joseph—it was Matthew who said, like he’d had this answer all ready to go for a long, long time, “We’re homeschooled,” and that librarian nodded her head and said, “How nice,” and walked away. I didn’t even know what that meant anyway: homeschool. But Matthew did.

And that was the end of it. No one ever asked what we were doing there again: two kids out of school in the middle of the day.

Matthew touched me in a way that was far different than Joseph ever did. Matthew’s hands were considerate, whereas Joseph’s were not. Matthew’s hands moved slow and gentle, but Joseph’s did not. I thought of Matthew’s hands as an eraser of sorts, as if them touching me could erase that image of Joseph’s hands right on out of my mind.

Matthew talked more and more about getting me out of that home. But he said he knew his father wouldn’t let me leave. And Matthew didn’t have the money to take care of himself, much less me. Matthew never told me where he stayed once he left that homeless shelter. Not the truth anyway. He talked about sleeping on a buddy’s couch, or a friend letting him sleep on a cot in some storefront he owned, but when he said these things, he looked away, like when he talked about riding barges on the Missouri River, and I knew that he was lying. Matthew always looked tired. He started looking old. His skin was weathered, like maybe he was living on the streets somewhere, I didn’t know.