6
The Good Ol’ Days We Never Had
It’s just one of those rare, beautiful Saturday mornings.
You’re up before everyone. You have time to take your coffee to the front porch, gaze out at the pond, and wonder how it’s even possible or fair that life can be this generous to you.
Even the branch hanging over your house, that scary one as thick as a trunk, as old as life, it seems like a relative to you, there since you were a kid, watching over you.
And now a squirrel sits on it contemplating whatever the hell squirrels contemplate. Nuts all day long, probably. Nuts and more nuts.
Then you head into the kitchen to make your family the best damned breakfast any of them could possibly imagine. Bowls offresh fruit you picked up from the market yesterday. Cantaloupe, honeydew, and blueberries. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. You’ve got this smile that won’t go away. It may not even be a literal one; it’s an inner smile, as if your heart’s glowing and made of helium.
And before you know it, Marcus and Joshua are stuffing their faces at the table, and your husband is groaning over every bite of pancake he consumes. Yes, of course you made him his pancakes. Homemade from scratch. That recipe you’ve perfected over the years, since the first morning you woke up in this house.
You could’ve sworn you woke up intending to make waffles.
I guess Tanner still gets his way, right?
“There’s just somethin’ about you this mornin’,” says Tanner as he takes the kids’ plates to the sink, helping me wash up. The TV is already loud with the clashing of swords and sparkly sound effects of magic from their game.
I kiss him unexpectedly, take the plate from his soapy hands, say, “It’s just a good morning,” and place it in the dish drainer.
We have many good mornings, in fact.
I’m starting to think Tanner was right.
I jumped the gun. I was just “going through it”, as they say. It was only shortsighted frustrations and pesky bad moods that led me to the impossible conclusion that I had to end what we have.
I’m almost ashamed, to think that’s where my mind was at.
“You got some this morning,” decides Mindy when she stops by the T&S Sweet Shoppe one afternoon in October. “You arewaytoo happy.”
I shrug. “Happy husband, happy marriage, perhaps?”
“Then that must make for one happy-ass marriage.” She takes a spoon, jabs it into the cup of fudge brownie sundae she ordered, then leans in and adds, “Do you want to do thathaunted hayride thing I told you about? Maybe double-date it with our kids? I know my treacherous twins aren’t in the same age group whatsoever as your sickeningly well-behaved boys, but maybe they can learn a thing or two about respecting others and being good kids. You get me? Can this be a possibility? Please? I’ll get Joel to hook you up with a free oil change or something. I amnotabove bribery.”
To be fair, her twins are pretty awful, and I don’t blame her in the least for wanting my kids’ sunshine to rub off on them.
Maybe a haunted hayride isn’t the worst idea, I tell myself after she’s taken off and I’m in the back again, seated at my desk in my cramped little office with my laptop, stumped on the name of a new cinnamon pastry I’ve been developing.
Fast-forward to the end of the month, and I’m standing next to one green Minecraft creeper, which I’m reluctant to call my son Joshua with his appropriately creepy, block-shaped face, as well as a “totally-not-from-Twilight” Vampire Marcus. I’m not sure why he has to distinguish himself from one of my favorite book series, other than my husband keeps calling him “Not Edward Cullen” and earning eye-rolls every time. But once we finally manage to leave the house, we make our way out to Gary Strong’s ranch (Tanner’s uncle) in the boonies between Spruce and Fairview. There, we meet up with “Franken-Mom” Mindy and Ninja Turtle Joel, who have their hands full wrangling in their three-and-a-half-year-old Super Mario Brothers twins, who apparently fought over who gets to be Luigi, so they both are Luigi in their green plumber overalls and no one asks about Mario. We also run into Kirk and Bonnie, another pair of friends of ours since high school, who brought six friends of their nine-year-old Kirkland Junior. We’re a band of seventeen split onto three hay wagons that inch their way through the creepy settings prepared by Gary’s ranch hands. Upon turning a corner of the barn, a scarecrow stumbles out of the dark and comes right up tothe flatbed for a jump-scare, which only seems to work on Joel, who shrieks. I nudge Tanner, and he seems to have concluded the same thing: that the scarecrow is our friend Harrison who lives and works on Gary’s ranch. I only now wonder if the funny zombie that leapt out of a barrel we skirted by earlier was his boyfriend Hoyt.
After the hayride, our curiosities are confirmed as the adults mingle on the porch of the ranch house while the kids run around a sort of candy-filled maze lit by funny pumpkin-shaped lights and ghost lanterns. Harrison and Hoyt were in on the planning of this whole thing, which is surprising considering Hoyt’s busy school schedule and Harrison’s furniture business taking off. But seeing as Hoyt shares his birthday with Halloween, he was all for doing something big and fun, then having a chill night “at home with my man”, he allegedly insisted to Harrison. I want to talk to him more about how he’s been, but he’s quickly off to prepare for the next batch of unlucky hayriders rolling in.
Apparently this is the first year Gary tried doing something like this, which gave him a lot of pause, but it’s turned out to be a success, with far more people coming in from both Fairview and Spruce than anyone counted on. “I don’t know if I’ll do this again next year,” he tells me and Tanner on the porch. “So much work.”
“Anything that counts takes a lot of work,” says Tanner with a beaming smile, choosing that exact time to throw his arm over my back, like he’s saying something else. I glance at the side of his face, appreciating it—and the black ooze running out of his ears.
Did I mention he dressed up as a zombie quarterback? It’s a bit on-the-nose, but I took his lead and came as a demented baker with a bloodied rolling pin.
I left the rolling pin in the car when I second-guessed brandishing such a weapon in front of other kids.
All of us, including Mindy, Joel, Bonnie, Kirk, and our gaggle of kids, return to the Strong ranch to crash Nadine’s big annual party she always throws at the main house, though this year it’s far more subdued with half the usual guests. When our boys dump out their spoils from the post-hayride candy maze onto the living room floor, Joshua sighs. “No fair. I thought I got more than justoneMilky Way.” Marcus cups the five that he collected himself and drops them onto his little brother’s pile and says, “Go to town, bro, all yours.” And I just stand nearby with a cup of punch while the vampire teenager gets murder-hugged by his green-faced creeper brother, my heart so full, it aches.
It’s been this awful thing that’s struck me often lately, how sometimes when I feel happiness, I start to also feel anxiety.
Like I’m used to cherishing things that are too good to be true.