All the Days of Her Life by Lurlene McDaniel Page B

progress with Mom, how’s it going with my father?”
    “I haven’t seen him as frequently. He’s been bogged down in his business.”
    Lacey felt a twinge of disappointment.
    “But he tells me he’s visited you while you’ve been here,” the doctor added.
    “Oh, yes. Of course, never when Mom might popin. I hate being juggled between the two of them like a bouncing tennis ball. It wears a person out.”
    “Is that how you feel? Like a tennis ball?”
    “Sometimes. It’s better that they’re divorced, you know. Our house was like living in a pressure chamber all the time.”
    “And now? How is it now at your home?”
    “All right, I guess. More peaceful.” She gazed toward the window. The afternoon sun was slanting through the partially closed blinds and casting striped shadows along the wall of Dr. Rosenberg’s office. Although the shadows were horizontal, they still reminded Lacey of prison bars. Suddenly, without warning, her eyes filled with tears. “I miss being a family,” she said softly.
    “Your dad says he sees you often. Is that true?”
    “He calls it ‘dates.’ He’s taken me to a play and a few movies, then out to dinner. But it’s not easy to make time, because I have things to do at school and he travels.”
    “Don’t you enjoy the time together with him?”
    “I don’t want a date with my dad.” Lacey sniffed and wiped away the moisture gathered in the corners of her eyes. “I want us all to live together. Be together.”
    “But you also said the two of them can’t get along when they live together.”
    “So why can’t they? Other people do. What’s so hard about working out problems so that you can live with someone?”
    “Are you angry at your parents because they can’t get along?”
    Many times, she’d been disgusted with them, irritated at their inability to communicate and work out their differences. She remembered the trip up to Jenny House the previous summer. They’d fought and argued the whole way, and by the time she’d arrived, she felt ready to throw something. It was no wonder that when she’d marched into the room determined not to stay around a bunch of sick kids all summer, and Katie had come on like Miss Congeniality that Lacey had snapped at her and sulked the first few days. “I guess I am angry at them,” Lacey told Dr. Rosenberg. “I know kids my age who can get along with one another better than my parents can at their age.”
    “And how about the divorce? Are you angry about that too?”
    This was a more difficult question to answer because her feelings went deeper than anger. It was an anger coupled with a sense of helplessness. “I’ve already said that the divorce made life more hassle-free for us.”
    “But does it make you
angry?”
    “Yes,” she admitted. “I don’t want to be part of a broken home. Whenever kids at school talk about their families, it bothers me because they have two parents living together and I don’t.”
    “Surely some of them come from single-parent families. Or maybe step families.”
    She thought of the people she really cared about—Jeff, Terri, Katie, Chelsea—they all lived with both their parents. Even Todd had parents who’d remained married. She looked at Dr. Rosenberg. “Iknow there are lots of kids who come from split homes. But I don’t like being one of them.”
    “So you’re angry about what you can’t change.”
    “Wouldn’t you be?” she countered sharply.
    He didn’t answer her, but instead asked, “What have you done to let your parents know you’re angry at them?”
    “Nothing,” she grumbled. “There’s nothing I can do. They didn’t ask my permission to get their divorce. So they wouldn’t listen to anything I said. Or wanted.”
    “Often, when someone makes you angry, you want to take revenge on the someone who hurt you. That’s a typical human response.”
    “Revenge?” Lacey scoffed. “How can somebody get even with parents who dump each other?”
    “Are you