Four Wives by Wendy Walker Page A

girl. With thirty pounds on her right hip, and sixteen on the left, Love crossed the grass median, then squeezed between two of the SUVs and Mercedes wagons waiting in the line. Stares of disbelief, disapproval, and’most of all’envy, burned a hole in her back as she approached the children lined up by the school’s entrance.
    “I need Henry, please,” Love said to the teacher handling the dismissal. Like much of the school’s staff, the woman was young, just out of college, with an air of self-importance that verged on disrespect. Dressed in a skimpy skirt, matching blouse, and shoes whose shape defied all rules of geometry, she looked Love up and down through eyes that were now squinted. And although she pursed her lips tightly and started to speak, she ultimately held her tongue. It was too unseemly to berate a woman carrying two children in her arms, especially one so disheveled.
    As the girl turned to fetch Henry, Love could feel herself, her life, in the expression left behind. Wrinkled pants’no time to iron. Hair long and unruly, nails unshapely, skin dry. There was a time when things like this had mattered. The house had been let go as well. The screens on the porch were ripped, the front step loose, jam and syrup crusted on the refrigerator shelves. It wasn’t just the little things either’the whole place screamed of chaos. Toys were sprawled out in every room’cars and trucks and hot-wheel contraptions, play kitchens, and big, unsightly plastic dollhouses, and of course, Legos (Henry’s obsession) in various stages of construction. When did it become like her to be this way? Or was it? There just never seemed to be time for herself or the house. She was in a state of perpetual motion, and her father’s letter had sent her into warp speed’on the run from what she knew was coming.
    Love smiled when she saw Henry, though every muscle in her back was starting to tighten.
    “Hey, big guy! How was school?”
    Henry looked surprised. This was not how things were supposed to be, and even at five, he could sense that his mother had done something wrong.
    “Mommy, you’re supposed to wait in the line.”
    “I know. But sometimes things happen and we have to do things a little differently. It makes life interesting!”
    Henry wasn’t buying it. He knew his mother too well not to see through the sugar coating. With a look of embarrassment on his face, he followed her through the line of cars, acutely aware of the mean looks from the strangers that were now upon him. Deflated, he hung his head and walked close to the rest of his family, hoping he would blend in and escape unnoticed.
    As he approached the median, there was a scream, a cry of pain that was both peculiar and haunting. It was not the sound Baby Will made when his mother put him down, or his sister when she didn’t get her way. This was the cry of a grown-up, and Henry thought it was the worst thing he’d ever heard. Looking up, he saw something equally disturbing. On the small patch of grass, tangled in a heap of arms, legs, and heads, were his mother, sister, and baby brother.
    “Mommy!” Henry yelled, his feet glued to the earth.
    Looking back, Love would remember the feeling distinctly. Her back had simply let go. When she took the step up to cross the median, that was how it felt’a complete collapse of her body and with it her hold on the children.
    She tried to sit up, locate each child, make sure they were all right. But nothing in her was working. A moment later, she heard the crying’first Will, then Jessica, and for the first time in her life as a mother, she was crying herself with relief at the high-pitched wails.
    “I’m OK, Henry,” she said, trying to reassure him. There was no doubt in her mind that her oldest and most sensitive child would also be the most unsettled. “I just fell’I’m really OK. Can you come and get the baby for mer
    Henry stood still, fear and confusion mixed together on his face as the tears