The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

Kendra works the overnight shift at the truck stop out by the interstate, eleven at night to seven in the morning, running the register and the deli counter for the truckers coming up and down I-29.

I had met her maybe four times. She was pleasant. She was always tired.

She had a way of holding the baby on her hip and a coffee in her other hand like both of them were keeping her upright.

So that was everyone. And for two months, starting right about the time the soybeans came off and the elevator went to harvest hours, Carter had been coming home to me on Sunday nights wrong.

That is the only word I had for it at the time. Wrong. He was heavy and slow.

He would fall asleep in the car on the six-minute drive across town. On Monday mornings I could hardly get him up.

I would sit on the edge of his bed and rub his back and say his name, and he would open his eyes and look at me like he was looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool, and roll over.

The second week of October, his teacher, Mrs. Lindgren, sent a note home in his folder. She was kind about it.

She said Carter had put his head down on his desk during morning reading again, and was everything all right at home.

Again. I had not known there was a first time. I sat in the car in the school pickup line reading that note three times while the kids came out in their jackets.

I told myself he was growing. I told myself it was the weekends, with babies in the house and a different bed.

I told myself a lot of things, because the true thing had never crossed my mind.

I bought him vitamins. I moved his bedtime up fifteen minutes. I asked Josh, once, in a text, if Carter was getting enough sleep over there.

Josh wrote back, “Yeah he sleeps great here.” And he was right. Carter did sleep great there. That was the problem.

The night of the kitchen floor

The first thing I wanted to do was call Josh and scream. I want to be honest about that.

I am telling you the decent version of what I did, but the first thing I wanted was to scream until he understood.

I did not, and I want to explain why, because people ask. A friend of mine at church asked me the next week, “Why on earth didn’t you just call him that night?”

Here is why. The spring before, Kendra had driven Carter to his cousin’s birthday party in a car without his booster seat, because it was in Josh’s truck and Josh was at work.

Carter told me about it, delighted, like it was a carnival ride.

I called Josh that night. I was not even angry yet, just worried.

And within two minutes it became a fight about whether I was jealous of Kendra, and whether I was trying to turn Carter against her, and whether I would ever let Josh have a life.

Forty minutes. I timed it afterward on my phone. Forty minutes, and at the end of it nobody was talking about the booster seat anymore.

Josh hung up saying “Fine, Meg, fine,” which in Josh means nothing.