The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

The kitchen sink

At twenty to eight on Saturday morning, a car I did not know pulled up in front of my house, and Kendra got out of it, still in her truck stop shirt, carrying a plastic grocery sack.

She had come straight from her shift. I could smell the coffee and the fryer on her from the doorway.

Her eyes were red, and not just from working all night. She held the sack out in front of her like a ticket.

“Josh said I didn’t have to come,” she said. “I wanted to. Can I come in? I won’t stay long. Mom’s watching the babies.”

I let her in. I did not offer her coffee, and then I did, because she was swaying a little standing in my kitchen.

She did not take it. She took a bottle out of the sack, a big one, the family size, half empty.

“This is all of it,” she said. “I didn’t want to just throw it away at our house. I wanted you to see it go.”

She walked to my sink and unscrewed the cap and poured it out.

It ran pink down the drain, and she ran the water after it and stood there watching it go, and then she put the empty bottle back in the sack and started to cry.

I let her. I stood at my own counter and let her cry in my kitchen.

I am not proud of how long it took me to hand her the box of tissues, but I did hand them to her.

“I work eleven to seven,” she said. “I sleep from eight till two if the baby lets me, which she doesn’t. Josh is at the elevator till ten. I’ve got three kids in a two-bedroom house and I lie down at seven-thirty for three hours before my shift, and it’s the only sleep I get.”

“Carter wouldn’t settle,” she said. “New house, babies crying. He’d come out four, five times. And every time he came out he woke Mason up, and then the baby.”

Then she said the part I still think about. “My mom did it to us. Every night. NyQuil, in a spoon. She worked nights at the hospital laundry in Watertown. I thought that’s just what you did. I thought it was a trick everybody’s mom knew.”

She looked at me. “I never gave it to my own babies. I swear on them. I knew they were too little. I thought he was big enough. I didn’t think about it past that. I was so tired I didn’t think about anything.”

I did not hug her. I am telling you the truth. I was not there yet.

But I sat down at my kitchen table, and after a minute she sat down across from me, at the same table where Josh and I had split up our son’s weekends on a pad of paper.

“You gave my son a drug every night for two months so you could sleep,” I said.

I said it quietly, because it needed to be said once, out loud, by me. “You didn’t tell his father and you didn’t tell me.”

“I know,” she said. She did not argue. She did not explain again. She just took it. “I know I did.”

“Then here’s how it goes now,” I said. “Nothing goes in Carter’s mouth at your house, not a vitamin, not a cough drop, without a text to me first. Josh does bedtime. Not you. If Josh can’t be there, Carter stays with me that night.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. All of it.”

“And if you’re that tired,” I said, and I surprised myself, “you call me. I’m six minutes away. I’d rather drive over and sit with three kids than have you do that again.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she put her head down on my kitchen table, right on her folded arms, and cried like a little girl, and that was when I finally put my hand on her back.