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  “I just… I’d have to ask my dad.”

  His laughter slid away the moment it left his mouth when he saw she wasn’t laughing along. “Really? You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head.

  “I figured you were my age.”

  Sunny didn’t want to talk about this anymore, but he was still looking at her. “I’m going to be twenty.”

  “I just turned twenty,” Tyler said. “I don’t ask my parents if I can go out. Is it like…some religious thing?”

  He meant the clothes, she thought. Or maybe her past clung to her like a stink. Sunny shook her head. Then nodded.

  Tyler’s smile was half of normal, but it still warmed her. “Okay. So. Ask your dad.”

  She opened her mouth to say no. What came out instead was, “I will.”

  Chapter 30

  Liesel’s mother is about to scream. Liesel can see this by the furious way her mom’s trying to light her cigarette, but her shaking hands are making it impossible. Robbie cringes behind Liesel, and Gretchen is stone-faced, though her eyes are glittery with tears and her cheeks are bright red. Liesel hasn’t started to cry yet, but she does want to run away.

  Fast.

  “How. Hard. Is. It?” Mom’s words crack on Liesel’s ears the way stones shatter glass. “How many times do I have to say it?”

  Robbie lets out a little whimper. Liesel wants to poke him, tell him to shut up, because when Mom gets like this, she’s like one of those lionesses in the grass on one of those nature programs the family watches on Sunday nights. Don’t draw her attention to you, and you might escape alive.

  “You kids,” Mom says, “are driving me crazy. You know that? How many times do I have to ask you to pick. Up. Your. Crap! Pick it up! Don’t throw your shoes and coats on the floor! Hang them up, put them in the closet! If something belongs to you, put it away, for the love of God!”

  Liesel can’t be sure what prompted the tirade, but she’s pretty sure it was Gretchen. She always comes in the front door from school and dumps her stuff on the dining room table so she can run downstairs to watch that stupid cartoon all of her friends are so into. It could’ve been Robbie, he never puts away his shoes. Or his toys. His stuff is always all over the place.

  “Liesel!” her mother cries loud enough to snap Liesel’s attention back toward her. “This isn’t brain surgery!”

  Her mother points at the kitchen sink with one perfectly manicured fingernail. She’s finally managed to light her cigarette, and she draws in the smoke now, eyes narrowed against it. She holds it for a second, so when she talks she sounds harsh and breathy.

  “Dirty cups go in the goddamn dishwasher!”

  “Oh.” Liesel’s stomach sinks. Yes, she’d had a drink of water from the faucet and had put her cup in the sink, not the dishwasher. “But it was full!”

  Her mother hits the latch and the door to the dishwasher falls open. Her mother points again. “Yeah, with clean dishes. If you see that? Here’s a small clue. Put the dishes away. Then put the dirty dish in the dishwasher! This is not difficult.”

  She points at Gretchen. “You. Go get all your crap off the table, or I swear by all that is holy I will throw it all in the trash.”

  At Robbie. “You. If I find one more dirty sock anyplace other than the laundry—if I find any single article of your dirty clothes, for that matter, in any location other than the appropriate laundry basket—I will take one dollar out of your allowance for every single thing. Do you hear me?”

  Robbie and Gretchen nod. Liesel has already moved toward the dishwasher. Her mother takes in another long drag and lets it out, the smoke rancid and making Liesel want to choke.

  “Are we all clear on everything?”

  The kids nod. It’s better not to speak. Nothing they say will make any of this better. Besides that, they know they’re wrong. Mom does ask them all the time to do exactly what she’s asking now. But it doesn’t seem fair that she gets so darned mad about it.

  “Good.” Mom stabs out her cigarette and takes a deep breath. “We all live here. Right? And I know you have this crazy idea that I just love cleaning up after you, but the fact is, I do not. There is more to my life than doing your laundry.”

  Liesel can’t imagine what else her mom might do all day other than laundry and clean, but wisely, she keeps her mouth shut. She considers herself lucky that she got away with only having to unload the dishwasher—she could’ve been grounded. That would’ve sucked.

  Mom sighs. “And really…I hate yelling like this.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy.” Robbie is kind of a suck-up, but when he squeezes Mom around the waist she does smile.

  Phew. The worst has passed. At least until tomorrow when the same conversation probably will happen all over again.

  That was what Liesel thought of when the words popped out of her mouth. “There is more to my life than cleaning up after you.”

  Peace, hands and mouth smeared with chocolate pudding, blinks and says nothing. Happy frowns. Bliss, firmly ensconced on Liesel’s hip, babbles something so cute and precious it would be nice to take a second to appreciate it, but Liesel is caught between her genuine and somewhat frightening fury and her shame at realizing that she’s turned into everything she swore she’d never be.

  “Happy, didn’t I ask you to watch your sister?” Ten minutes, that was all it had taken for Liesel to take the baby upstairs to change her diaper. Ten minutes and thirty seconds that had apparently been long enough for two kids to destroy the kitchen.

  Half-gallon of milk on the floor, mostly spilled. Two glasses half-full, contents slopped on the table. Chocolate pudding cups completely emptied, though it seemed more of the pudding ended up all over Peace’s face and clean shirt than in her mouth.

  “Peace was thirsty,” Happy said. “I had to get it for her.”

  Liesel knew the kids were a little wild with the idea that they were allowed to help themselves to stuff from the fridge, and the last thing she wanted to do was have Peace revert to asking her every twenty minutes if she could have a drink or something to eat. Happy wouldn’t—he was still very much attached to the idea of a schedule. But he’d help his sister do whatever he thought was necessary to keep her content. It was sweet, actually.

  Just messy.

  Liesel sighed, bouncing Bliss on her hip. “I have to put Bliss down for her nap. Why don’t you go in the den and play.”

  Upstairs, Bliss fussed when Liesel put her into the crib, though it was at least half an hour past the time she normally went down for a nap. It was the second day in a row Bliss had fought going to sleep in the morning, and Liesel really hoped this meant she wasn’t trying to give it up. That hour in the morning had become precious to her, one of two times a day when she could set the other kids in front of the TV and grab a shower. Or God, just go pee by herself.

  She hadn’t shaved her legs in two weeks. No time, and when she thought of it, she was usually too tired to bother. Her hair was in desperate need of both a trim and a color touch-up. No time for that either, unless she wanted to drag three kids along with her to the stylist, who never seemed to have any appointments available on the days Sunny didn’t work or after she got home. Liesel hadn’t yet broken down enough to go to one of those mall salons, but it was getting close. There was only so much a couple of bobby pins or a baseball cap could handle.

  None of this had been anything like she expected, which was stupid on her part since she’d certainly been privy to Becka’s grousing about how hard it was to be at home with kids. But somehow Liesel’d thought things would be…different. Because they weren’t her children? Because she wanted this so much? Or because it was the only way she could stop herself from dwelling on the fact she’d quit her job and it was the first time in her entire adult life she hadn’t had a payc