Keeping Faith. Janice Macdonald

hair, worn now in a tightly controlled ponytail that set off her clear skin and blue eyes.

      Liam’s eyes.

      Children pick up on negative emotions.

      Most parents only want what’s best for their children.

      Liam wasn’t most parents.

      Hannah didn’t need Liam in her life.

      Faith didn’t need Liam in her life.

      Children pick up on negative emotions.

      Hannah consciously slowed her breathing, stayed in the doorway, smiling now as she waited for either her daughter or her mother, who was on the phone, to look up and see her.

      Her parents had moved into the large Spanish-style house a block from the ocean in Long Beach just after Hannah’s first birthday and, of all the rooms in the house, the huge square kitchen figured most prominently in her childhood memories.

      She’d learned to walk by pulling herself up to the cabinet edges, knocked out a tooth on a pantry shelf after roller-skating across the polished floor on a dare from her sister Debra. A large cast of dogs had eaten from various bowls that were always set out by the back door, and litters of kittens had taken their first breaths under the kitchen sink.

      Nothing much had changed. After her father died, her mother had traded in the avocado-green appliances and ditched the old wallpaper with its repeating pattern of yellow kettles and orange teapots. The walls were peach now, or as Margaret insisted, apricot bisque; the refrigerator and stove stainless steel, but something was always in the oven or on the stove and, until last week when he’d gone to doggy heaven, Turpin, the family’s elderly black Lab, had still been eating from the bowl by the door.

      The henhouse, her mother called it these days. Hannah and Faith and Margaret lived there. Sporadically, Margaret’s sister Rose and her own sister Debra came to stay. Helen, the youngest of Hannah’s aunts, had her own coop, a guest cottage behind the rose garden, but always joined them for meals. Males were conspicuously absent.

      “Who needs them anyway?” Margaret would say. “We’re just a bunch of hens cooing and clucking around our baby chick.”

      So while Margaret’s friends were dealing with the empty-nest blues and converting extra bedrooms into sewing areas, Margaret kept busy as she had all her adult life—cooking, cleaning and caring for her brood. “My family is my life,” she’d say when Hannah or Debra would urge her to expand her horizons with a part-time job or volunteering. “This is what makes me happy. My daughters and my granddaughter. Why would I want to do something else?”

      If there were times when Margaret’s fussing and clucking made Hannah question the living arrangement, Deb made no secret of the fact that Margaret drove her nuts. Deb’s biggest fear was that she’d turn out like Margaret. “If you ever catch me acting like Mom,” she’d say to Hannah, “just shoot me, okay?”

      And Deb in turn drove Margaret nuts. Deb was the problematic chick in the nest; prickly and demanding, always flying away only to return a few months later, torn and tattered but still defiant. Margaret had been thirty-eight when she gave birth to Debra and had once, in Deb’s hearing, referred to her youngest daughter as “an afterthought.” Debra had never forgiven her.

      Still the relationship had a weird kind of synergy. Debra could tell herself that however screwed up her life might be, at least she wasn’t like Margaret, leading some nutso June Cleaver existence, ironing sheets and baking pies while her husband cheated with women half his age as Hannah’s father had done. And Margaret’s tales about her problematic daughter always got a sympathetic hearing from the women in her Wednesday Weight Watchers group. “I give Mom a sense of purpose,” Deb would say, only half in jest.

      So, too, did Faith. In fact, Faith was so thoroughly the center of her grandmother’s life that Hannah worried what Margaret would do if she and Faith ever moved away. Not that she had any plans to do so. She was happy. Sort of, kind of, basically. A job she enjoyed—well, maybe she would rather be a landscape gardener, but somehow that hadn’t worked out. A guy she liked. Allan was sweet and thoughtful and if he didn’t make her heart beat faster, so what? Chemistry wasn’t everything.

      More importantly, Faith was happy.

      And if Liam didn’t care that his little girl was just about to turn six, that was his loss. Hannah tiptoed into the room and came up behind her daughter. Arms wrapped around Faith’s shoulders, she nuzzled her neck.

      “Hey, baby. Who loves you more than anyone else in the world?”

      “Ow, Mommy, you’re squeezing too hard and don’t call me ‘baby.’” Faith wriggled away. “Look.” She held up a large colored tin for Hannah to see. “Grandma bought me these cookie cutters. They have all the letters of the alphabet. See, I’m writing my name with cookies.”

      “Wow, that’s terrific.” Hannah pulled up a chair and sat down next to her daughter. The cooking gene had skipped a generation, gone from her mother to her daughter. Both loved long days in the kitchen, Margaret’s cookbooks spread out across the table, the KitchenAid whirring. Impulsively Hannah brought her face up under Faith’s. “I’m the kissing monster.” She puckered her lips. “And I won’t go away until I get ten thousand kisses.”

      “Momeee.” Faith pushed Hannah’s head away. “I can’t see what I’m doing.” Up on her knees, she began fishing small vials of silver balls and candy confetti from the tin. “Look. Grandma bought me all these decorating things. We’re having so much fun.”

      “I can tell.” Hannah glanced over at her mother, still on the phone. Margaret, sixty, and the oldest of the three sisters, had wiry, gray-blond hair tied up with an orange scrunchy. From Margaret’s careful tone and turndowned mouth, Hannah guessed that the caller was Deb and that the crisis du jour was gathering strength.

      “God.” Margaret carefully set the phone back on the wall holder, leaned against the sink and folded her arms across her chest. “I swear Debra will drive me to an early grave.”

      “No!” Eyes wide and troubled, Faith looked at her grandmother. “I don’t want you to go to an early grave, Grandma.”

      “Oh, honey,” Margaret laughed, and hugged Faith. “That’s just one of those silly things grown-ups say. Grandma isn’t going anywhere. She’s having too much fun with you. Did you tell Mommy what a great day we had? We shopped and baked and talked girl stuff,” she said, addressing Hannah now. “And next week—”

      “We’re making all the cookies for Grandma’s friend’s party.” Faith sprinkled blue sugar onto a pink cookie and sat back to look at the results. “Six kinds. Chocolate chip, lemon bars and I forget the rest.”

      “Oh, all different kinds.” Margaret started clearing the knives and spoons from the table. “Poor Bella, she’s got the garden club coming and she’s overwhelmed so I offered to make the desserts. Somehow I’ll manage to squeeze it between the birthday cake I promised to bake for Rose’s friend and…damn, I know there’s something else. Please God don’t let it be something I promised to do for Deb. She’s already upset because I forgot to ask what happened with that job interview she went on…” Margaret wiped the table and waited until Faith had gone to watch cartoons, then slowly shook her head at Hannah. “Tell me where I went wrong with Deb. Why can’t I do anything right for that girl?”

      Hannah carefully set Faith’s decorated cookies into a tin, resisting the urge to bite into an extra letter A. Deb was twenty-two and she was thirty-one, but to Margaret they were always the girls.

      “So what’s up with Deb now?”

      “She says she’s moving in with Dennis.”

      “The bartender who sells marijuana?”

      “This isn’t funny, Hannah.”

      “I’m not laughing, Mom.” Actually she’d been wondering whether or not to mention the news about Liam. “I thought she was through with Dennis.”