CHAPTER THREE
KATE
The next few days were a blur. We decided that the kids should stay with me in my penthouse apartment downtown. The problem with that was there were only three bedrooms, so the girls had to share a room which they weren’t used to at all. Adam was staying wherever it was Adam now lived, but he had agreed that after the funeral he would start picking the kids up and taking them to and from school every day so that I could get to work on time. It was a plan that had to work.
The question had come up about the house the kids grew up in but I wasn’t ready for us all to stay there yet; there were too many memories. Every single one of the kids came home from the hospital to that house. There were too many Christmas’s and birthdays celebrated with them there. I felt like if I stepped through that front door, the careful composure that was hanging by a thread would snap and I would lose it completely. It was already bad enough that I was having to bury the two very best friends I’d had in the whole world. I couldn’t walk into that happy home and feel the emptiness there. Not yet anyway. Maybe not ever. A commotion came from down the hall and I heard Peyton screaming. Sprinting down to their room, I stopped dead when I saw the twelve-year-old girl in a black dress and matching heals banging wildly on the bathroom door that connected to their room. “April. Open. The. Door.”
I had no idea that much noise could come out of someone so small. Jason walked up next to me and grabbed my hand.
“They always do this,” he said rolling his eyes. He was dressed in a suit with a tie and he looked like the world’s first child GQ model. I giggled at the thought.
“They do? What did your mom do? What should I do?” I asked him and he shrugged.
“Mommy just told them to stop and let Pey use her bathroom.” He sniffled and I realized bringing up his mom was probably not the best way to handle it. This situation was difficult for all of us and asking a six-year-old for advice on the day of his mother’s funeral probably wasn’t the most helpful. Beth was such a good mom and I was totally out of my depth with this stuff.
“Girls? That bathroom is huge, can’t you just share it?” I asked stupidly, standing at the doorway looking in to the room. Peyton turned, stopped banging on the door, and scowled at me. “Or not,” I added, not having any clue how to best handle this. “How about you come use my bathroom instead?”
“But, all of my stuff is in this one,” she whined stomping her foot like the adolescent preteen that she was.
“April?” I shouted through the door. “Can you hurry up, please?”
She walked out the bathroom door and I gasped. “Honey, what did you do to your hair?”
Her beautiful blonde hair was died black and it looked like she had taken a pair of dull scissors to it. There were chunky uneven spots everywhere. Peyton looked at her in horror. “Mom…” she trailed off and sniffled.
I wrapped my arm around Payton as she cried. I looked at April and cried inside at the obvious pain the teen was in. But, at the moment, the only thing we could focus on was the immediate problem at hand. Emotions would have to be dealt with later. April needed a hair dresser, like immediately.
Priorities, Kate. Hair now. Crash later.
“If you want to keep your hair that color you can,” I began, “but can we at least make a salon appointment to even it out a little?”
“Yeah, I tried to get it even but it didn’t work. I kept cutting more and more off until it looked like… this.” She sighed shaking her head in defeat.
“It’s okay. We’ll get it fixed.” I tried for a reassuring smile.
“Thanks, Kate.”
“You’re welcome, babe. Now let’s finish getting ready, yeah?” I asked hopefully. “Do you think you could share the bathroom? It’s big enough for the both of you.”
“Okay.” April nodded and she and Peyton walked into the bathroom together.
“Hey Jace? Where’s your brother?”
“He won’t come out of our room.” He pushed at the bedroom door. “He won’t even talk to me.”
“Well, we already averted one crisis, why don’t we go see if we can cheer him up too?” I said feeling surprisingly good about my very recent parenting skills.
We walked into the boys’ room, and Jace pointed to his brother. I’d purchased two twin beds and Jax was laying on one of them with his face buried in the pillow. The bed dipped when I sat down and Jax looked up at me with a tear-stained face. I pulled him to me so he didn’t see the tears collecting in my own eyes. He wasn’t even dressed in his suit for the funeral yet. “Hey buddy, are you okay?”
He shook his head and I sighed. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
He shook his head again. “He won’t even talk to me Auntie Kate,” Jace answered for his twin.
The doorbell rang and I slumped in relief. “What about Uncle Adam? Will you talk to him?”
The head shaking was still happening and I cringed, realizing that the poor kid was dealing with his pain differently than everyone else. “Jace, honey, help your brother get dressed. I’m gonna go open the door for Uncle Adam,” I said getting up from the bed. “Jax, can you let your brother help?”
He pushed up on his arms, turned to his twin, then finally got up and started getting dressed. My sigh of relief was audible as I walked out of the room.