Willow and Asher got in the car to go to school the next morning with a little bit of the previous night’s ice cream still dried on their cheeks. And Willow’s bones relaxed with relief. Sitting in the front seat next to her mother, she observed her in all of her coolness. Her long fingers with the red painted nails curved around the gear stick. Her left foot casually perched up on the seat. Her head bopping from side to side as she drove. Her wavy brown hair swaying back and forth as the wind moved through it.
Willow was in awe of the way Rosie’s hair moved so pleasantly. The mellow manner in which her locks draped over her shoulders. The way it looked like her hair belonged piled on top of her head. She wondered if her own tight curls would ever fall into smooth waves like that.
Willow was distracted from her thoughts by the jolt of Lili Von coming to a red light. And Willow watched Rosie as she pulled down the sun visor and fumbled around in her purse. She watched her mother pucker her lips in the mirror, and then locate a tube of red lipstick in the depths of her tote bag. Then she watched her mother twist her lipstick stick and spread the bright red color slowly and deliberately around her lips.
Rosie smacked her lips together and winked at herself in the mirror. Then she caught her daughter’s eyes fixated on her lips as if she were aching for something. And Rosie was happy to give her that thing.
So when Rosie reached the elementary school drop-off area, she asked Willow to stay in the car for a moment while she said goodbye to Asher. Willow felt a tickle in her tummy waiting for her mother to return as she watched Asher express his typical embarrassment over the dramatic hug that Rosie gave him when they were dropped off. And like all the other mornings, Asher rolled his big blue eyes as his mother pressed her whole body into him.
Willow watched with a smile until her mother got back into the car. And then, with minimal digging in her bag, Rosie pulled out that same stick of red lipstick and presented it with a flick of her wrist to her daughter.
“You want some?”
Willow didn’t have to say anything for her mother to know that, yes, she wanted to put some lipstick on. She wanted some of her mother’s lipstick on more than anything in the world. She wanted pieces of her mother with her all the time.
Rosie leaned over to Willow and delicately painted her daughter’s lips red with full attention and precision. Then Rosie snapped up, looked at her daughter and smiled warmly.
Willow could see how much her mother loved her. How funky Rosie found Willow’s purple leggings. How cool she found her wild hair.
“Check it out, noodle,” Rosie said as she unfolded the mirror from the sun visor in front of Willow.
Willow looked at herself in that tiny mirror. She knew she looked so much like her mother with those bright red lips. Willow smiled a big, big smile as she hopped out of the car with only the tiniest stumble and walked toward the building door.
“Wait!” Rosie hollered after Willow as she marched away. “You forgot something.”
Rosie tossed the stick of lipstick through the passenger side window and right into her daughter’s hands.
“It’s all yours.”
And just like that, red lipstick was added to Willow’s permanent outfit.
“Oh! Willow. One more thing!”
Willow stumbled again when she turned back around toward her mother. You would have never guessed that Willow was feeling more confident than ever in her new red lips, the way she turned around with her knees and ankles wobbling.
Rosie held up her pointer finger and curled it back toward herself three times as she raised her left eyebrow. Willow smiled, ran up to the car and stuck her little head and big hair through the window.
“Yeah?” Willow asked.
And then Rosie leaned over and pressed a big kiss into Willow’s cheek. And she shook her head all around as she did it. It left a big blob of red on Willow’s cheek that Willow didn’t even consider wiping away.
There was a moment of quiet love as Willow and Rosie looked straight at each other. But then Willow snatched it up.
“Hey, Mom. Can I ask you something?” She was looking right into Rosie’s brown eyes. Right down into her full heart.
“Did you leave those Pixy Stix for me on the school bus from Dad’s?”
Rosie tilted her head to the side and scrunched her eyebrows.
“Hmm. I’m not sure about that, noodle. What do you mean?”
Willow smirked. It was so like her mom to pretend like it wasn’t her.
Willow turned around and walked into the building feeling a second wave of her mother’s love. But ignoring the sincerity of her mother’s confusion about those Pixy Stix.
* * *
Willow Thorpe had gotten a lot of things privately wrong about her mother. Her father too. As parents and as people. And Willow got a lot of things wrong about the ways in which her parents showed their love. But of all the things that Willow got wrong about her parents and about love, Willow’s assumption that those two Pixy Stix were another one of her mother’s displays of the right kind of love would turn out to be the most detrimental.
* * *
That next night at her mother’s house, Willow and Asher helped Rosie prepare for Spaghetti Sunday. Asher shoved his hands into a bowl and squeezed and smashed plump red tomatoes until he couldn’t squeeze or smash anymore. And then he thrust the bowl at Rosie and said, “Hewe’s youw tomato guts!” through his toothless smile. As Willow stirred the bubbling pot of tomato sauce, the house filled with the aroma of garlic. And as soon as Mom got her hands on the record player, the house filled with sounds of Elton John too.
Rosie danced around as she set the table, and then served big piles of pasta and tomato sauce on her children’s plates. Rosie hadn’t yet finished chewing her first bite of dinner when Asher announced to the table that he had something to say. Rosie put her fork and knife down and urged Willow to do the same so that they could listen properly to Asher.
Asher stood up, pushed his chair in and swallowed.
“I don’t weally like the colow of my woom,” he said nervously, wobbling over each mispronounced word.
“What?” Rosie yelled quickly as she slammed her fists down onto the dinner table. She slammed them so hard that their glasses shook and the soda in them fizzled. Willow thought for a moment that her mother might be mad. She had never seen her mad before.
“That is a terrible thing!” Rosie continued, fists still clenched in tight balls next to her bowl of pasta. Rosie paused for a moment as if she was contemplating the best and quickest way to indulge her son.
“We have to fix this right away.”
Another pause.
“Willow, Asher. Shoes on. We’re going to the store.”
And both Willow and Asher quickly, and excitedly, obeyed. Willow twisted her feet into her high-top Converse sneakers and then helped Asher tie his light-up shoes, bunny-ear style. And then Rosie whisked her children into the car and drove, windows down, Prince blasting, straight to the paint store.
She guided Asher quickly down the aisles by his hand as Willow jogged and stumbled behind them. And then Rosie stopped in front of a giant wall of every color paint in every size bucket.
“All right, sweetie. Up to you. What color do you like?” Rosie said to her son so earnestly.
Asher’s eyes stretched all the way up to his hairline and his jaw fell all the way down to his belly button. And then his lips tightened as his nose crinkled.
“I have an idea,” he said firmly.
It was rare that Asher found a sentence without an R to fumble over. It gave his words a certain un-Asher-like seriousness.
“What if we get a lot of diffewent kinds of colows and put ouw hands in thum, and then put that on the walls?”
And just like that, Asher was back to Asher. And Rosie was ecstatic at the idea.
“Yes!” she cheered. “Let’s do it! Pick out all of your favorite colors. This is going to look fabulous!”
It was only natural that Rosie said yes so passionately. So openly. Because the list of things that Rosie said yes to was infinite. It was infinite on top of infinite. And whenever Willow or Asher wanted to have something or wanted to do something, their mother said yes and piled another thing right on top of it. Yes, you can play. And I want to play too. Yes, you can have candy. Have you ever put a Rolo inside of a marshmallow? Yes, you can have ice cream. Do you think it would taste as good with Swedish Fish and cookie dough on top? And, tonight, yes, you can paint your room. And you can do it all different crazy colors.
She kissed Asher on the cheek. Hard. Hard enough to make his lips look like a fish. And then Asher ran up to the paint chips and started pointing.
After only a few minutes of Asher running and pointing and comparing colors, Rosie, Willow and Asher were walking out of the store with five new buckets of paint.
When they got back to the house, Rosie tossed Willow and Asher some old T-shirts she had in her closet so they wouldn’t ruin their clothes. The T-shirts smelled like Dad. And everyone noticed, but no one said a thing about it. They just walked over to Asher’s room and pushed his solar-system themed rug into the closet and spread newspapers across the floor. And then, the paint cans were opened and Prince’s “1999” came on full blast.
All three of them stood on opposite sides of the room, shirts rolled up to their elbows, and prepared for their fun.
Rosie dived in first, but it wasn’t even a full second before Willow and Asher had their arms elbows deep in paint too. At first, Willow and Asher were deliberate with each stroke of the paintbrush. Each handprint on the wall. Each little detail by the doorway. But they changed their style as soon as they noticed the way their mother had slipped right into creativity. The way she twirled around the room. The way she fanned her brushes causing the spray of paint to add a gentle dusting to the wall. The way she threw handfuls of paint at the wall, creating bursts of color. She did it so effortlessly. And the walls looked so good. And soon Willow and Asher were following Rosie’s lead in ignoring boundaries. In accessing an internal kind of freedom. In living fully and blindly immersed in the things you love. In doing the crazy things that made you happy even if they were temporary. And in this moment, dancing and singing with paint on their hands and faces, it could not have been more apparent just how wonderful all of those feelings were.
And once the walls were covered, everyone signed their name in their favorite color paint and lay down in the middle of the paint-colored floor. It was the kind of tired that only happened after an hour of laughing and dancing. It was the kind of tired that hit your bones all at once. It was the kind of tired that allowed you to keep smiling even though your eyelids were getting heavy.
As the three of them lay there quietly on their backs, the track changed to “Purple Rain.”
Willow wasn’t used to hearing slow songs from Prince. She was used to the kind of Prince song that begged you to dance all around or sing at the top of your lungs in the car with the windows down. But she welcomed the restrained drumming and intermittent cymbal chime. She imagined what purple rain might actually look like. The sky dripping with little beads of her favorite color. Nothing in the world scared Willow more than a thunderstorm with its whipping wind and relentless rain and sharp cracks of lightning, but a purple one might be okay.
And then, just when Willow and Asher thought the night was winding down, Rosie broke the silence with an offer of ice cream and a wink on the way downstairs to get some.
In no time at all, Willow, Asher and their mother were huddled together in Rosie’s bed, scooping Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food with every topping in the pantry straight from the container. And then Rosie put on The Twilight Zone episode she had recorded and her children sank into her.