Page 3 of Dear Debbie

“Please don’t call him.” Her eyes are full of desperation. “Promise me you won’t call him, Mom.”

I don’t want her to miss the bus. I can’t afford to drive her right now, since I need to be here for the photo shoot. But she’s not going to budge until I agree, so I finally spit out, “I promise.”

I promise I won’t call him. But I didn’t promise I won’t go to his office and ask him what the hell he was thinking when he cut my daughter from the team.

Izzy gives me one last look, and then she dashes out the door. That girl is always running. She’s an amazing soccer player. I don’t know what happened to get her kicked off the team, but I’m determined to get to the bottom of it.

I turn my attention to my older daughter, who has picked up a can of creamed corn and is reading the label with a sour expression on her face, like the ingredients have personally offended her.

“Do you know what happened?” I ask Lexi.

“Oh my God, Mom, no, I don’t.” Lexi grunts. “Can you please stop asking, like, a million times?”

This is the first time I asked her, but whatever. “You haven’t heard anything at all?”

“No.” Lexi gives me a seething look but then adds, “She’s better off ditching the team anyway. Coach Pike is such a perv.”

“A perv?”

She rolls her eyes, irritated that she has to take the time to explain every little thing to me. “My friend Mira was on the soccer team, and she said he was always, like, ‘accidentally’ walking into the locker room when the girls were changing. He’d say sorry and leave right away, but…well, that doesn’t sound like an accident to me.”

He did what?

The cereal sticks in my throat as I contemplate this new revelation. Izzy never said anything like that, but I know Lexi’s friend Mira, and she’s not the type of girl who makes up stories. Is it possible that it’s true? And if it is, do I even want Izzy on the soccer team?

“Ugh, could you quit it, Mom?” Lexi says irritably.

I force myself to swallow the mouthful of cereal. “Quit what?”

“Chewing,” she says.

“Chewing?” I repeat incredulously.

“The way you chew…it’s so loud. Like, nobody else in the world chews that loudly. Trust me—it’s super weird. They can probably hear it next door.”

Nobody has ever criticized the volume of my mastication before. For a moment, I’m at a loss. “Sorry. I’ll try to chew more quietly.”

“It’s so loud,” she reiterates. “You’re always chewing, and it’s, like, so annoying.”

I am momentarily distracted from my thoughts of Coach Pike by the more immediate issue of what on earth happened to my relationship with my firstborn. I remember a time when I used to make pancakes for Lexi in the morning. I would go all out. I formed a smiley face on each individual one using blueberries or, if it was a special day, chocolate chips. When Lexi saw those smiley face pancakes (especially the chocolate chip ones), her eyes would light up. She would eat all the blueberries or chocolate chips first, and then she would smother the stack in maple syrup. After a few bites, she would look up at me with a sticky, happy smile. You make the bestest pancakes in the world, Mommy!

I take another bite of my cereal, wondering if there’s any activity I could suggest we do together. Maybe a shopping trip. Lexi has always loved to go shopping, even when she was little, and now she still loves clothes. Finding the clothes she likes might be a challenge though.

Maybe I could offer to take her to a pajama store. Is there such a thing? If there isn’t, they should make one. It’s a million-dollar idea.

A car horn blasts from outside the house, loud enough that both of us startle. I can’t make my daughter smile anymore, but that horn does the job. It’s her boyfriend, Zane, who recently turned eighteen and got his full license and now can drive her to school every single day.

He never comes inside the house though. He only blasts that damn horn loud enough to let everybody in the neighboring towns know that he has arrived. It might even be a little louder than my chewing.

“Gotta go,” Lexi chirps.

My daughter grabs her backpack off the floor, which is heavy enough that when she’s wearing it, she walks with a slight backward tilt. She opens her mouth as if to tell me goodbye, but then she remembers her rule about not speaking to me in the morning, so she instead darts out the door without another word.

I’ve only finished about half my cereal, but I don’t have much of an appetite anyway. I follow the path through the living room that Lexi took to the front door, knowing she didn’t bother to lock it on her way out. Why should she, since I always lock it behind her.

I am always here for my family. Always.

I peek out the window at the broken-down red Kia that is pulling out of my driveway. Whenever I see that car, I think to myself that he should just drive it straight to the town dump and leave it there. I’m not thrilled about the fact that my oldest child is being transported to high school in that piece of junk, but I recognize that I don’t have much of a say in the matter.