The Moment Keeper

Chapter 7

Olivia sets her pink and purple princess table with her ceramic floral china set. There’s a setting for her and her best friend, Emma, and one for Olivia’s doll, Sadie, and one for Emma’s doll, Nellie.

“Is it time yet?” Olivia calls to her mother.

“Almost,” Elizabeth says.

Each week, the five-year-olds have a play date and this week it’s at Olivia’s house. The doorbell rings and Olivia races to the front door. The girls hug and Emma and Olivia run to the playroom where they’ll spend most of the afternoon. The room is packed with every toy a little girl could want – from a play kitchen to an immense dollhouse to a puppet theater complete with a red velvet curtain.

Elizabeth walks in with a plate filled with grapes, carrot sticks, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into quarters, diagonally. She places a quarter on each girl’s plate.

“Don’t forget Sadie and Nellie,” Olivia says. “They’re hungry.”

Elizabeth puts a quarter on their plates, too, and sets the rest in the middle of the table.

The girls dig in Olivia’s sparkly pink dress-up trunk for hats and boas to wear. Olivia wears her Cinderella gown and Emma chooses the Snow White dress. Olivia picks the tea-party hat with the pink chandelle feathers and matching boa and short-sleeve gloves. Emma picks the tea-party hat with the ruffle trim and matching boa and long-sleeve gloves. They pull out the pink and purple chairs with heart-shaped cushions and place their dolls across the table from one another. Then they pull out the other two chairs and sit.

“What’s that, Sadie? You think this is good? Me, too,” Olivia says.

“Nellie thinks it’s good, too,” Emma says.

The girls’ giggles draw a curious Elizabeth, who peeks in the room and finds them changing their dolls’ diapers.

“You have a real baby sister to change,” Olivia says. “I wish I did.”

“Maybe you could ask Santa for one?”

Ever since Emma got a baby sister, Olivia’s been asking her parents for one. They’ve told her that she’s special, picked just for them and that even if she never has a baby sister, or brother, she can always have friends over to play. Olivia doesn’t quite understand the why behind it, but having Emma over always helps.

“You’re my bestest friend,” Rachel said, hugging me.

It was the first — and only — time Rachel was allowed to play at my house. We spread the blanket out on the living-room floor and pretended to have a picnic on the beach. The tan vinyl hassock was a sand dune and the sofa was our sailboat. We had so much fun pretending – until Matt came home.

It was in the middle of the afternoon and Grandma was in the kitchen baking chocolate-chip cookies. Matt opened the door and stumbled in with a woman whose top was cut so low that I thought her double-Ds would pop out. He knocked over the black tole-painted TV tray inside the front door where Grandma kept her keys. Grandma heard the noise and rushed into the hallway.

“Matt,” Grandma said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Sarah has a friend over.”

Matt took a couple of steps toward Grandma, almost knocking her over. “I have a friend over, too.” His speech was slurred. “This here’s Candy.”

“Matt,” Grandma said. “Not now.”

“Get out of my way, old woman,” he said, swatting her with the back of his arm.

He looked at me. “What are you lookin’ at, kid?”

I swallowed hard and stepped in front of Rachel to protect her. “Go. Don’t hit Grandma.”

Rachel was holding onto the back of my shirt so tightly that I thought it was going to rip.

“Oh, Mattie,” the woman said. “Let’s just go to my place.”

Matt looked at Grandma, then at me.

They stumbled out the same door they came in and Grandma ran to the kitchen to take the burning cookies out of the oven. The kitchen filled with smoke and the fire alarm made a shrill sound, the kind that no matter how well you cover your ears, you still hear it.

“Want to play grown-ups?” Olivia asks.

Emma nods.

“I’m a dancer. What do you want to be?”

“A teacher.”

The girls divide the room, each taking a half for her “apartment”.

Olivia pretends to call Emma. “Were the kids good today in school?”

“There was one little boy who was bad. He pulled a girl’s hair.”

“What did you do?” Olivia asks.

“Gave him a timeout.”

“Want to come over for dinner?” Olivia asks.

“What are you having?”

“Macaroni and cheese.”

“The SpongeBob-shaped ones?” Emma asks.

“Yes,” Olivia says.

“Be right over.”

Elizabeth stands outside the room and smiles. I think she loves listening to the girls play. I know these moments are some of my favorite to record. Olivia and Emma act out what they see in real life.

One night, I was playing with my Barbie dolls in my bedroom. I was around five. I didn’t know that Grandma could hear me.

“What are you doing here?” Barbie asked. “You can barely stand.”

I made Ken wobble. “Come to get me some money.”

“But I gave you money yesterday,” Barbie said.

“And I need more today, woman.”

“You know better than to come here like this,” Barbie said.

“Are you going to give me the money or am I going to take it?”

Grandma walked in. Her hands shook. “No, no, no. That’s not how we play.”

She sat on the floor and picked up the Ken doll.

“Would you like to go out for dinner?” Grandma said in her best male voice.

“Ken doesn’t like to go out to dinner. He likes to drink,” I said. “He likes that bar around the corner.”

Grandma shook her head. “He stopped drinking.” Again, Grandma pretended to be Ken. “Would you like to go out to dinner?”

“That’s too expensive. Why don’t you pick up a roasted chicken at the grocery store and we can pretend that it came from a fancy restaurant?”

Grandma put the Ken doll down. “I can’t play anymore,” she said, and went to her room. I heard her crying.

Chapter 8

Olivia bites into an apple and her eyebrows jump to the top of her forehead. She pulls the apple away to look at it.

“Mom,” she yells. “My tooth’s in the apple.”

Elizabeth sets down the basket of laundry. “So it’s finally come out. That tooth has been dangling for days.”

Olivia grabs some tissue and dabs the blood. She hands her mom the apple.

“Emma got a dollar for her tooth last week,” Olivia says. “Wonder what the tooth fairy will bring me.”

Elizabeth pulls the tiny tooth out of the apple. “Guess you’ll have to put your tooth under your pillow tonight and see.”

Olivia jumps up and down. “I have that special pillow Daddy bought me. It has a pocket for the tooth.”

Elizabeth smiles. “I forgot about that. You’ll have to show Daddy when he gets home.”

By the time I lost my first tooth, Matt wasn’t living with us anymore. Despite Grandma’s efforts to get him help, he sank deeper and deeper into a drunken abyss.

Sometimes, I’d catch Grandma looking through old photos of Matt when he was a baby. She even showed me a lock of hair from his first haircut and a baby-food jar filled with his baby teeth. Grandma did the same for me. She kept a curl from my first haircut in a plastic baggie and she covered a baby-food jar with pink construction paper and wrote “Sarah’s teeth” with a black marker on the side. I lost my first tooth at school.

“Look, Rachel,” I said, pinching one of my bottom teeth with my thumb and index finger and wiggling it. “Grandma said it will come out soon.”

“Want me to pull it?” Rachel asked. “My dad pulled mine and got it out.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t brave enough.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Rachel said. “I’ll do it quick. Promise.”

For a second or two, I considered Rachel’s offer but the bell rang and we had to go back to our classroom. Recess was over.

I kind of forgot about my loose tooth until I took a bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch and something crunched in my mouth. I spit out the chewed blob of sandwich and found my tooth inside it.

“You did it.” Rachel clapped.

Rachel was always my biggest cheerleader. No matter how bad something was, she’d always find something good in it.

Tom opens the car door for Olivia and bows as she slips into the back seat. It’s daddy-daughter date night and they’re headed to dinner and the ballet.

“When I grow up I want to be a ballerina,” Olivia says.

“You’d make a beautiful ballerina. It takes a lot of practice, though.”

“Miss Dawn says that we should practice every day, and I do.”

Tom nods.

“Emma does karate. Why does she do that and not ballet?”

Tom smiles. “Because it’s what she likes. Just like you like chocolate cake and Mommy likes vanilla. It’s good when people like different things. If everyone liked the same thing, the world wouldn’t be as interesting.”

“But what if someone likes chocolate and vanilla?”

“That’s OK, too. But sometimes you can only have one and you need to decide which one it will be.”

“Why can’t I have both?”

“We don’t always get what we want, Libby. You’re little and most of the things you have to decide are little like you. But when you get to be a big girl, the decisions will be harder to make. Sometimes you can have chocolate, sometimes you can have vanilla and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can have both.”

I can see the wheels turning inside Olivia’s head. She doesn’t entirely understand, but I know that with age comes wisdom. I pray that the little girl I am keeping moments for will always get whatever flavor cake she wants.

I looked at the pink sign with green lettering on the school door. “Daddy-Daughter Dance.”

“Are you going?” Tracey Carmichael asked.

Tracey was in my first-grade class.

I shook my head.

“Why not? It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t have a dad.”

Tyler Butler overheard me and walked over. “You do too have a dad. I’ve seen him. He rides a motorcycle and has tattoos on his arms and a red bandana on his head. My mom said he’s a biker.”

“He’s not my dad.”

“Then who is he?”

“His name’s Matt.”

I walked away from Tracey and Tyler. I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. When I got home, Grandma asked me what was wrong. She said she could tell I was upset about something because I was extra quiet and I didn’t want my usual afterschool snack of Oreos and apple juice.

A tear slipped from my eye, followed by another. Within seconds, it became a deluge. It was as if the tears had been holed up all day just waiting for the right moment to bust loose. “There’s a dance for daddies and daughters and I don’t have a daddy and everyone else does.”

Grandma bent down and wrapped her saggy arms around me and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I wish things were different. But we don’t always get the things that we want.”

“Like the time I wanted chocolate-chip ice cream and there was only that yucky kind?”

“Exactly,” Grandma said. “Sometimes yucky’s all there is and you have to make the best of it.”

“Like you putting chocolate syrup on it?”

Grandma nodded. “It made it taste better, didn’t it?”

I smiled. “Yeah. It tasted better.”

Chapter 9

“There she is!” Olivia yells.

Olivia, six, is dressed in her blue Cinderella gown with tulle petticoat. A bejeweled heart-shaped cameo accents the bodice.

She runs toward Cinderella Castle at Disney World and her beaded tiara with glitter organza ribbon flies off. Elizabeth picks up the tiara and places it back on Olivia’s head.

Olivia gets in line behind two girls.

Olivia loves Disney World. Her parents take her every year. She loves seeing the princesses and getting their autographs. Elizabeth always makes her a keepsake album that includes all their favorite photos. Several albums line the bottom shelf of the bookcase in Olivia’s room. One of Olivia’s prized possessions is a pink lanyard covered with collectible Disney pins. She has dozens of them.

Cinderella is her favorite character. She always eats breakfast and dinner with Cinderella in Cinderella’s castle. And she usually stops by the Crystal Palace at the end of Main Street for breakfast with Pooh and his friends and at Chef Mickey’s at the Contemporary Resort for dinner with Mickey, Minnie and their friends. It’s always a whirlwind week full of laughter and love and happiness. Wonderful moments to record.

I’ve never been to Disney World. I always wanted to go. I remember when I was in first grade and Tracey Carmichael came back from a trip to Disney World with a carriage-load of souvenirs. She brought them in for show and tell, a new thing each week. There were Minnie Mouse ears, a Cinderella dress and matching purse, a Snow White umbrella, jewelry and T-shirts and pens and pencils and markers. Oh, and a mug for the teacher and lollipops for everyone in the class. Everyone liked Tracey. And they liked her more when she gave them treats.

I remember asking Grandma if we could go to Disney and see Cinderella as Tracey did.

“And she had breakfast in Cinderella’s castle,” I said. “And there were fireworks and Tinkerbell flew down from the sky.”

“She did?” Grandma said.

I nodded like Tracey’s Mickey bobble head that she let everyone hold — everyone except me. She said that I was too clumsy, recalling the time I tripped over the carpet while carrying the classroom goldfish and dropped it on the floor. The fish died.

“Yeah, and Tracey said she got real pixie dust.”

For the next several months, I bugged Grandma about going to Disney World. Tracey Carmichael wasn’t the only one who went that year. Alex and Michael Deamer went and Katelyn White got to go, too.

Then one winter day Grandma said she had a surprise. We were going to see Mickey and Minnie and Pluto and Goofy and the rest of the Disney gang. But, she quickly added, we weren’t going to Disney World.

I had seen Grandma put change in the empty red coffee container she kept in the cabinet near the sink. She explained that she had been saving money for a year to take me to see the Disney on Ice show coming to the area.

“I know it’s not Disney World,” Grandma said. “But you’ll get to see the characters and you might even get their autographs.”

I was so excited I could barely sleep that night. I kept checking the small glass container of pixie dust Grandma had given me when she told me about the show. I sat it on my nightstand when I went to bed. Looking back, it was probably a mixture of very fine blue and silver glitter. But to me, at that age, it was the real deal.

Just like Tinkerbell, Grandma had spread her magic dust and I was flying higher than I ever thought possible. Not even Tracey Carmichael could bring me down.

Tom watches Olivia get off the bus in front of their house. They live in a gated community with manicured lawns and colorful gardens; many have waterfalls and gazebos. Olivia skips toward Tom, her blonde pigtails bouncing and her pink princess backpack swinging from side to side.

Tom opens his arms and Olivia runs into them.

“I got a surprise for you,” Tom says.

A smile erupts on Olivia’s face, dusted with light freckles.

“Come with me.”

Tom takes Olivia’s hand and leads her to the patio behind the house where Elizabeth stands with a video recorder.

Olivia’s eyes pop and she jumps up and down when she sees the pink sparkly bike with “Princess” printed on the crossbar. “Is it mine?”

“All yours,” Tom says.

Olivia drops her backpack and climbs onto the seat and starts to pedal.

“Wait,” Tom yells. “You never ever get on a bike without this.”

He holds up a pink sparkly helmet and puts it on Olivia, adjusting the straps to make sure it fits tightly.

“Promise me you’ll always wear a helmet,” Tom says. “I just had a patient the other day who was hurt because he didn’t wear a helmet.”

Olivia knows from the tone of her daddy’s voice that he is serious and means what he says. She doesn’t often hear that tone, but when she does she knows she must pay attention.

“I promise,” says Olivia, pedaling in a circle around the patio.

“Emma rides without wheels,” Olivia says.

“We’ll take the training wheels off when you think you’re ready to ride without them,” Tom explains.

Olivia follows Tom to the front of the house and he walks while she rides on the sidewalk down to the stop sign and back. After a few times down and back, Olivia gets brave and wants to go around the block. So, Tom takes her around the block, breaking a sweat as he runs to keep up with her.

I’ll never forget my first bike. Someone had put it out for trash pickup and Grandma and I saw it on our way home from the grocery outlet.

Grandma pulled over to the curb next to the Hulk bike.

“What do you think, Sarah? Some new paint and a new seat and we’ll have this bike looking as good as that bike you saw in the store.”

“Are we allowed?”

“Sure we can take it,” Grandma said. “These folks don’t care. They want to get rid of it. Doesn’t matter to them how that happens, whether it’s the garbage men or us.”

Grandma popped the trunk on the old Chevy and lifted the bike. I saw a woman watching from the window as Grandma eased the bike into the trunk then slammed it shut.

By the end of the week, Grandma had that bike looking better than any store-bought one. She painted it pink and added a pink and silver sparkly seat, a water-bottle holder and a bell. She even found a pink plastic basket with flowers to put on the front so I could haul stuff.

“Oh, Grandma,” I said. “It’s the best bike ever.”

When I rode down the sidewalk, I felt like a peacock presenting his feathers. Kids playing in yards pointed as I rode by and I rang my bell. I was happy. I had a new bike. And it was better than anyone else’s bike. I was certain of that.

Chapter 10

I watch Olivia sleep. She looks so peaceful in her pink canopy bed. She always sleeps with her right hand over her heart and the left one down across her belly button or off to the side. I was a Pledge-of-Allegiance-sleeper, too. That’s what Grandma called it.

Olivia is restless tonight. She’s having a bad dream. She’s dreaming that she’s riding her bicycle and a stranger approaches her in a van. She tries to ride away from him but no matter how hard she pedals, the bike doesn’t move. I feel her anxiety and try to will her out of the dream. Sometimes, if I think happy thoughts and direct them toward her, I’m able to disrupt the nightmare. But tonight is a particularly bad one. She and her dad role-played different “bad person scenarios” earlier in the evening and this was one of them. Olivia screams and within seconds Elizabeth and Tom fly into her bedroom.

Tom flips on the light switch. Elizabeth leaps on the bed and wakes Olivia. “It’s just a dream, sweetie. Just a dream.”

Elizabeth holds Olivia in her arms and rocks her gently back and forth. Tom rubs her back.

“Shh. It’s OK. Daddy and I are here.”

“That’s right, pumpkin. It’s just a dream,” Tom says.

They finally get Olivia calmed down and tucked in once more. I continue to record the moments – never stopping, never sleeping.

I remember when I was about Olivia’s age, eight, I had this particularly bad dream. I thought Matt was going to take me away from Grandma and make me live with him. It was after Grandma kicked him out of the house. Occasionally, she would invite him to dinner and hope that he wasn’t drunk. She never stopped reaching out, even though Matt pummeled her outstretched hands time and time again.

This one Sunday, she made her pot roast, which Matt loved, and his favorite dessert, chocolate cake with peanut butter icing. We rushed home from church so Grandma could make her homemade blueberry biscuits. He loved those, too.

Matt was late. Really late. In fact, he was so late that Grandma and I ate dinner and cleaned up. When he did show up, it was late afternoon.

I was playing with my Barbie dolls in my bedroom. Grandma had made me a Barbie house out of a bunch of old cardboard boxes she fastened together. It wasn’t as fancy as the Barbie penthouse complete with an elevator that Tracey Carmichael had, but I liked it better because Grandma had made it. She even made Barbie clothes out of the same material she used to make my clothes so we could match.

I heard Matt first. It sounded as if someone fell against the apartment door.

“Grandma,” I yelled. “Did you hear that?”

I found Grandma snoring on her favorite chair with the Sunday paper on her lap. I shook her arm to wake her.

“Someone’s at the door.”

Grandma put the paper on the coffee table. By the time she reached the door, Matt was inside, swaying and trying to remain on his feet.

“Matt,” Grandma said. “I told you never to come here like this.”

Matt looked at me, clutching my Barbie to my heart. “What ya lookin’ at, kid?”

I looked down at the floor.

His speech was slurred. “Maybe you should come live with me?”

“Sarah,” Grandma said. “Go to your room. I’ll take care of this. It’s not good to see your dad like this.”

“He’s not my dad,” I yelled, and ran to my room, slamming my door and locking it. I could hear Grandma’s muffled voice. It sounded as if she was in the kitchen. Probably making Matt coffee. That was usually what she did. Made him coffee and got him sober enough to ride his Harley home.

Matt left a couple of hours later. I came out of my bedroom and heard Grandma crying. I found her in the kitchen doing the dishes.

I hugged her waist and she bent over to brush the curls away from my face.

“I love you, Grandma,” I said.

“I love you, too, Sarah. I wish you had a better dad.”

“I don’t want a dad. I want you.”

“And you’ll always have me, Sarah.”

“And you won’t let anyone take me?”