Lily came downstairs anyway.
Almost every night.
The first time was about two weeks after I signed the agreement. I was lying in bed reading, a little after nine. I heard the door at the top of the basement stairs open, very slowly. Then soft footsteps. One stair at a time. Stopping. Listening. Then another.
She appeared in my bedroom doorway in her pajamas and socks. She was holding a library book against her chest. Bridge to Terabithia.
“Lily. What are you doing down here?”
“Shh,” she whispered. She looked back over her shoulder at the stairs. “Mom and Dad are fighting. I can’t sleep.”
I could hear it, faintly. Through the floor. Josh’s voice. Megan’s. Low and sharp.
I lifted up the edge of my quilt.
She climbed into the bed beside me. I wrapped the quilt around both of us. She opened her book. I turned off the lamp and handed her the little flashlight I kept on the nightstand for when the power went out.
We read together under the quilt with the flashlight. One chapter. Then another.
“Don’t tell Mom,” she whispered, when she finally got up to go.
“I won’t, baby.”
It became our ritual.
Almost every night. Nine o’clock. The soft creak of the door at the top of the stairs. The careful footsteps. Then Lily in my doorway in her socks with a book.
We read Bridge to Terabithia. Then Charlotte’s Web. Then A Wrinkle in Time. Then all seven Little House books, one after another. She loved Laura Ingalls. She said Laura reminded her of me.
“Why?”
“Because she’s tough,” Lily said. “And she lost her house too. Lots of times. And she always just started over.”
Sometimes we didn’t read. Sometimes she just lay there with her head on my shoulder and talked. About school. About her friend Kayla who wasn’t her friend anymore. About the boy in her class who called her “Bookworm” and how much she hated it, and how much she secretly didn’t.
And sometimes she talked about her parents.
“They fight about money,” she said one night. “All the time. Dad says it’s Mom’s fault. Mom says it’s Dad’s fault.”
“Grown-ups fight sometimes, honey.”
“Dad’s always on his phone,” Lily said. “Even at dinner. Even at my soccer games. He yells at it sometimes. He says, Come on, come on, come on. And then he throws it on the couch.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Grandma,” she whispered. “What’s a parlay?”
My heart stopped.
“Where did you hear that word?”
“Dad says it on the phone. To his friend. I’ve got a five-team parlay going. Is it a kind of game?”
I lay in the dark with my granddaughter’s head on my shoulder and felt something cold settle in my stomach.
“Something like that,” I said quietly.
Sam came down too, sometimes. Usually in the mornings, before kindergarten. He’d come running down the stairs in his dinosaur pajamas and jump on my bed and demand pancakes.
“I can’t make pancakes, buddy. Grandma’s not allowed in the kitchen until after seven.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“Those are the rules.”
“Those are dumb rules.”
I didn’t argue with him.
I watched my daughter wear down over those two years like a bar of soap.
She picked up extra shifts at the hospital. Sixteen-hour shifts. Back-to-back. She’d come home at two in the morning and leave again at six. Some nights, through the floor, I heard her crying in the bathroom.
She stopped going to the gym. She stopped going to her book club. She stopped calling her friends.
She stopped laughing.
Josh traveled more. Or said he did. He was gone two or three nights a week. When he was home, he was on the couch with his phone. Or in the garage with the door closed. Sometimes at two or three in the morning, I’d hear the TV on upstairs. Sports. Always sports. Some game from the other side of the world. Cricket. Australian football. Things nobody in Iowa ever watched.
Once, in the second winter, I came up the stairs at seven-fifteen at night to heat up my soup. Josh was at the kitchen table with a laptop open. He slammed it shut so fast he nearly caught his fingers.
“Lynn,” he said. “You’re early.”
“It’s after seven.”
He looked at the clock on the stove. Then back at me. His face was gray. There was sweat on his upper lip.
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
He took the laptop and went into the garage.
Then in March, Josh lost his job.
Nobody told me.
I heard it through the floor.
It was a Tuesday night. I’d done my laundry. I was folding towels on my bed. And suddenly, upstairs, Megan screamed.
Not a scream of pain. A scream of rage. A word I’d never once heard my daughter say in forty-two years.
Then Josh’s voice. Loud. Then louder. Then both of them at once.
“—eleven years, Josh, eleven years you’ve been there—”
“—didn’t have a choice, they were cutting the whole—”
“—don’t lie to me, I talked to Brian, I talked to him—”
“—you had no right to call my boss—”
“—fired, Josh, he said fired, he said they found—”
A door slammed. So hard the whole house shook. The lamp on my nightstand rattled. A picture fell off the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
Then silence.
Then, very faintly, through the floor, the sound of my daughter sobbing.
I sat on the edge of my bed with a folded towel in my lap.
A minute later, I heard the door at the top of the stairs. Soft footsteps.
Lily appeared in my doorway in her socks. She wasn’t holding a book this time. She was crying.
I lifted the quilt.
She climbed in and buried her face in my shoulder. Her whole body was shaking.
“It’s okay, baby,” I whispered. “It’s okay. Grandma’s here.”
“It’s not okay,” she said into my nightgown. “Dad got fired. And Mom said—” She stopped. She swallowed. “Mom said he lost the house money.”
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
Lila earned her degree in History and Archival Studies from the University of Edinburgh, where she cultivated her passion for documenting the past and preserving cultural heritage. Her expertise lies in combining traditional archival techniques with modern digital tools, allowing her to create comprehensive and engaging collections that resonate with audiences worldwide.
At TheArchivists, Lila is known for her meticulous attention to detail and her ability to uncover hidden gems within extensive archives. Her work is praised for its depth, authenticity, and contribution to the preservation of knowledge in the digital age.
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