Mommy’s Business
by Bob Johnson
Her mother was in danger of “crashing,” the doctor told Kat, if she didn’t haul herself out of bed and do her rehab. The old lady had broken a hip a month earlier, and her urinary tract infections—though they responded well enough to antibiotics—returned like clockwork the instant the meds stopped.
“Either she gets moving,” the doctor said, “or she’s not long for this world.”
In the days that followed, Kat’s orderly life began to crash itself. She stumbled, she dropped things. She made one mistake after another, suddenly careless as a child.
There was the speeding ticket the week before, the first in her forty years.
There was the note she’d received only yesterday asking that she PLEASE NOT send her daughter Lacey to kindergarten when the girl clearly had a cold.
There was the window sticker in her Civic saying an oil change was hundreds of miles past due, and her husband Jules’ sad, patient face when he pointed it out to her.
But rather than attend to any of these, Kat was this morning—yet again—driving to the nursing home where her mother stayed, while Lacey sniffled in the Civic’s backseat, and the October day shone bright and blue and hard.
The old lady had called at 6:00 am, demanding that someone come visit. Didn’t Kat and Jules know that her caretakers—teenage girls in paisley smocks, Black men with spiky combs sticking out of her hair—looked after her only because they were paid to do so? Did it matter to her actual family that she was in pain?
“You know I can’t,” Jules had said at the breakfast table, when Kat had begged him to go too, to use his working stiff’s charm to allay her mother’s tornado of guilt. “I’m flooring a kitchen today.” He’d belched and stood. “Besides—”
“Besides,” Lacey had chimed in, always happy to take her father’s side, “Gramma’s your mommy, not Daddy’s.”
To make things worse, Kat’s psoriasis was back, a patch like a fifty-cent piece above her left eyebrow. Scarlet, raw, shedding translucent flakes onto her blouse front.
She took her eyes from the road, twisting the rearview mirror to study her forehead. She’d followed the druggist’s instructions to the letter. Too much steroid cream might scald her skin. Too little, and its powers would have no effect. Every other day was the ticket. Wash the area gently in between. Pat it dry.
Yet the patch had returned. Always the same eyebrow. Always the same fifty-cent piece size.
“Shit” she whispered.
Lacey giggled behind her. “I’m telling Daddy,” she said, in the teasy, singsong tone she used to wheedle Jules into letting her stay up past her bedtime.
Kat groaned and slapped the mirror back into place, and—as if by doing so, she’d activated a mechanical sequence—there came a soft splintering, a flash of yellow outside the passenger window, the steering wheel writhing in her hands.
She gasped and skidded to a stop. She looked in the mirror again but saw nothing behind her. Rangeline Road had once been a logging trail and was barely two lanes across, guarded on both sides by steep banks and ancient oaks.
She turned to look at Lacey, but the impact—more of a grazing, really—had been so slight, the child only stared back at her, eyes wide with surprise.
“I saw Big Bird,” she said. “Did you see him, Mommy?”
Kat pressed her forehead against the wheel and panted in and out like they’d taught her years before in Lamaze class. The radio was on, and her favorite oldies channel played “Over and Over” by The Forget Me Nots. She looked at the road in front of her and again in the mirror, but no car appeared in either direction.
Lacey was staring this way and that. “Where did Big Bird go?”
“Just a second, sweets.” Kat stepped from the Civic, steadying herself on the roof. The oaks joined in a canopy above her, sunlight knifing through in rigid shafts. The overnight temperature had dipped below freezing, and rain had crusted in the potholes. Acorns in their knitted caps littered the pavement.
She leaned into the door. “Mommy will be right back,” she said.
“Okay.”
Moving hand over hand on the hood, Kat staggered to the front of the car. A black smear marred the right fender, refusing to come clean when she scratched it with a fingernail. She jerked her head right and left like a frightened doe. The morning was too cold for tree frogs or insects, but the woods thrummed with a sound like childish laughter. Autumn rot filled her nose.
I mustn’t faint, she thought.
She pushed free from the car and walked on the path it had taken. At twenty paces she saw the shards of red glass—a few in rinds of white plastic—on the asphalt. She peered down the bank. Ferns and rhododendrons rose toward her in a solid mass. There was no bruising in the foliage, no path a body might have taken.
Then she heard a sound she’d last heard as a five-year-old but knew at once.
Her mother’s boyfriend Mr. Posey had been teaching her to ride her Lil’ Chick bicycle. Up and down the sidewalk they’d gone—his hand cupped beneath her bottom, his salty breath against her cheek—until the chain came loose from its sprockets. He’d balanced the bike on its handlebars and pink banana seat, tightened things expertly with a pocket wrench, then spun a pedal so the back tire zinged gaily.
Tick..Tick..Tick..Tick..Tick..Tick, it had sung.
“There you go, princess,” he’d said, setting the bike upright and lifting her astride. “Set that sweet butt down.”
Somewhere below, a bicycle tire was spinning as her Lil’ Chick’s tire had spun. Freewheeling, unencumbered by rider or pavement.
“Hello?” she called into the gloom. “Are you okay?”
A woodpecker answered far off in the trees. The spinning slowed.
Tick…Tick….Tick…..Tick……Ti—
Then stopped.
“Mommy!” Lacey screamed over the muffled harmonies of the Forget Me Nots. Kat stumbled back to the car. The little girl was staring out the rear window. “I didn’t know where you went,” she cried.
“Mommy’s here,” Kat said, falling into the driver’s seat.
She turned off the radio, then took her cellphone from the console and fingered the keypad. She’d bumped a bicycle off the road. That much was clear. But the blow had been just that, a bump. The rider might be shaken up, but he couldn’t be badly hurt. He was probably already climbing the bank, ready to give Kat a piece of his mind.
Another driver who didn’t have the brains or courtesy to share the road with a bicyclist. How arrogant! How typical!
Kat’s cheeks warmed with fury as they did whenever she was blamed for something. Her jaw turned hard. The patch on her forehead throbbed with her heartbeat.
It wasn’t her fault! She’d looked away for an instant. A shaft of sunlight had blinded her. The pavement was slick.
Besides, who was the arrogant party here?
Arrogance was demanding a piece of a winding, narrow road, when cars and trucks—vehicles the road was designed for—were using it too. Arrogance was wearing those silly helmets, that neon spandex. Arrogance was forming caravans of three, four, a dozen (!) thousand-dollar bicycles as angry motorists piled up behind, waiting to pass.
She dropped the phone in her lap and shifted the car into Drive. Acorns crunched beneath her tires. She came to a curve and rounded it slowly, the scene disappearing from her mirror.
—
“What’s that awful business above your eye?” Kat’s mother asked when Kat and Lacey came in.
The old lady was often foggy from her meds when her daughter visited, though today she was alert and sitting up. Her gown hung on her bony shoulders like a t-shirt on a wood hanger. The room smelled of used Depends and butterscotch pudding.
Kat touched her brow with a fingertip. “Just a little psoriasis. It’ll go away.” She lowered herself onto the consignment-store recliner Jules had bought for her mother’s room. Lacey sat cross-legged by the room’s only window.
Kat’s knees were trembling, and she covered them with a blanket from the chair arm. She held to her belief that the cyclist was more to blame than she for what happened, though her decision to flee, to leave him or her at the bottom of the ravine, shocked her, nonetheless.
What was she becoming? Who would do such a thing?
The old lady sat higher in bed and peered at Lacey. “If it wasn’t diaper rash with your mother, it was eczema or chickenpox. I had more ointments in my bathroom than hand soap.”
When the girl didn’t answer, she shook her head. “I don’t know where you found that child,” she said to Kat. “I’d have slapped you a good one if you’d ignored your grandmother that way.”
“Lacey,” Kat said sharply, “Gramma is talking to you.”
“I know she is.”
“Then answer her, for heaven’s sake.”
Lacey sighed. “What’s chickenpox?”
“It’s a disease that children—” Kat began.
“Oh lord, your mother’s chickenpox,” the old lady said. “She had scabs everywhere, even up her nose. Mr. Posey and I took turns giving her oatmeal baths.”
Lacey sniffed and looked out the window.
Kat opened her mouth to speak again, but the old lady stopped her with a withering glance. “Just like her mother,” she said. “Too cute to be told.”
“Is Big Bird a chicken?” Lacey asked.
Kat’s heart froze.
“No,” her mother said slowly. “A chicken isn’t a big bird. An eagle or a Canada goose are much—”
“Because we saw Big Bird on the way to come visit,” Lacey said, “and he was very, very big.” She wiped her nose with the heel of her hand. “He was flying, too. Wasn’t he, Mommy?”
The old lady looked at Kat. “What on earth is she talking about?”
Kat squeezed her knees with both hands. She stared back and forth between her mother and daughter. An aide’s cart passed—Tick..Tick..Tick—in the hallway. “The sun blinded me and I hit a pothole,” she said. “That must be it.”
“But I saw—” Lacey began.
“It was yellow sunlight through the leaves, dear. It scared us both to death.”
Lacey stuck out her chin. “I wasn’t scared. Big Bird is nice.”
—
Kat meant to take the long way through town after she and Lacey left the nursing home, but when she came to the Rangeline shortcut, she turned onto it again. Clouds had gathered, and, though it was midafternoon, the narrow way was dark.
She switched on her headlights and glanced at Lacey in the mirror. “Don’t rub your nose on your sleeve, babes,” she said. “That’s nasty.”
The girl’s wet upper lip glistened in the half light. “You said lying is bad.”
“That’s right. It is.”
“Then why did you lie to Gramma?”
“I didn’t.”
“You said we didn’t see Big Bird.”
“We didn’t.”
Lacey crossed her arms like a peevish adult. “We did too, Mommy. You got out of the car and looked for him. He was…he was…” She gaped as a new memory came to her. “He was wearing red shoes.”
Kat’s forehead prickled. “Lacey,” she said, “Big Bird is like Peppa Pig. He’s only on TV. Mommy hit a pothole and the sun flashed in our eyes at the same time, and it startled us both. I got out of the car to be sure there wasn’t any damage, that’s all.”
She slowed to a crawl, returning the girl’s gaze in the mirror. “If you tell Daddy you saw Big Bird, you’ll be the one telling a lie, not me. Understand?”
“But—”
Kat twisted, staring into the backseat. “Understand?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
They came to the place where the incident had happened. Red glass still littered the pavement. The ferns and rhododendrons rose in silent witness.
Surely the cyclist had climbed the bank by now. Surely he’d called for help on his cellphone and was already home—bruised, angry, but safe.
She took her eyes from the ravine and glanced in the mirror once more. Lacey was wiping her nose and studying her closely.
—
Kat’s bedside alarm projected the time on the ceiling, and that night she lay watching the hours tick by as Jules slept beside her. A cheerful, busy man, he laid floor tile Monday through Friday, drank a beer with dinner, and watched police dramas on TV. He ate his wife’s cooking, put his daughter to bed every night, and otherwise took scant notice of the goings on—Kat’s skin woes, her spats with Lacey—within the walls of their one-story ranch.
So Kat was surprised when he snorted awake and said, “Hey, did Lacey skin her knee or something?”
“No. Why?”
“The garage smelled like rubbing alcohol when I pulled in.”
When Kat had come home earlier she’d planted Lacey in front of Sesame Street and gone to the garage, where she’d used alcohol to scrub the black smear from the Civic’s fender. A tiny, filigreed scratch remained—like a river and its tributaries photographed from space—though the old car had enough nicks and bruises that it blended invisibly among them..
“I was soaking hairbrushes in the mudroom,” she said after a moment.
“Oh, something else. Who the heck is Mr. Posey?”
“What?”
“The girl couldn’t stop talking about him when I tucked her in.”
Kat watched the time change overhead from 1:59 to 2:00. “He was our neighbor, a nice old fix-it man. He lived with us for a while after Papa died.”
“Mmmm-hmmm. How come you never told me about him?”
“I was a little girl. I barely remember him myself,” she said. She rolled away. “That Lacey’s so weird. She hears everything and spits it back like a parrot.”
“Here’s what’s weird.” Kat’s back was turned, but she could tell he was making quotes in the dark with his fingers. “‘A nice old fix-it man’ giving a neighbor girl a bath. What’s up with that?”
When he was snoring again, Kat fell into a fitful doze. Memories knotted and unknotted in her mind like snakes in a bucket. Yellow and red in a splintering vortex. The crunch of acorns beneath her tires. The nice county lady sitting with her in her bedroom, while her mother talked with a policeman on the other side of the door. The Tick..Tick..Tick of a—
She jerked awake and looked at the ceiling. It was 5:00 am.
—
There was no mention of a hit-and-run on local TV during breakfast, nor on the radio when Kat dropped Lacey—the girl’s cold much improved—off at school. The October day was mild, and she opened the sunroof and breathed deeply as she drove away. All was turning out okay. A bicyclist had been bumped off Rangeline Road and later crawled to safety. A dramatic story to tell one’s friends, but hardly fodder for the news.
She touched her forehead, pleased to feel that her psoriasis had cooled. The steroid cream was working. Maybe this time the cure would take.
Her phone vibrated, and she glanced at it in the console. It was the nursing home’s front desk. When her mother didn’t get an answer at the house, she insisted an aide call Kat’s cell, because she couldn’t remember the number herself.
Kat drummed her fingers on the steering wheel until the buzzing stopped. “Answer when you feel like it, and don’t when you don’t,” the old lady’s nurse had said. “Five minutes after you talk to her, she’s demanding we call all over again.”
She drove aimlessly into town, loath to go home, loath to get to her chores. What was happening to her? She and Jules had been together for ten years, and she’d never once flinched at her household duties. He mowed their tiny lawn, she treated grout stains on his work shirts. He bought new tires for his pickup, she scoured the internet for noodle recipes.
But since her mother’s broken hip, since the doctor had suggested the old lady might die if she didn’t look to her own rehabilitation, Kat had moved through life in a haze, as though she didn’t know her place in the world, as though—her mother slowly vanishing—she was vanishing as well.
Stop it, she scolded herself. Her carelessness had led to near disaster on Rangeline Road. A wise adult would use the event as a wakeup call. Grow up. Look after your husband, your daughter. You’re not a child anymore.
Her phone vibrated again, again the nursing home, and she pulled over to answer. The old lady’s UTI was back with a vengeance, her mother’s nurse said. She was refusing food. There were signs of sepsis in her blood.
“So we’ll start the antibiotics again, right?” Kat asked.
The woman paused. “That’s an option, certainly,” she said.
Kat held the phone at arm’s length and stared at it, then returned it to her ear. “What other option is there?” she said.
“I’m sorry. I can’t advise you what to do, but…do you have family to talk—”
“Are you suggesting we stop treating her?”
“That’s for you and the doctor to decide,” came the nurse’s voice, suddenly cool and far away. “It’s not my place to suggest such a thing.”
After she’d hung up, Kat drove to the drug store and bought more steroid cream, then to a coffee shop where she scrolled through her phone and drank cup after cup. Then, with nothing else to do, she drove to kindergarten an hour early, where she parked and waited for her daughter to appear.
She leaned back and closed her eyes, her hands shaking from caffeine.
No, she had no one to talk to. Her father had died when she was little. She didn’t have a brother or a sister, a preacher or a coworker. Jules…well, she could talk to Jules, but he would only say, “it’s up to you,” as though allowing one’s mother to slip away was like choosing new curtains for the bedroom windows.
She flinched when a back door opened and Lacey climbed in.
“How was class?” she called over her shoulder.
“Fine,” the girl said. She was usually full of chatter after school. Tyler was mean. She and Olivia had played tag on the monkey bars. They’d had Fig Newtons for snack.
Now she said, “Mommy, Tyler called me a dumb bunny.”
“Why did he say that?”
“Because I said Big Bird wears red shoes when he goes outside.”
Kat turned slowly. “What did you tell Tyler about seeing Big Bird?”
“I didn’t say I saw him. I just said he wears red shoes. I wasn’t bad, was I?”
Kat’s heart scratched in her rib cage like a rat behind drywall. The heat bloomed in her cheeks. Her daughter was watching her closely, as she had the day before on Rangeline Road. “You most certainly were bad,” she said. “Mommy said not to mention your silly Big Bird, so of course you did it anyway.”
The little girl’s eyes widened.
“No, no. Don’t look all innocent and surprised. You’re too smart for your own good, just like Gramma says.”
Kat jerked the Civic into Drive and pulled from the curb. Light blinded her through the sunroof, and she slammed it shut. Traffic was busy through town, and she switched lanes recklessly, drawing honks from other motorists.
“Mommeeee,” Lacey wailed behind her. “I’m sad.”
“I’m sad, too,” Kat said loudly. “I’m sad my daughter thinks it’s cute not to mind her mother. I’m sad she tattles to Daddy whenever I say a bad word. I’m sad she pretends not to listen to her gramma when in fact she’s listening to every goddamn—”
She stopped, panting heavily. She’d been about to mention Mr. Posey, but she knew that doing so would only prompt Lacey to bring the name up again, when Jules tucked her in that night.
“Stay out of Mommy’s business!” she shouted.
When they got home Lacey went to her room and Kat to the kitchen, where she turned on the midday news as she collected bread and cold cuts for lunch.
She stopped like a child playing freeze tag when the lead story began:
A local attorney named Angus French had left home on his bicycle the morning before and never came back. His work life was hectic, so he sought the solitude of back roads in his spare time. He was often gone for hours, purposely not taking his phone. But when he hadn’t returned by evening, his wife had finally called. Police had delayed designating him a Missing Person at first, but now, a full day later, they were doing so.
Mr. French was last seen riding a black Cannondale Mountain Bike. He was wearing a yellow jersey and yellow spandex shorts when—
Kat turned off the TV and went to the bathroom, where she fell to her knees and vomited into the toilet. When the last of the coffee she’d drunk that morning appeared in the bowl, she followed it with blood and mucousy bile.
Afterward, she washed her face and stepped into the hall. Lacey was singing tunelessly behind her bedroom door, so Kat went to the kitchen and called Mrs. Wells, a neighborhood widow who was nearly always available to watch the girl.
She’d be glad to help, Mrs. Wells said. Of course, she’d finish making Lacey’s lunch. Oh my, she hoped the call from the nursing home didn’t mean bad news. Yes, she still had a spare key and would let herself in. She’d be over in a jiffy.
Kat didn’t know where she was going when she drove from the house, though she knew there was no help for Mr. French. The temperature had dropped into the teens overnight. If he’d survived the tumble into the ravine and then lain there, injured and exposed for twenty-four hours, he was almost certainly dead by now. And alive or dead, how could she tell people where to find him?
A call from her cell would be traced. She knew as much from Jules’s police shows. For that matter, she couldn’t use a payphone either. Security cameras were everywhere. She couldn’t send a letter. They’d track the paper to the stationary store where she bought it, lift her fingerprints from the envelope, her DNA from the stamp.
She’d be found out, as bad people were. It was only a matter of time.
She looked up, surprised to find herself at the nursing home. She parked, then lurched through the front door and down the hall to her mother’s room. The shades were drawn and the old lady was sleeping, so Kat sat on the recliner and listened to the ragged rise and fall of her mother’s chest.
The patch above her eyebrow tingled and pulsed.
Angus French. What a silly, rich man’s name. His work was “hectic,” the news report had said, so he took weekday mornings off and rode hither and yon on an expensive bicycle. Kat didn’t take mornings off, Jules didn’t take mornings off. She drove a battered old Civic, while Angus French probably drove a Mercedes and lived in a beautiful house and never had a moment’s worry.
If anybody thought she was going to take the blame for what happened, they had another think coming, didn’t they? She hadn’t been the one risking her life on a narrow, icy road. She hadn’t been the one to—
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said aloud.
Her mother coughed and rolled toward her. “It most certainly was your fault,” she said, her ancient eyes finding Kat in the darkness. “You knew what you were up to.” She spoke in wheedling, singsong parody. “Mr. Posey, let’s ride bike. Mr. Posey, let’s play tickle. Mr. Posey, can I sit in your lap and watch TV?”
Kat stared, her face on fire.
“And then you had to tattle, like the little tease you are.”
“Mommy,” Kat said. “I didn’t mean to ta—”
“Don’t ‘Mommy’ me, Katherine Sue. Why do you think they took him away?”
—
Mrs. Wells met Kat in the garage when she got home. Lacey wouldn’t come out of her room to eat lunch, she said. Mrs. Wells had pleaded and cajoled, but the child had refused, and she’d finally left her where she was.
After the woman left, Kat went quietly into the hall and cracked open Lacey’s door. The girl was sitting on her bed and talking to Monk-Monk, the old sock doll Kat had played with as a child. “You most certainly are bad,” she was saying to Monk-Monk. “I’m going to slap you a good one.”
Kat cried out and rushed into the room, intending to sweep her daughter up in her arms. But Lacey—as she’d done since she was tiny and she and Kat were at each other’s throats—threw her head from side to side and arched her back, squirming from her mother’s grasp.
Bob Johnson‘s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Common, The Barcelona Review, American Fiction, and elsewhere. His debut story collection, THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, was published by Cornerstone Press in February 2025 and was subsequently reviewed in The New York Times by Stuart Dybek. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Bob lives and writes in South Bend, Indiana.