RE: Trailer Trash 44 pt 4

   “Happy birthday!” Hannah cried out.

   “Good morning Hannah,” Tabitha replied.

   Today was the big day, and Tabitha felt pretty confident. The tickle of anxiety at having to deal with a lot of people in a public situation where everyone was focused on her was there, but it was manageable. Presenting herself to everyone with any kind of personable face wasn’t something she was capable of back during the start of high school, and after plenty of time ruminating over it, Tabitha decided to say that was what had gone wrong with her debut. Being thin and pretty really wasn’t all it took—appearance was a necessary facade, but behind that facade a teenage girl needed social musculature to back it all up, built atop a skeleton of core confidence.

   “Happy birthday,” Hannah repeated.

   “Yes, thank you,” Tabitha chuckled. “I’m fourteen now. Time to start checking for gray hairs!”

   “Hah, yeah right,” Hannah shook her head as she padded across the living room and jumped onto the couch. “When do you get gray hairs? Like, at how old? Fifty? Seventy?”

   “It’s a little different for everybody,” Tabitha explained. “But! I do remember there’s a mnemonic about gray hair. They say that fifty percent of the population has fifty percent gray hair at fifty years old.”

   The Macintire’s remote control was jammed partway between two of the couch cushions, and Tabitha retrieved it and pointed it towards the entertainment center to turn on the large tube TV. There was no smartphone or bracelet PC that allowed her to glance at the weather, so the local Channel Seven news was her best bet. She was hoping for mid to high fifties today, because if temperatures were into the low forties, she would have to rethink her planned outfit.

   “Fifty percent for fifty white hair…?” Hannah giggled. “What. Is that real?”

   “Maybe?” Tabitha shrugged. “It means that around half of people have about half of their hair gray when they reach fifty years old.”

   “Hmmm,” Hannah pursed her lips into a frown as she fell deep into thought. “Some of the old ladies at church have gray hair. That’s it, though. No one else really even has gray hair. Actually, some of them have white hair. Like the whole way white.”

   “They do!” Tabitha nodded. “I remember. As for myself, I’ll start seeing gray in my hair when I’m fifty-two or fifty-three. The gray will creep the rest of the way in almost before I even notice it, and I’ll be all gray by fifty-seven! It’ll all go gray really quick, almost all at once!”

   “Yeah, right,” Hannah shook her head in disbelief. “How do you know? From your grandma?”

   “Hmmm,” Tabitha hummed out without answering. “Why don’t you come sit at the table, so that we can get you your cereal?”

   “Can we have french toast?” Hannah asked.

   “Of course,” Tabitha said. “I can make you french toast.”

   “Wait, I forgot,” Hannah smacked her own forehead. “It’s your birthday. You don’t have to make food on your birthday!”

   “How about… we make breakfast together,” Tabitha proposed. “Do you remember all the ingredients we use for our french toast?”

   “No, no—you sit at the table, I’ll make french toast,” Hannah insisted, hurrying across the living room towards the hallway for her room. “Sit, sit!”

   “Hannah, if you’re looking for your little cooking apron, I think it’s already dirty,” Tabitha reminded her as she went the other way, stepping into the kitchen. She turned on the stove and withdrew the Macintire’s griddle plate from their lower cabinet. “You remember? We made the big lasagna together?”

   “Oh yeah,” Hannah paused. “Can I still wear it?”

   “Let’s have you wear your dad’s apron,” Tabitha said. “He won’t need it for grilling for another few months, yet.”

   “Okay,” Hannah said. “Do I have to go ask for permission?”

   “I think this time it’s okay, and I can allow it,” Tabitha beamed at Hannah. “But, I’m very proud of you for thinking to ask that. Good job, Hannah banana.”

   “Yeah.”

   The apron was retrieved from its normal spot on the coat hooks near the door to the garage, and then draped over Hannah’s diminutive figure like a sail cloth. The thing was almost wide enough to wrap around the little girl twice, and it hung down across the floor, so a moment was necessary to fold the excess and then tie it all secure with the apron strings looping around Hannah’s front in a large bow. The usual kitchen stool was put in place in front of the kitchen sink so that Hannah could wash her hands before cooking, and though there had never been any mishaps, Tabitha hovered nearby to ensure that Hannah didn’t have a fall.

   “Okay,” Hannah dramatically dried her hands on the hand towel and then fwapped it back to where it hung from a kitchen drawer handle. “Now, you go sit. I’ll cook!”

   “Hmm. Can I help a little?”

   “Tabitha… it’s your birthday.”

   “Are you okay cracking the eggs by yourself?”

   “Uhhhh—” Hannah wavered. “You can help with those.”

   “Okay, I’ll do that.”

   “But, I get to do everything else!”

   There had been some difficulties with teaching Hannah to crack open eggs, because she didn’t want any uncooked icky inside goop touching her little fingers. Her first try had been almost a full minute of Hannah gently tapping an egg against the lip of a bowl with a nervous smile, as if she needed to slowly chip away all the eggshell bits. When instructed that she needed to use much more force for her second try—Hannah directly smashed the egg against the side of a mixing bowl, yelped at the splattered mess, and jumped back in fright, flinging runny egg all across the kitchen tile.

   With a small smile, Tabitha retrieved the other ingredients they needed from the cabinet. Each of them had created important morning lessons in the past week. Nothing was more useful for teaching a seven year old that more of a good thing isn’t always better, than vanilla extract. Likewise, cinnamon taught Hannah its bitter truths about being careful and restrained when measuring out for a dish, and now the little girl adhered to Tabitha’s whispered recipes with deadly seriousness.

   “Four eggs?” Tabitha asked.

   “What? No way! Just one,” Hannah pursed her lips into a pout. “We don’t eat that much.”

   There was still a childish sort of glee in Hannah when they didn’t make enough breakfast for the whole family, as though there was some sort of one-ups-manship to be proud of in being able to enjoy something mom and dad didn’t get and might be jealous of. It wasn’t a behavior Tabitha particularly wanted to encourage in the girl, and it made her incredibly exasperated to see Mr. and Mrs. Macintire always obviously playing along with it, pretending to be huffy and upset.

   “But…” Tabitha tried on the new pleading look she was learning from the grandmaster at puppy dog eyes, Hannah herself. “But, it’s my birthday. I want all of us to share a big breakfast, like a family. For my birthday.”

   “Ugh, fiiine,” Hannah complained. “Only ‘cause it’s your birthday!”

   “Which means…”

   “Math,” Hannah groaned in disgust, as if using four of each measurement instead of one was an enormous hassle that would require pencil and paper to puzzle out.

   For all that the little girl was incredibly receptive to reading and learning words, Hannah had little patience for the dreaded math, and Tabitha’s attempts at making the subject interesting thus far had run headlong into a wall of total disinterest. That was okay—Tabitha had expected there to be challenges in playing her role as a live-in nanny, and… here they were. Because of how spoiled she was, Hannah just didn’t even have a strong grasp of the importance of money or costs. Counting out the coins from her piggy bank didn’t hold the girl’s attention. Numbers were mostly meaningless towards Hannah’s mental map of the world, where she held power of persuasion over her parents—and parents were the arbiters of reality, as far as Hannah was concerned.

   I don’t know if I should be envious or appalled.

   French toast wasn’t quite the ordeal pancakes had been, and since they’d done this together twice before already, Hannah didn’t need too many small reminders. Tabitha was able to relax and observe, splitting her attention between the stove area and the TV until a weather segment finally played. The high today would be forty-five degrees fahrenheit, with a low of twenty-nine degrees. It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but neither was it as bad as it could have been. She could still wear her modified white wedding blouse—what Hannah called the angel outfit, if she had her hoodie overtop in the brief stints outdoors today. It would be very brisk, but not too bad.

   “Is this good?” Hannah offered Tabitha the bowl to inspect.

   “It looks great, good job mixing Hannah,” Tabitha said. “Do you want help with the—”

   “No, I got it!” Hannah insisted. “You can sit and watch TV.”

   “I want to help.”

   “It’s your birthday.”

   “Then—I want to watch. Seeing it come together, smelling it cook will help whet my appetite.”

   “It’s breakfast,” Hannah reasoned. “Everyone has a wet appetite for breakfast, ‘cause it’s been hours since they ate.”

   “Hmm,” Tabitha broke into another smile.

   “Hmmm,” Hannah retorted.

   “Hmmmm!” Tabitha rubbed Hannah’s back as the girl dipped the first slice of bread through the mixture in the bowl.

   Tabitha was in love with the Macintire family.

   Though she was sure part of it was just this idyllic honeymoon phase, as Hannah hadn’t even thrown a major tantrum during Tabitha’s time here with them, the fact remained; Tabitha was deeply in love with the Macintire family. It was a kind of love she’d ever imagined experiencing, having family without all of the baggage attached to that concept, that inescapable love hate relationship she couldn’t escape before. Tabitha’s role as an outsider with the Moores because of her incredible changes in body, mind, and attitude was perfectly suited to her identity as a nanny here. The Macintires had never seen her as Tubby Tabby. Tabitha wasn’t Tubby Tabby anymore, she was someone completely new that she’d never been before, and here with this new family she felt a sense of belonging that was absolutely intoxicating.

   “You know what I like?” Tabitha remarked.

   “What?”

   “I like that we make such a good team,” Tabitha said. “I can help you with what little I can—”

   “Yeah, right. You do everything—”

   “—And then for what I can’t do—”

   “—Practically everything. Laundry, dishes, cooking—”

   “—I can ask for your help, without feeling embarrassed or ashamed or anything.”

   “Your hand’s in a cast!” Hannah shrugged. “What are you supposed to do?”

   “I know. But still,” Tabitha sighed. “Cooking, and dishes? With one hand, it’s such an enormous struggle, but with three hands? Especially for dishes! It’s all a piece of cake, and all because we’re such a good team.”

   “I don’t even hardly do anything.”

   “You help me cook,” Tabitha rubbed Hannah’s back again. “You help me lift big heavy things and carry them. You tie my shoelaces for me! That’s a big deal. You help me brush out my hair and look pretty. Do you remember how long it took me to fold laundry by myself those first few times? I was almost about to cry, and since then you’ve helped me every single time. Even though I’m supposed to be the nanny here, and take care of things. It just—it means a lot to me.”

   “Mom said you’re not even s’posed to do laundry,” Hannah giggled, tilting her head up so she could grin at Tabitha. “Or a bunch of other stuff, like cooking even.”

   “I know,” Tabitha admitted with a wistful smile. “But, together you and I make these amazing big breakfasts, and we just keep proving her wrong!”

   “I heard that,” Mrs. Macintire yelled over from the master bedroom—apparently the rest of the house was quiet enough for their voices to carry. “What do you think you’re teaching my daughter, huh?!”

   “Mom—it’s her birthday!” Hannah called back in retort.

   There was a moment of silence, and then Officer Macintire responded instead of Sandra.

   “Happy birthday, Tabitha!”

   “Thank you, sir!”

   “Don’t call me sir, I work for a living!”

   While Tabitha had grown very close with Mrs. Macintire and Hannah, she didn’t have much in the way of interaction with Officer Macintire and was happy to at least now have a few inside jokes she could lean on. As a father figure Tabitha found him strange, but with only her own dad for comparison she felt forced to accept that Darren Macintire must be the real normal, while her dad was this stubborn trailer park simpleton.

   “Happy birthday, honey!” Mrs. Macintire yelled.

   “Thank you,” Tabitha called back across the house. “Get dressed and come on out, we’re making french toast again!”

   “Coffee?”

   “Umm—” Tabitha crossed the kitchen and flicked on the coffee maker on the opposite counter. “Hannah baby, can you clean your hands and come help me with the coffee water?”

   “Got it!”

   “Sorry!” Tabitha yelled over. “I wasn’t thinking! Another five minutes?”

   “It’s her birthday!” Hannah hollered in consternation. “Sheesh.”

   “Happy birthday, Tabitha!” Officer Macintire yelled again.

   “Sheesh!” Tabitha agreed.

   “Sheesh!”

/// Sorry, this was kind of a cheat day, writing-wise. Brush with food poisoning and some pretty harsh reviews on the audible and amazon started getting me depressed, and I just wanted to write out a cute frivolous section rather than what I'm supposed to be writing. Promise I'll still somehow get the important tense bits of the chapter sorted out before Nov.