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apples….”

Chapter Three
    I remember a certain wintry morning many years ago. It followed the let’s-get-through-the-holidays-for-the-sake-of-the-kids phoniness, the weeks of my husband and I arguing, sometimes in front of the children, mostly after they went to bed. After more than a decade of “wedded bliss,” it was very clear the marriage was over. I could take the emotional torture no more. And now the moment was here: how would my husband move his clothes out of our walk-in closet without our daughters actually seeing him do it?
    One day and a half-empty closet later, I moved my shoes to what had always been his side. As I did, the closet walls echoed and so did my head, with my fears – financial and emotional. We would be a household of three now, not four.
    Surprisingly, I found comfort where I least expected it: from my daughters, Scarlett, age 14, and Madeline, age 9. It began that night in a lonely bed, where I experienced for the first time the cold silence from his side of the sheets. At 11 p.m., my door flew open. There stood my two beaming daughters. “I thought you two were asleep!” I sputtered. The girls didn’t answer but instead climbed up on the quilt. Brandishing a boom box, Scarlett said, “Mom, this is important. Do you think ’NSync or Backstreet Boys are better singers?” She pressed a button, and suddenly JustinTimberlake was belting out a tune. Madeline began flopping around the mattress. Lots of giggles and pillow slamming ensued.
    My lonely first night simply…wasn’t.
    Had they come to me to ease their own sense of loss? Could they have been more aware of mine than I knew? Or did some instinct tell them that in making me feel better, they would soothe themselves as well?
    Gradually I began to see that the roadmap to this new, uncharted life lay in my daughters’ faces. When Madeline studied my eyes while licking the cookie-dough spoon and asked with a crumpled jaw, “Mommy, you won’t ever leave me, will you?” a new kind of direction was born in me.
    I learned that being “us girls” alone didn’t only mean we had lost something. We had gained something, too: independence. In the car Scarlett, pushing the radio buttons, back and forth, landed on the theme song from the “Charlie’s Angels” movie: “All you women, independent, throw your hands up for me!” She sang along with it, then she turned to me and said, “Hey, Mom, that’s you. Independent,” which prompted Madeline to ask, “What does independent mean?”
    Years later I watched Scarlett take a clue from me and she grew up to be independent, too.
    The day Scarlett graduated college it was pouring rain. As we splashed through the mud after the ceremony, she flung her arms around my neck and said, “You are the best mom a girl could ask for.” And in learning that, I had gained a lot more than a little extra closet space…
    Quick! Write that all down. I stumble over my half-clothed self moving to my dresser to find a piece of paper and a pen. Great article for later…“How to Find Comfort in A Divorce from the Place You Least Expect It: Your Children…”
    But then, startled by a ringing telephone, I lose the thought as fast as it arrived. I trip over my shoes and then the nightstand to get to it. I pick up. “Hello?”
    “Took you long enough to answer the damn phone,” says an over-demanding voice on the other end of the receiver.
    “Kitty?” I say, “I have to call you back.” I juggle the phone while trying to snap on my bra. “Five minutes, I promise. Don’t go anywhere. Five minutes…”
    “But…”
    But I’ve hung up. And my bedroom door handle begins moving. If I’m not finished dressing by the time the door flies open, I know the newspaper headline will read: “Twins Die of Fright upon Viewing Stepmother’s Fat Ass!”
    The door handle comes to life, twisting and turning, the giggles on the other side of the door signifying determination more than amusement.
    “Just a