Page 1 of Better Than Expected
December 21 – 8 Years Ago
“You and my granddaughter are coming over on Christmas Eve, right?” Hannah’s mom, Betty, asked. “I feel like it’s been way too long since I’ve seen those cute little cheeks. And Abbie’s too.”
Hannah rolled her eyes even as she smiled. “Mom, you literally saw us both three days ago.”
“Barely! You two coming by the diner and having dinner with me on my break doesn’t count.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that the drawing Abbie gave you at dinner didn’t count! We are going to have to demand it back.”
“You can pry it out of my desperately in-need-of-a-manicure hands, then, can’t you?” Her mom cleared her throat as she walked and Hannah could hear how fast she was moving. A sign of her hustling to work for the breakfast shift, bright and early. “Abbie did love seeing them cook, though, the last time she came to work with me.”
“Mom! You let her in the kitchen?”
She could practically hear her mom’s eyeroll. “Honey, you think you weren’t raised in that kitchen? Come on. Speaking of, I’m about to clock in, so I’ve gotta go.”
She could only shake her head, because… well, her mom was right. She’d spent more time than she could ever recount everywhere in the diner. It didn’t mean she wanted her daughter toddling around back there, though. Hannah had the small scar on the back of her neck, still, from when she’d thought the kitchen was her personal playground and she’d accidentally knocked one of the pots down from the open flame stove as she’d been running by it, and it had sizzled against her skin as she’d passed it.
“Okay, I’ll let you go. And please,” she lowered her voice in deference to her mom, knowing how much she always hated Hannah mentioning this, “If you need anything for rent or bills next month, could you please ask me instead of working seventy hours a week? Seriously. Those are whole days you could spend with Abbie and me,” she added, trying to convince her. Desperately trying. It wasn’t the first time this had been a conversation and she was certain it wouldn’t be the last.
“You don’t have to take care of me, Banana. I’m just fine,” came her mom’s unsurprising response.
Just fine mostly, sure. But Hannah could already see the toll working so much had taken on her mom as she neared sixty. And she didn’t like to see it, not one bit. Especially not when she had the access to money to do actually something about it, now.
She bit her lip; on one hand, hating an argument, especially about money, but on the other… “Mom–”
“Christmas Eve. Michael can come. Or not,” Betty offered, her tone light and playful, but Hannah knew she wasn’t kidding. “I love you.”
Betty Woodland was a force of nature. Someone who could do anything based on sheer willpower, Hannah had always thought so. It was something that, at twenty-four, Hannah could still only admire; she didn’t have that innate quality.
“Love you, too, Mom.” She held the phone out for Abbie, who sporadically had been watching her from across the room while also eating/playing with her oatmeal and fruit. “Say goodbye to gram, Ab.”
“Bye gram-gram! Love you!” Abbie’s adorable smile beamed across the room as she clapped her oatmeal-y hands together.
She hung up the phone, breathing out a deep sigh regarding her mom’s “invitation” for Michael.
It hadn’t taken Hannah long to realize that the fairytale forever she’d naively thought she’d been handed wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
It just, unfortunately, took too long.
Because now, she’d already dropped out of college and was living solely off of Michael, they were married, and she already had Abbie.
So… perhaps she got the feeling in her gut that Michael perhaps wasn’t being entirely honest with her about where he was going or who he was with. Then again, maybe she was – as he would often accuse her – being paranoid.
And maybe Michael could control his temper more or the way he spoke to her. Perhaps she wished that she could ever even try to bring up her issues without being snapped or yelled at.
But, it wasn’t as though he hit her and it wasn’t like the bad stuff happened every single day, either.
And so, maybe she wished that he was more involved with Abbie than he was, given that he was rarely ever home and when he was, the last thing he wanted was to be “bothered” by their two-year-old.
Which, Hannah just couldn’t understand at all, because Abbie was a wonder to her, every single day. She was constantly growing and learning and exploring, all the while being the cutest toddler to ever exist.
Two and a half years in, and… no, her marriage wasn’t a fairytale. Then again, she told herself for the hundredth time, marriages weren’t fairytales. That was something she’d learned in the last few years –
Hannah had been so intent in high school, at the urging of her mom, to focus on school. Get good grades. Do the extra-curriculars. Get into college. Work hard to have the life she wanted. Relationships would always be there, later. The right person would be there, later, to sweep her off her feet when everything was just right.
She’d been foolish to believe that. That at any point, a relationship would come along when things were just right. It had been easy to let herself get swept away in Michael when she’d met him at twenty. Handsome, so smart, so charismatic, so interested. So much money that he might be even richer than real princes? A prince charming.
It just… it just took her until really being married to learn that marriages weren’t fairytales at all, and no man was really a prince charming. This was what it was like. What she had, was reality.