Extra Credit

Darlene rested her head against the cool and solid refrigerator, her eyes closed as she counted out the longest sixty-three seconds of every day. Those sixty-three seconds it took for the coffee machine to create her personal cup of mommy wake up juice to start the day.

As she silently hit number forty-six, she realized that something was wrong. Something was very wrong. It was quiet. Too quiet. Suspiciously quiet.

She kept her eyes closed, willing herself to ignore the intuitive certainty that Jake was up to no good. Less than twenty seconds to go until she could take that first hit of caffeine. Then she’d see what he was doing. Seven seconds. Five seconds. Three…

“Mom?”

Her eyes flew open and what they saw scared her and confirmed her hunch. This was not going to go well. She would need an extra slug of Caramel Macchiato creamer to handle this. She reached towards the refrigerator and froze. Clearly it was worse than she thought.

The Caramel Macchiato creamer was not in the refrigerator. It was clasped in the hands of her son. Her smiling son. Her smiling, already-dressed-in-clothes-that-matched, son. This was bad. So, so bad.

“Hi sweetie,” she said carefully. “Can you hand Mommy the creamer, please.”

“Sure!” he chirped. “You look so nice today Mommy!”

Wincing, Dar poured the creamer with a heavy hand into the sturdy green mug, as she tried to process what to do. Clearly something was up. Jake normally took nothing short of threats to ban Minecraft in order to get him dressed and out of his room in time to go to school. Who WAS this cheerful cherub? What did he want?

She didn’t have long to wait. “Um, Mom? Since I’m ready for school and everything, we have time to get into the attic for my extra credit, don’t we?”

Although she knew the meaning of these words individually, they made no sense at all strung into that sentence. She had been right. It was best to confidently engage and then deflect to a new subject.

“We aren’t going into the attic honey; it’s 100 degrees up there. And you are six. It is the second week of school. Six-year-olds don’t need extra credit. How about blueberry muffins for breakfast?” There. A confident takeover of the conversation and a bribe of sweets should do it. “I’m going to get dressed and then we can take our time walking to school. How’s that sound?”

He was as determined as the Post Office used to be- nothing was going to distract him. “Mom! I do need extra credit. Mrs. Stanhope doesn’t believe we have a museum picture and I told her we did, and it’s in the attic, but not ours, and she said if I brought it in I could get credit, and can I have two muffins?”

Chugging the last of the coffee and plopping another pod into the coffee maker, Darlene’s tired mind worked on this newest stream of nonsense words. Not our attic? Museum picture? “Sure, babe. You can have two muffins, they’re small. Where is the attic with the pictures? WHAT pictures?”

As her brain fog was blown clear by the twin impact of Jake and the coffee, she worked her way to one of the words: museum. She and Jake had gone to the Chicago Museum of Art three weeks ago, a side trip from seeing the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. It had been a quick trip to see the American Artists and the Impressionists. She didn’t think it had made much of an impression on Jake. Clearly, she was wrong.

Talking around an entirely too large bite of blueberries and muffin crumbs, Jake explained that his class had ‘Talk and Tell Time’ yesterday, sharing what they had done during the Summer. He said that he had seen the dinosaurs in the city, and the room filled with pictures like the ones in the attic. The ones with the hay that the man painted over and over. He said that they were on the wall over his head and the ones in the attic were easier to see once he took them out of the hiding place in the attic. That’s when Mrs. Stanhope said he should bring one of the pictures into school for extra credit.

Watching the coffee stream into the mug, Dar thought how fast a day could get turned around. It sounded like they were hiding a cache of stolen Master’s painting, of course Mrs. Stanhope would want to see them. Heck, DAR wanted to see them. Monet’s haystacks. In her attic. Of course.

She waited until the coffee had been thoroughly creamed, then took a sip and asked for the missing detail. “Jake, I know we don’t have paintings in our attic. Where’s the attic you think you saw them?”

He gave a sigh so loud and long she knew that he was imitating her. “In Grampa’s attic. I saw it when I explored. We need to go there before school.”

Grampa’s attic? Her father’s attic? That cramped triangle of insulation and mouse droppings? There couldn’t be anything there. But. But Jake had spent the night with his Gramps when she had to cover the night shift at the clinic. It’s possible he had seen something, even if it wasn’t a hidden trove of priceless paintings.

“Jake, does it have to be this? I know that there aren’t painting in Grampa’s attic, and this is my only day off this week; I can stop by there this afternoon and look around and you can bring whatever it is in to school tomorrow. I….” Even as she was speaking her son was shaking his head.

“No, Mom, it needs to be today. Teacher said that I had to bring it in today to get the extra credit. No one else has extra credit. I will be the only one. Pleeeeease Mom!”

Checking her watch as she drained her second mug of coffee, Dar decided to meet it head on. Her father was likely at the Senior center getting his first cup of coffee and planning which of his buddies he was going to fleece in a game of poker. They could get into the house, up into the attic, and a quick turnaround and off to school.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Oh, sure, unlocking the door was simple. Climbing the stairs to the second floor was uneventful. Even pulling on the cord that dropped the attic stairs our of the ceiling and unfolded the ladder down into the hallway with the usual crashing thump went well. What wasn’t expected was the sight of her father walking out of his bedroom wielding a baseball bat.

“Dad!”, she shrieked, “It’s just us!” As if appearing in her father’s house and climbing into the ceiling was something she did every day.

“Grampa!” yelled Jake, dropping the flashlight and rushing to give his grandfather a hug. “We’re here to get some of the treasure so I can get extra credit at school.”

Hugging Jake, Darlene’s father lifted his eyes to her and arched his brows, waiting to have the declaration decoded. As he listened to Darlene explain more about the reason for the trip, he did something that caught her by surprise. “Jake,” he said sternly, "those were to be our secret, weren’t they?”

There was not enough coffee in the world to get her through this morning. Secret? They WERE Monet painting in her father’s attic? As she took a breath and thought about which question to ask first, her father surprised her again.

“Darlene, I just couldn’t decide on a good time to tell you about them. They’ve been upstairs for quite a long time. I’d almost forgotten about them. But, since you’re here, and since it’s for ‘extra credit’, I guess now is as good a time as any.” He picked up the flashlight and made his way up the stairs and into the attic. “Do you remember where they are, Jake?”

Jake confidently took the few steps that were possible in the cramped space and walked over to the clothes rack that had been next to the chimney as long as Dar could remember. He pushed aside the silver garment bags that hung, cocoon-like, on the frame and revealed a flat crate leaning against the wall. His grandfather tugged it along the wall and out from behind the rack.

“Let’s take this downstairs where it’s cooler and have a look. Then you can decide which one you will take to school”, he said. Wordlessly, Dar followed her father and her excited son down the narrow metal steps and into the hallway.

Gently opening the side of the box Dar’s dad carefully pulled six framed canvases from the box. There, in gentle but clear tones were six oil paintings. Not of haystacks, she was relieved to see, but different views of a pear tree.

They were simple paintings, but carefully made. Each painting showed the small tree from a slightly different view and lighting.

“Dad, what in the world? It looks like the pear tree in the back yard, but the tree is so small! Who did these?” She slowly flipped through the canvas, barely hearing Jake telling her that he had TOLD her there were museum paintings in the attic! “What’s going on? Why were they hidden?”

“Well, hon,” her dad said. "Your mom painted those. It was a long time ago and she was plenty sad when she did them. Hey Jake! How about you look in the spare room for a blanket that we can wrap around the one you will show your teacher and me and your mom will wait here?”

Jake sprinted down the hallway, giving ‘extra credit’ hand salutes as Dar turned toward her father waiting for whatever he didn’t want Jake to hear.

“You see that pear tree was planted when your mom found out that she was expecting”, he said gently. She nodded; this was old news. “And, well, your mom lost that baby when she was four months along”, he hurriedly said, rushing to finish the story. “She was healthy, it just wasn’t meant to be. She was so glad when we learned she was carrying you just a few months later!”

It looked like he was relieved to explain things. She had not known that her mother had lost a child, and Dar’s heart ached for the mother that had died the year before.

He continued, “She was just nervy about overdoing things, even though that miscarriage hadn’t been her fault. She sat outside almost everyday and taught herself to paint the tree we had planted for that lost little one. When we brought you home, she asked me to put the painting away. She said there wasn’t any need to see them anymore since they reminded her of those fears she tried to work through. Since you were home with us, she wasn’t afraid anymore.”

They both turned to see Jake come running back down the hall, pulling the quilt her mother had made for her behind him as he ran. Darlene had always loved it, and fell asleep as a young girl tracing the round green, brown, and yellow pears that her mother appliquéd to the surface of the quilt.

She wrapped the quilt around the ‘sunny one, mom! the sunny one!’ as she thought about her mother piecing the fabric together into an orchard of trees. Each one standing witness to her daughter’s safe arrival.

I hope you enjoyed this story. Family stories aren't always as they seem. You may enjoy this, written about a memory of my mom.