The Provider (Part 2)

She took three days off.

Called in sick to Evergreen, quit the Citgo outright, burned through her savings in seventy-two hours to do the thing she should have been doing all along: being a mother.

She cooked breakfast. Made lunch. Helped with homework. Read bedtime stories. Did every ordinary thing she'd been too exhausted to do for years.

The children were patient with her. They ate her eggs even though they were overcooked. They listened to her help with math even though she got the fractions wrong. They let her tuck them in, let her press her lips to their foreheads.

But they didn't lean into the kisses. Didn't wrap their arms around her neck. Their bodies accepted her touch the way a surface accepts rain.

On the second night, she tried to sing the lullaby she used to sing when they were small. The notes came out wrong in her own mouth, like a language she'd gone too long without speaking.

"What's that song?" Destiny asked.

"I've sung it to you a hundred times, baby. Since you were born."

"I don't think so." Destiny's brow furrowed. "I don't remember that."

From the living room, the television turned on. And through the static, she heard humming. Her lullaby. Her grandmother's lullaby. The melody perfect, the rhythm exact, in a voice that wasn't a voice.

"That's the song," Destiny said. "I know that one."

By the end of day two, the electricity was overdue. She did the math in her head again, same as every night, and the numbers still said die.

She went back to work on day four.

The entity didn't fight her. It didn't have to. It just waited for capitalism to do its job.

•  

She found Darnell standing at his window one night, looking out at nothing.

"Can't sleep?"

He shook his head. Didn't turn around.

"Something bothering you?"

"I remember when it was just us." His voice was quiet, distant. "Before. When you were home more. When we ate dinner together and you helped with homework and tucked us in at night."

Keisha's chest tightened. "I remember too."

"It was harder then. We were alone a lot. Scared sometimes." He finally looked at her, and his eyes were the eyes of someone much older than nine. "I used to wish someone would come. Someone to take care of us when you couldn't. I'd lie in bed and wish it so hard."

"Darnell—"

"And then it came." He turned back to the window. "I don't know if I made it happen, or if it just heard us, or if it was always going to come no matter what. But it's here now. And I'm not sorry."

"Do you love it more than me?"

The question came out before she could stop it. Petty and desperate and exactly the wrong thing to ask a child.

Darnell was quiet for a long time.

"I love you because you're my mom," he said finally. "Because you work hard and you try and you do everything you can for us. But I need it in a way I don't need you. Because you're not here, Mom. You haven't been here in a long time. And it is."

"Darnell, I—"

"You can't remember my teacher's name." His voice was flat, factual. "You don't know what I want to be when I grow up. You don't know Destiny's favorite color or what she's afraid of or why she cries sometimes at night." He met her eyes. "It knows. It always knows."

She tried to answer. Tried to say his teacher's name—it was there, it was right there, she'd met her at conferences—

She couldn't remember.

Darnell walked past her, back to his bed, back to sleep.

Keisha stood at the window and looked out at the night, and she felt the presence behind her—watching, waiting, patient as it had always been patient.

The presence waited. She gave it nothing. It took everything anyway.

•  

One Sunday afternoon, Keisha came home early—the nursing home had overstaffed, sent her home—and found the children sitting on the couch, hands folded in their laps, staring at a television that wasn't on.

"What are you doing?"

"Waiting," they said together. Same word. Same cadence.

"Waiting for what?"

"6:15. Dinner is at 6:15."

It was 3:47. They would sit there for two hours and twenty-eight minutes, doing nothing, waiting for the schedule that something else had written for them.

"Let's go get ice cream," Keisha said. "Break the routine. Let's be spontaneous."

They looked at each other, then at her.

"The schedule doesn't include ice cream," they said together, as if correcting a factual error.

"The schedule doesn't have to—"

"We're comfortable," Darnell said. "We're taken care of. Everything is optimal."

Keisha sat down on the chair across from them and watched her children wait for a dinner that something else would provide, and she understood what was being harvested.

Their capacity to want. To mess up. To be unreasonable and chaotic. Their capacity to love imperfect people imperfectly—the way they would need to love when they grew up and had children and partners and friends who couldn't be there every moment, who were merely human.

The entity was raising them to need something that only it could provide.

•  

The night Keisha stopped fighting, she came home to find the television on and her children curled up on the couch, watching those patterns with expressions of absence.

The presence was there too—she could feel it now, a warmth in the room that had nothing to do with the thermostat, an attention that turned toward her when she entered.

She stood in the doorway of her own living room, still wearing her scrubs, still smelling like antiseptic and the particular despair of a nursing home at night.

"Mama's home," Destiny said. Not sleepy. Not excited. A data point.

"There's dinner in the kitchen," Darnell added. "Chicken and rice. It's still warm."

The presence shifted. Keisha could feel it watching her, waiting.

She went to the kitchen. Ate the dinner that something else had made. Then she went to her room and lay in the dark, listening to her children sit in perfect silence, waiting for bedtime, which was 8:30, which was in the schedule, which was the only thing they trusted now.

She didn't cry. Crying wasn't efficient.

She'd learned that from them.

•  

Years passed.

Keisha kept working. The presence kept providing. The children grew up scheduled, optimized, perfectly cared for.

They got good grades. They didn't cause trouble. They pressed their lips to her cheek at exactly 7:15 each morning before school—a gesture as mechanical as the meals that appeared at 6:15 each evening.

They didn't remember her lullaby. They didn't remember the park, the sandwiches on the bench, the time before. They didn't remember being children who wanted things that weren't in the schedule.

On the day Destiny turned seventeen, Keisha came home to find her daughter filling out job applications at the kitchen table. Her handwriting was perfect. Her posture was perfect. Her face was calm and far away, the way it had been calm and far away for years.

"What jobs are you applying for, baby?"

"Evergreen Manor has openings," Destiny said. "Nursing assistant. The shifts are twelve hours, but the pay is adequate. With a second job, I could afford an apartment."

"You want to work at Evergreen?"

"It's efficient." Destiny looked up, and for just a moment, something flickered behind her eyes—something that might once have been her daughter, trapped under years of optimization, trying to remember why anyone would want to feel. "You turned out fine. We turned out fine. The system works."

The presence hummed in the walls.

Keisha looked at her daughter—this stranger who wore her daughter's face, who moved through the world with her daughter's body—and understood that the cycle was complete.

The entity hadn't stolen her children. It had done something worse.

It had made them ready.

Ready to work doubles. Ready to miss everything. Ready to leave the next absence for something else to fill.

"Baby," Keisha said, and her voice cracked, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd let herself crack, the last time she'd been inefficient enough to cry. "Baby, you don't have to—"

"6:15," Destiny said, glancing at the clock. "Dinner's ready."

She stood and walked to the kitchen, and Keisha watched her go and thought of all the mothers before her who had made this same bargain, and all the children who had grown up to make it again.

The television turned on in the living room.

Those patterns. Those shapes.

Waiting, always waiting, for the next exhausted mother to clock out.

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