Lilly strips the bed of its sheets and the comforter, tosses each stuffie to the far corner of the room. Jack is whining about Blue Bear, the one she and her mother made while she was pregnant, from the leftover remnants of her own baby blanket. The blanket she’d brought to college, to graduate school, that she’d only folded and put into the shelf of her old bedroom at her parent’s place when she’d moved in with Mick. Because Mick wasn’t sentimental. Her something blue on her wedding day had been a piece cut from the cloth and sewn into the inside of her dress by the seamstress who tailored it to her exact measurements. As the dress hung from the bride’s suite at their reception venue, she searched through the layers of satin and tulle to find the swatch, rubbed her fingers on it, silently spoke to her dead grandmother to ask if she was making the right choice. Jack formed an attachment to the bear around age 2, when he carried it down stairs in the morning, back to bed at night, to her mother’s house for sleepovers. Blue Bear went everywhere with him. But now on the one day he could take it to school for the Teddy Bear Picnic, she couldn’t find it. She’d thrown off his routine by getting home late last night, missing dinner, rushing him to bed. Because she had stayed for a reception after work, talking with Charles, not quite flirting, but almost.
Lilly searches under Jack’s bed, her room, the upstairs bathroom, the playroom. Nothing. Downstairs, she crawls into the fort Jack erected with Mick, of throw pillows and folding chairs, and there in the dark is Blue Bear, waiting for Jack.
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