Hometown glory

Spring 3025. La Shawn Cameron is 39, Hayden Cameron is 3, Jack and Irvin Cameron are 9 months.
Last update: Winter 3024

Most days are the same with three small children in the house.

Small children, La Shawn thinks to herself as she’s awoken to cries or shrill shouts, tend to set the rules – in case anyone was ever in doubt about that. Her children are no exception.

Since the house has so few bedrooms the twins sleep in hers and it’s a reasonably good solution even if it means she wakes up as soon as one of them makes the slightest noise. During the day, she gets assistance from Talin and Catriona and whenever they come by, La Shawn takes a nap. Without that help she knows she would go insane.

The hardest part is the guilt she feels whenever Hayden calls for her attention. He’s too young to understand the reason for everything and the only thing he’ll remember, she thinks at times, is that she was absent, tired and too worn-down to cope with his development and need for her.

Hopefully she can make it up to him somehow, someday.

She tries to remember the essential things in life and make sure she eats reasonably well even if it’s tempting – some days completely irresistable – to spend all the calm moments sleeping.

It’s not an easy life. Most days it’s not a life she would wish for anyone and whenever that thought surface she feels a pang of guilt for not appreciating her boys more.

She loves them beyond words, but every day with them is a struggle because it wasn’t meant to be like this. La Shawn has never held any beliefs apart from a firm conviction in science, but even so she feels upset on some fundamental level whenever she thinks too long about her situation. It’s not supposed to be like this.

An unexpected spot of light in her new life is Karen, of all people.

If someone had told her a year ago that she’d make friends with Noah’s ex-wife, she would have brought them into the hospital to check their level of sanity. But dark times seem to turn everything around or at the very least shift reality slightly.

These days, Karen stops by a few times a week. Often she comes over on her way home from work, dropping off some leftover food or on her way downtown, asking what La Shawn wants from the mall. There’s a casual kindness in those gestures that could make La Shawn cry.

Typically, she walks into the kitchen to check the fridge, while La Shawn is ordered to lounge about in the living room.

Then she cleans or cooks or makes a grocery list – basically anything that requires a little more energy than La Shawn currently is in possession of.

And eventually they eat something together.

La Shawn occasionally feels the need to broach the subject of Noah – or more specifically the aspect of Noah that involves the two of them being involved with him, more or less at the same time. It’s eating away at her, the vague shame in having that affair to begin with and even more so now, with Karen here, right in front of her.

“We didn’t… you know, not before you two decided to get a divorce,” she exclaims one day. It feels incredibly important to point this out, for some reason.

Karen waits for a couple of beats, then she nods. “It doesn’t matter, though. Even if you did. Noah was a grown man. It was his responsibility to be faithful, not yours.”

“I don’t-”

“The whole ‘big bad homewrecker’ idea?” Karen looks annoyed at the very thought. “I don’t buy it. It’s just bullshit created to let men off the hook. Men aren’t animals, they can choose their actions, you know.”

La Shawn rakes a hand through her hair. “I know. But I try to be a decent person, and decent people don’t necessarily get involved in affairs with married ones.”

“Look, La Shawn, I don’t blame you for anything. Why should I? And you’re the mother of my sons’ half-brothers, which makes us family in my book. We’ve got half a football team to raise on our own, for goodness sake. So you’ll have to live with me coming around to help out. Okay?”

“Yeah.” La Shawn tries to cover her surprise with a half-smile. Karen is always unexpected, usually in good ways. Unconventional, Noah had called her once. She used to think it had been a stab at her own more traditional family values, but she realises now it’s merely the best word to describe her new friend.

Karen is unconventional. Their friendship is unconventional.

And she values it more than she could even begin to describe.

“I don’t think we had the kind of marriage he wanted, actually.” Karen sounds matter-of-factly, like she’s had so much time to ponder these things that they no longer bother her. She probably has. “I wasn’t sure what I was doing and he was… I don’t know, I think he knew what he wanted when we got married but I’m not so sure he wanted it with me, either.”

La Shawn thinks of choices and dreams, of how blurry they tend to become over the years. Time and experience tearing down the edges, leaving them smudged and altered – and even the dreams you catch seem to shift somehow because when you reach your goal, you’re no longer the same person who once wished for it.

With Noah she had felt things that never rose to the surface with Griff, a need that went deeper than a wish for two children and a white picket fece. Had Noah been exactly what she’s looking for? She doesn’t know. She does know that they had a good thing going and that she would have been happy with him. That they were happy and that it has torn something apart inside her to lose him.

“He loved you,” she tells Karen, remembering how respectful he had always been when he was talking about his ex-wife. Even as the bitterness flooded his actual words, he had been firmly determined to do right by her.

“Yes.” Karen smiles wistfully. “He did. And he loved you too. I think you knew what to do with that love, even. I’m not sure I ever did.”

It’s a slightly absurd conversation to have, though there’s nothing particularly absurd or uncomfortable with Karen’s presence in her life. They’ve got a lot to talk about, a lot to share. La Shawn smiles back at her.

“I’m not sure it makes anything easier, but thank you for saying it.”

“No problem,” Karen puts down her glass of water and looks out over the living room. “So, are you going to take a walk of freedom while I’m still around?”

La Shawn inhales, almost too eager to even imagine the opportunity to go for a walk, both hands free and her thoughts all to herself.

“The twins need to be fed,” she protests weekly, for good measure.

“I know.”

“And I think Hayden will wake up pretty much… now-”

Karen shakes her head. “You. Outside. Now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” La Shawn retorts, getting to her feet within a second.

The neighbourhood is in full bloom outside, the air soft and warm and light in her lungs. She walks for a long while along the streets of this small town she never truly has cared for but that is a big part of her life.

River’s Bend, like a chain around her heart, she thinks to herself as she passes the hospital and proceeds further down the road to the docks, the more crowded spots full of new apartments and entertainment.

Maybe she belongs here. Maybe she doesn’t. But it has become home, regardless.

—-

* I love Karen and the fact that she rolled a want to be friends with La Shawn immediately after the funeral for Noah made me decide on a friendship path for these two.

* La Shawns life is depressing to play. EVERY minute of it is spent with the kids, to the point where she’s exhausted, smelly, hungry and bored. She’s not even rolling family related wants at the moment, which is sort of sad for a family sim. All she wants is to read a book or watch a movie.

* Title from this chapter’s soundtrack: ‘Hometown glory’ by Adele