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Show 13 putting the kids to bed-Sharon started to throw this in her face. But at the last moment, she bit off her words. She phoned Robbie. She was so heated up from her argument with Katie, before she thought about it she found herself pleading with him to go in on an apartment with her. She could pay part of the rent now, help out on the groceries. It would be perfect, the two of them together. She waited a moment. He did not say anything. Mom and Dad would have wanted it that way, she said. Damn! she did not want to have to say that. To use them as leverage against him. But she was desperate: it was her final advantage, her last trump, the one thing, she thought, that would convince him. He refused. She would just have to work out things where she was, he said. Without hesitating, without giving her a chance to say anything further, he hung up. So it was final. He had failed her. The only helping hands she had were those at the end of her own wrists. That was what her dad used to say. The only helping hands you can count on are those at the end of your own wrists. Well, she had learned it at an early age. She had an advantage that way. She knew now the way the world was put together, the way the world worked. She would adjust to that. She would learn to use it to her own advantage. The rest of that winter she was home every evening, doing the housework after supper, and then putting the kids to bed. It was the winter which she was to remember the rest of her life, that time when she became an adult, when she began to think of herself as an adult. |