Sugar, Baby by Avitus B. Carle

I tell her I’m addicted to Sugar Babies. Not really, but that’s all my daughter can handle. She doesn’t ask what addicted means. Hell, she probably already knows. One time, she found an old spoon in my purse. I told her mommy likes to collect old spoons. Next thing I know, she’s collecting spoons too. Plastic spoons that change color in water. Teaspoons she bends into rings. Spoons she leaves on the windowsill—mouth down—to cook just like you, she says. I don’t know what to say, don’t know when she saw me. I thought I was being careful. I tell her to stop collecting spoons and, of course, she asks me why. ‘Cause it’s bad, I say, so she starts looking for something else to do. Kids have an eye for things, especially when it comes to keepin’ track of what their parents are doing. I wish I’d known that before the spoons. Definitely before the tinfoil. She makes a dog out of the tinfoil squares I hide in a tea box. Piglets from the squares she finds in plastic butter containers. Tinfoil birds takeoff from her piggy bank. In her piggy bank. This haunts me for weeks and I take a few Sugar Babies after I make sure she’s sleeping. I tell myself, tomorrow, I’ll tell her. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Today. I sit her on my knee, tell her about Sugar Babies. How they’re not so good for me, that mommy shouldn’t have them anymore. I tell her I’m trying to stop. That I want today to be a good day. What’s a bad day, she says, while playing connect the dots on the insides of my forearms. Those are bad days, I say, when mommy can’t resist Sugar Babies. And I tell her it starts with one spoon. Starts with tinfoil and a need for more sugar, more of the soft chew filled with milk caramel, more than I can handle. Except that part’s not true. I don’t know if any of that’s true. I don’t know a lot because of these Sugar Babies I still have hidden behind the bottles of hot sauce her daddy loved. Even keep some tucked behind the box holding her daddy’s ashes. The Sugar Babies took him, but I don’t tell her that, just that I’m trying to make today a good day. Some days are just bad, she says, leaning into me. I tell her, yes, some days are, and her head cuddles into my bones and, maybe, I hear my skin start to tear. And though I told her that some days are bad, what I keep to myself is how few I have left. ◆