Home Alone in Pure Heart Valley

Chapter 16

It was very well into the beginning of the slumbering hours of the night, and most of the ground bus's passengers had drifted off to sleep in their seats. Apart from the driver, the only ones remaining awake were Mao Mao, Eugene, and Camille. Camille was quietly experimenting with some small-scale modifications to a spell while Mao Mao and Eugene could only sit quietly while observing the outside without any other emotion.

"I'm a bad parent," Eugene quietly said out of the blue. There was no more strong sorrowful emotion in his tone. He was mostly just tired and contemplative.

Mao Mao already got right to trying to refute the bespectacled bat's self-inflicted criticism. "No, you're not. You're beating yourself too hard about this."

Eugene turned away from the window to face the sheriff. "How you can tell me that. You freaked out just as hard when we all first realized our mistake."

Mao Mao sighed. "Well, if you wanna talk about bad parents, just consider me. Adorabat's lived with me long enough that I'm just as responsible for her. If anything, I should've been the one to keep track of her, being the sheriff and all."

Eugene hung his head down to look blankly at his lap. "But I'm her dad...literally, I mean. You can take care of her any way that works for you, but me? I'm supposed to be able to care for her no matter what. You're forgiven. I'm not."

Mao Mao turned his head to look at the opposite side of the bus, trying to pay no mind to the other passengers surrounding them. "You know, I'm only able to take care of Adorabat based on what I knew from my dad." When he sensed Eugene now looking at him after hearing that, he continued. "My father, he...at least made an effort to do things any father would. He taught, he trained, he showed off the way things are done...heh, if you could see just how great my sisters became because he raised them..."

Eugene didn't know what to say, so Mao Mao kept going. "As he paid attention to my sisters, they got better while I was always left to catch up since I got to learn pretty much nothing from him. Maybe for them, he was a good father, but when it came to me...I never quite knew what to think." He rested his chin on his hand with an elbow on the seat in front of him. "My whole life, I kept wondering and wondering just what was it about me that made my dad's love and care fall short, and later, about him that he would fall short of one last kid when he's attended to the other five."

Eugene kept quiet for a little longer but then took his chance to add to the conversation. "Well, I know I can't say I've been a star dad either. When I first met you and Badgerclops, I was asking for Adorabat after eight months, like you said. I already messed up by realizing she was missing from home after that long. It didn't matter that this time, I remembered her much sooner, but I still made that same mistake." He looked back out the window in contemplation. "Every time I look at her, I ask myself if Sonara, her mom, would be alright with the job I did. And then I might ask her that same question too, considering she was way better at that whole thing than I could ever try to be."

Neither the bat or cat could say any more, but stayed in their seats as they sank back into their tiredly guilty thoughts. Despite how tied they felt at that point, they were still too upset to get any actual sleep.

"Well, if it's any consolation," Camille interrupted in a surprisingly indoor voice, "your whole parenting and child-rearing challenges aren't any different from the work I do."

Mao Mao sighed with a growl. "Camille, just...I'm not in the mood. We're not in the mood for this."

Camille dismissed the sheriff's complaint with a flick of her wrist. "Oh let me have my turn to say my piece, won't you?" She looked back at the miniature cauldron in her lap. "In all my years serving as a magic technician for the king, there's one thing I always picked up from every new thing made by me and Honey." She carefully tipped the cauldron to pour a little bit of the formula into something resembling a test tube. "Every potion, every machine that smokes, explodes, or proves a dud, it's never stopped me. For every failure, I check what went wrong, what was missing, what I added too much of, and once I get the result I want, it's ready to be written down as a new recipe and instruction manual."

Mao Mao looked away with his arms crossed, not sure if he should entertain the chameleon's spiel. But Eugene thought such dialogue was better than the silent wordless mulling he and Mao Mao had been doing ever since they got on the road. "What's your point?"

Camille giggled as she sealed every little test tube she filled from her now-empty cauldron. "My point is, don't let every setback set you back. If something goes wrong, fix it or change it so the next time it's about to happen again, it doesn't." She secured all the tubes in a satchel she kept at her side. "Sure, you forgot this little girl once. Heck, I forget things all the time."

"And that's the truth," Mao Mao leaned in and whispered into Eugene's ear.

Camille continued, "But thanks to Honey, no amount of forgetting's made me fall behind in my work." She spared a glance at Honey herself, who was reclined back on her seat, asleep like the other passengers. "If you're really thinking of fixing things up with your little girl, just try out something, anything. Whatever you do might make it better or worse, but at least you'll know and you can stop running around without a head about how to get on with it." With that said, the chameleon lady put aside her things, leaned back on her seat, and shut her eyes. "Ah," she sighed in satisfaction, "Snoozes: always taking up so much time but just so rewarding." In under a minute, she was already snoring.

Eugene looked back at Mao Mao, whose eyes were opened extra wide in epiphanic surprise. The feeling was mutual with the teal bat. One exchanged look and they both appeared to understand how they could get through this ordeal, as though they no longer felt as lost as they used to.

For the rest of the drive to Pure Heart Valley, Mao Mao and Eugene slept soundly through the night.