This Is How It Always Is(38)

Some playdates went less well. Rosie and Penn kept a no-fly list of kids with whom Poppy could not play again. One playdate ended when Poppy and the other little girl were playing princesses, and the dad made a dirty joke about drag queens. That family went on the list. One mom peppered Rosie with questions every time they ran into each other on the playground after school as to the process of physically turning Claude into Poppy, which Penn wanted to excuse on the grounds that she was showing interest but which Rosie saw for what it was: impudent nosiness. Another family went on the list when Penn went to pick Poppy up and the mom and dad tag-teamed him to explain, politely, that God did not make mistakes, and since God had given Poppy a penis, he and Rosie were interfering with God’s plan. “And that’s … bad?” Penn guessed. He also guessed that if that family kept their own list, his name had just gone on it.

Rosie tried not to let any of it get to her. She had too much to do without worrying about her kid’s friends’ parents’ ignorance. Her job wasn’t to educate them. Her job was just to raise her kid, all her kids. And work to feed them all. As she and Penn kept telling Poppy, you don’t have to like everyone. Find who’s fun and smart and safe, and stick with them.

Which approach worked just fine until Nicky Calcutti. Nicky was Claude’s one friend from before, and Nicky seemed a little perplexed, a little put off, by the change. He was a quiet kid, which was probably what Claude had liked about him. He was unassuming. He didn’t wrestle or chase. He didn’t always have to have his way loudly. Mostly, the boys played next to each other, like toddlers, and that was fine with both of them. He’d been over once, since, to play with Poppy and had murmured to Rigel, “I never had a playdate with a girl before,” to which Rigel had replied, “Oh it’s great. Their rooms smell way better.” But Nicky did not seem mollified.

“Maybe he’s taking this personally,” Penn guessed.

“Like Claude becoming Poppy is a failure of Nicky’s manhood?” said Rosie.

“Something like that.”

“He’s five.”

Five he may have been, but five turned out not to be too young to be offended or freaked out. Five turned out not to be too young for any number of sins. Rosie and Penn knew Nicky’s mom. After Claude’s announcement, she’d emailed Rosie to say she hoped the boys would still be friends. She asked if she could do anything to help. She promised peppermint ice cream—Claude’s favorite and Poppy’s as well—if Poppy would come over to play. Rosie dropped him off, stood in the door and chatted idly for a few minutes with Cindy Calcutti, and was in the art store buying supplies for a project Orion was doing about bats when her phone rang. Poppy was crying too hard to tell her what was wrong. Rosie was in her car and halfway to Nicky’s already before he even managed a wobbly, “Mom? Would you come get me?”

Cindy Calcutti and Nick Calcutti Sr. were separated. Rosie gathered this was a no-way-in-hell-are-we-getting-back-together separation rather than the let’s-take-some-space-and-work-it-out kind but, having a much better grasp than other people on what was and wasn’t her business, declined to pry. She knew that Cindy was jockeying for full custody by sharing irreproachably during this trial period. If it was Nick’s day with his son, Cindy did not say Nicky has a playdate. Cindy went and got a manicure and let her erstwhile husband supervise.

Rosie was close, but Penn was closer, so she called him from the car and sent him over. He was home with the boys, and though Roo and Ben were probably old enough, at twelve and thirteen, to babysit other people’s brothers, babysitting their own raised an entirely different set of issues. Penn piled them all into the van and pulled up at the Calcuttis’ mere moments before Rosie did. She had not, apparently, been obeying posted speed limits. Or stoplights.

Poppy opened the door before they made it up the walk and ran, sobbing and full-tilt, toward them all. He’d disappeared within a circle of brothers before Nick Sr. made it to the front door. He was much larger than Penn, whose only regret was that he could not therefore meet the man quite eye to eye.

“What on earth happened?” Rosie asked Nick, his son nowhere in evidence, hers having absorbed completely the other child who could answer that question.

“Your kid’s a faggot, that’s what happened,” said Nick Calcutti Sr.

Rosie turned on her heels and started back down the walk. She simply did not need to have this conversation with this man. He had managed, in one short sentence, to tell her everything she needed to know. But when she got back to Poppy and took him in her arms, he whispered, “He has a gun,” and then she could not in good conscience leave Nicky there.

“Everyone in the car,” she said, and turned to face down Nick Calcutti Sr. with her husband.

Nicky peeked out from behind his father’s legs. “Daddy says I’m not allowed to play with faggots, Mrs. Walsh. And I don’t want to anyway.”

Nick spit between his teeth. “What you do with your kid is your own damn business, but it’s disgusting, and you better keep it far away from my son. Seems to me what you’re doing is child abuse, and you should go to jail, but what do I know? Don’t make no difference to me as long as you keep far away from Nicky. See, this is what I keep telling Cindy. She needs a man around the house to prevent bullshit like this from going down.”

“Why does Poppy think you have a gun?” said Penn.