Lost and Wanted(68)

“It’s fine,” Terrence said. “We invited him.” He’d been sitting cross-legged with the children, but now he jumped up lightly and went to check something on the stove.

    “Grandpa just wanted to read to me.” Jack experimented with a sort of adolescent tone. “It was so boring.”

“You love reading.”

“Their food is terrible.”

“I like the green goddess dressing,” Simmi put in.

Jack made a face.

“Well, we’re getting pizza tonight,” I told him. I looked at Terrence. “If you want—”

“We’re already cooking. Vegan chili—you’re welcome to join us.”

“I love vegan chili!”

“Do you even know what vegan is?” I asked Jack.

“Chili from the planet Vega,” Terrence said. “Taste it if you dare.”

Vega is an AOV main sequence star in the constellation Lyra, but it seemed pedantic to point that out.

“I think we should give you guys a little peace. It sounds like Jack was down here all the time.”

“He’s cool,” Terrence said.

Jack looked at Terrence as if he’d just offered a trip to Disney World, or maybe as if Terrence were Disney World. Then he turned to me: “See? They love me.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“Still,” I said. “We’re going to have to say goodbye. Just temporarily.”

“After this game.”

“Your grandparents are leaving in a half hour,” I told him. “They want to see you before they go.”

“That doesn’t take a half hour.”

“Jack!”

I’d been back for five minutes, and I was already scolding him.

“We’ll finish later, little man,” Terrence said.

Because Terrence had insisted, Jack followed me out of the apartment in a disgruntled way. On the carpeted stairs in between the two apartments, he started to cry.

“You never let me do anything fun. We always have to leave everything early, because of your stupid work!”

This was fairly standard, as a response to an out-of-town trip, and I wouldn’t have minded if my parents and Terrence hadn’t been within earshot. When I opened the door to our apartment, they were standing just behind it, fully dressed in their outerwear and peering at a printout of their reservation. They pretended not to notice Jack’s expression.

    “It says we arrive in Terminal Five,” my father said. “But we left from Three.”

“Why would that make a difference?”

“Five is under construction.”

“Maybe it’s only the departures that are under construction?”

“We’ll need to ask while we’re still on the ground,” my father said. “We should have left earlier.”

“It’ll be fine,” my mother said. Then she turned to Jack: “What was the score this time?”

“Her dad had one thirty-two and we had seventy-six. But then we had to stop.”

“He doesn’t let you win,” my father said approvingly.

“Come here and give me a hug,” my mother said. “How much does Grandma love you?”

“So much,” Jack mumbled into her coat.

My father looked back at the printout and shook his head. “They charge you three hundred dollars to change the tickets now—even though we explained the situation.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll pay for it.”

My father shrugged. “It’s not your fault. Nothing is predictable anymore.”

My mother raised her eyebrows at me, and mouthed: “Catastrophic thinking.”

My father hugged Jack the way he hugged everyone, as if he had made a careful study of the gesture and was attempting to reproduce it.

“Planning anything is ludicrous,” he said.





9.


We ended up back downstairs for dinner. Jack wanted to help with the chili, but Simmi declined, and so she and I were left in the living room together.

Simmi looked at me for a moment, then casually extended one leg up above her head, cupping the arch of her foot in her hand.

“Wow.”

“That’s just a warm-up,” she said. “I go to a gym here now.”

“That’s good.”

“She can do everything!” Jack called from the kitchen. “Show her the back walkover.”

A certain excitement manifested itself under Simmi’s guarded expression.

“I’d love to see.”

“We have to go in there,” she said.

She took me to the back bedroom, the larger of the two, and it was immediately clear where Terrence had focused his decorating energy. Most of the floor was covered with a rainbow-colored sectional mat, and there was a small trampoline in one corner. Above her bed, he had drilled a toggle bolt into the joist, from which was suspended a net canopy edged with pink ribbon. Synthetic net is made of carbon fiber; the mat was probably vinyl and polyethylene foam. I often think about the oceanic gyres where so many of these materials will remain, long after all of us are gone.

“Could you stand against the wall?” Simmi asked politely. “I don’t want to kick you.”