I'm Fine and Neither Are You(49)

My mind quickly turned to another six-year-old who would never again visit the toy store with her mother. Cecily’s list of nevers would be excruciatingly long, and my being there for her simply could not fix that.

“This?” Miles was holding up an action figure in front of my face.

I examined it. “It’s twenty dollars, which is five too many. And you said you were scared of that guy.”

“Yeah,” he said, placing it back on the shelf.

“This?” he said two minutes later, holding up a bright-orange pistol.

“Sorry, you know the rule. No guns.”

He scowled but put the gun back.

He returned with a zombie figurine that was guaranteed to have him peeing the bed until he was seventeen. I winced and shook my head. Who had decided to put such a thing in a children’s store? And why had I agreed to come here again?

I was sure our outing was seconds from going south when Miles ran down the aisle to where I was standing. He was clutching a dinosaur, which he presented to me. If the packaging was to be believed, four batteries would transform the plastic beast into a roaring relic.

“I want it but it’s sixteen dollars,” Miles said mournfully.

“It’s fine.”

“You’ll buy it?”

I nodded. He dropped the dinosaur on the floor and threw his arms around me. “I love you, Mama.”

I squeezed him back. Sixteen dollars for him to call me Mama like he had when he was a toddler? A steal.

When we got home, Stevie was sitting in the entryway, still dressed in her leotard and tights. Her arms were crossed and she was scowling. He held out his dinosaur toward her, which she regarded with disdain. “You know that’s actually made of real dinosaurs.”

“No, it’s not,” I said quickly.

Miles was regarding her quizzically. “Mommy?” he said.

“It is ,” Stevie insisted, still planted in the center of the floor. “It’s plastic, right?”

I nodded as we stepped around her.

“Then it is too made of dinosaurs. Because plastic is made of petroleum, and petroleum is made of fossils. And old dinosaur bones are fossils,” she said.

I stared at her with surprise. “How did you know that?”

A faint smile appeared on her lips. “I found a book about the environment at camp the other day.”

“Cool,” said Miles.

Though she had been attempting to goad Miles, she was just as pleased that she had astonished him instead. “Do you want to go play?” she asked. “I can find your old stuffed dinosaur, and we can make them a family.”

“Okay, but you can’t touch my new toy.”

Stevie shrugged. “Fine.”

They ran upstairs. I headed to the dining room, where Sanjay was at the table, tapping away on his laptop.

“Mission accomplished,” I announced.

He looked up. “Any meltdowns?”

“Not a single one. More astoundingly, he and Stevie went off to play together. How’s the book proposal going?”

“It’s going well,” he said. He stood from the table. “But I’m done for now. How about I pour us some wine and we go sit on the deck?”

“It’s only four o’clock,” I said.

“It’s Saturday, we have nowhere to be for the rest of the day, and our children are playing quietly. This is the parenting equivalent of a triple rainbow.”

Was this his way of trying to make up for our argument about his job search? I decided I didn’t want to know. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

It was nearly ninety degrees outside, and the glass of pale-pink wine Sanjay handed me was beaded with condensation. “When did you go wine shopping? And how did you know I was secretly craving rosé?” I asked.

He smiled. “I know what you like.”

Did he? “Thank you,” I said.

“Thank you ,” he said, clinking my glass against his. “I very much enjoyed not making the trek to the toy store.”

I took a sip of my wine. It was dry and delicious and definitely not the cheap stuff we normally bought. “This is fantastic,” I said to Sanjay. “Did you decide to raid our 401(k)? And the last time I checked, you weren’t even a rosé fan.”

“I got paid for a story yesterday and thought it would be nice to get a decent bottle of wine to celebrate.”

“Which one?”

“The summer music roundup for the Free Press .”

“That’s great,” I said, careful to make sure my voice conveyed enthusiasm.

He sniffed his glass. “Turns out I like rosé just fine when it doesn’t come in a box.”

I laughed and leaned back in my chair, which pitched precariously. Our deck was not level and would probably fall right off the house in another year or two. Before me, the backyard looked like a small swath of the Sahara. I had given up the idea of landscaping after one of our neighbors had mentioned how much he had spent resodding. Still, the dead grass gave me a pang. It seemed like further confirmation I would never have an emerald-green carpet my children ran barefoot on. I would not grow peonies or plant a vegetable garden where the tattered trampoline currently stood. That yard indicated my life would be just as it was for a very long time—and that was only if I had the good fortune of things not getting worse.