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“Just put him in regular underpants,” Kit’s mother would say. “If he messes them up, he’ll get uncomfortable in a hurry.”
“He doesn’t seem to have a problem with walking around in a poopie pull-up,” Kit pointed out every time. “How much difference will it make if it’s underpants instead? It would just make more work for me.”
But Kit’s mother was never wrong, even when she was patently incorrect. She just clicked her tongue against her teeth, shook her head knowingly and said, “You coddle that child too much.”
It wasn’t a surprising sentiment from her mother, she realized, considering the fact that Kit had done more to raise her two younger sisters than her working mom had, but it still made her feel bad.
“Got it!” Johnny called in a singsong voice. Kit hadn’t even realized he’d left the room, but he was walking back in with the pale blue princess dunce cap—she made a mental note to find out what the real name for it was before printing the column— perched on his head at a rakish angle. He dragged the satiny dress—made entirely with a tank dress from Target and cheap, shiny polyester fabric ironed on with stitching tape—behind him. The glitter they’d stuck on with glue left a vaguely Disney-like trail behind him.
She had to hand it to him, he really was a good sport.
Kit went to him. “Put your arms up.” He did, and she slid the dress over his head. She had to admit it looked pretty good. Perhaps a little like a trailer-park prom dress, but that was what Halloween was supposed to look like. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Comfortable? Move around a little bit.”
He struck a superhero pose, then ran across the floor and back again, feet stomping hard on the wood floor. Thank goodness it was just the Finnegans living beneath them, since they were both all but deaf. When he got back he nodded his approval. “It’s good.”
“I wonder if it will hold together,” she said, tugging gently at the hem. She was alarmed to see that the stitching tape was starting to pull apart when there was a knock at the door. “Wait there,” she instructed Johnny, pressing the hem together before getting up. “Don’t move.”
He stood still and she admired the costume one more time, hoping she might be able to improvise a quick fix. Maybe a glue gun? She was so distracted by the thought that when she opened the door and saw her ex-husband, it took a moment to compute. Why wasn’t he at work?
“Rick.”
“Daddy!” Johnny cried from across the room.
“Hey, bud.”
Johnny ran to Rick, arms outspread, dress coming apart more with every step. He threw himself into Rick’s arms, distributing pale blue glitter all over Rick’s Grateful Dead T-shirt.
Rick looked at his son. “What’ve you got on?”
Johnny flashed his mother a look of dramatic disapproval. “A princess costume.”
Rick looked over Johnny’s shoulder at Kit. “The column again?”
Kit nodded.
“They really ought to pay you extra for doing that. Put some money aside for therapy.” Rick laughed.
“Very funny. You’re early.”
“I know, I know, but I borrowed a car from my neighbor and I have to get it back to her by six.” Rick was six years younger than Kit, and once upon a time she had been enamored by his long-haired starving-artist persona. Now she was just weary of it.
“What happened to your company car?” she asked, dreading the answer even before the words were out of her mouth. He didn’t lose his job. Please, God, don’t let him say he lost his job.
Rick clicked his tongue against his teeth and let out a long aah breath. “I’m just not a corporate drone.” He set Johnny down. “I gave it a try—and I really appreciate your helping me get me the job and all—but it just wasn’t me.” He was unfazed by the withering look she was giving him. “The good news is, I got a gig painting a mural on the side of that old brick building on Maryland Avenue and Dobrey Street.”
“Does it pay?”
He tipped a flattened hand from side to side. “But the exposure is great. The theme is Indonesian history.” He nodded, as if that would make Kit feel all better about her son’s father’s complete lack of financial prospects.
Kit just looked at him. “Indonesian history.”
“What’s that?” Johnny asked.
“Excellent question, my friend.” Rick ruffled Johnny’s hair. “We’ll look it up this weekend.”
“You have to look it up?” Kit repeated incredulously. “You got this job without even knowing anything about it?”
Rick just smiled and said to Johnny, “Change your clothes—we have to go.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back!”
When Johnny was gone, Rick looked at Kit with pity. “Rough week?”
“What?”
“You look like hell. And you’ve got that past-deadline-temper thing going. You work too much.”
She frowned. “I have to. I’m trying to buy a house for our son. And it will be a lot easier if you keep up your support payments, such as they are.”
He waved her concerns away. “Don’t worry about it.”
It was good advice, because worrying about Rick’s lack of prospects had never made one whit of difference anyway. “So. Got big plans for the weekend? Besides studying Indonesian history, I mean.”
“Thought I might take him into the city to see the Modigliani exhibit at MOMA.”
“That would be good.” Better Rick than Kit, she figured. It wouldn’t hurt Johnny to be exposed to modern art, and God knew Kit didn’t want to do it. Modigliani gave her a headache. She didn’t like taking liberties with proportion. She was more of a Vermeer girl herself.
It wasn’t a bad metaphor for her life with Rick.
“Then again, we might stay in and watch Time Bandits.”
“Again?”
“Hey, it’s a classic.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. She’d known what she was getting into when she’d married him, and now, when he was consistently what she expected, she could hardly call foul on him for it. At least he loved his son and took good care of him when it was his weekend.
Johnny pounded back in the room. The dress was gone and he was in a Batman shirt—inside out—and shorts. He hauled his overstuffed Buzz Lightyear suitcase across the floor noisily. Buzz himself, the beat-up three-pound toy that could double as a weapon in the event of a burglary, was sticking out of the top.
“Ready to go, Buzz?” Rick asked, reminding Kit why she had loved him once. He was really good with Johnny, there was no denying it.
“Yup, he’s ready.” Johnny pointed to the obvious projection from his bag.
Kit knelt by the boy and gave him a tight hug. “You have a good time with Daddy, okay?”
“Okay, Mommy.”
She drew back and touched his nose. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too. ’Bye!”
“’Bye, baby.” She stood up.
“Relax a little,” Rick said to her. “These sixty-hour weeks are too much. You need to just be sometimes, you know?”
And that, she realized all at once, was why she’d married him. That mellowness, that hippie-without-the-drugs peacefulness. That was why she’d married him.
And why the marriage had failed.
Because no matter how much she wanted to be that easygoing, mellow, pass-the-nachos person, she was always going to be the uh-oh woman.
Thank God Johnny had Rick around to balance that out.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I need to be employed.” She smiled. “But don’t worry about me—I’ve got the whole weekend to eat bonbons and listen to Frank Sinatra on the CD player.”
“Give it a try,” Rick said with a smile. “Couldn’t hurt.” He looked down at Johnny. “Let’s go. The car’s about to turn into a pumpkin.” He put his hand lightly on the back of Johnny’s blond head and guided him into the hallway.
For a moment she watched Johnny’s slight body walking away, his pipe-cleaner arm raised to hold his father’s hand, then stepped back into her apartment. The door closed with a light click behind her. She still heard their footsteps—Rick’s heavy plodding and the tap of Johnny’s run—disappear like music at the end of a song. When they were gone and she knew she was safely alone, she smiled. The weekend was hers. She didn’t have to make a single vegetable if she didn’t want to. In fact, she could eat Cap’n Crunch over the sink for two nights in a row if that’s what she wanted.
She had forty-eight hours to unwind the stress that had wound her up all week and she had to start right away.
She got the Cap’n Crunch out.
Chapter Two
“The thing is, I don’t think doctors actually give babies opium for teething anymore.” Kit leaned her elbows on her desk and listened to the old medical columnist’s patronizing response over the telephone line before responding, “I know it’s called paregoric, but it’s opium.” And four years ago she would have given her right arm to have some for her screaming baby, but still. Come on. It was a narcotic. “How about you just try describing more homemade remedies, like teething rings, freezing a sock, that kind of thing….” She listened on the line again. “A sock. Like, for your feet. You soak it in water, then freeze it and…” She sighed. “Never mind. Just go ahead and finish your column.”
She would edit it later.
Home Life magazine had been around for a hundred and twenty-five years, and Kit was willing to bet Orville Pippin had been writing his “Ask the Doctor” column for at least half that time. She would also bet his exploration of modern medicine stopped with whatever the Stenberg School of Medicine class of ’38 had taken away under their graduation caps.
Kit had only been the managing editor of the magazine for five years, but in that time she’d researched and written more of his columns than he himself had, thanks to all of the outdated advice he had a tendency to dole out. She had a hotline to her own pediatrician’s office to double-check just this kind of thing.
Opium.
Jeez.
“Hey, Kit!” Lucy, a young editorial assistant, barked from the hallway. “Phone, line two. Johnny’s babysitter again.”
Kit glanced at the clock. Two fifty-five. Damn. Five minutes ago it had been noon and even then she hadn’t had enough time to finish everything she had to do today. She closed her eyes and counted to five. If she didn’t pick up the phone, they couldn’t tell her to come pick him up early again. It wasn’t as if they’d put him out on the sidewalk.
She waited just a beat longer, then picked up the receiver. “This is Kit Macy.”
“Ms. Macy.” It was the director, Ellen Phillips. She always pronounced Ms. as if it contained twenty-two z’s. “We seem to have a problem.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, Johnny has been fighting with Kyle again.” Big surprise. It was like saying Churchill and Hitler had had another disagreement. “It seems both of them wanted to ride the fire engine, but Johnny refused to let Kyle have a turn.”
Kyle was a bully. Easily two years older than Johnny and at least twenty pounds heavier, the kid picked on Johnny every single day. One would have thought the facility administrator might have taken the older, bigger child to task, but she never did. Kyle’s parents were a whole lot richer than Kit, and if Mizzzzzzz Phillips had to alienate either boy’s parents, it was going to be Johnny’s every time.
And it was.
Kit took a short breath. “Ellen, look, can’t you please just separate them for the rest of the day?” She looked at the clock. Three o’clock. “It’s only another two hours or so, and I have a million things I have to get done.”
“I’m trying to do my job, too, Ms. Macy, but that’s difficult to do with these hellions creating chaos for me.”
Hellions. Man, she’d hissed it like a curse. “Well, maybe Kyle’s parents can pick him up this time.”
The phone line seemed to crackle with the chill of her response. “But you are in the building next door to ours. I would hate to ask Mr. Cherkins to come all the way downtown when you’re right here.”
Yes. Yes, she was right here. And that was the only reason she still had Johnny in the Petite Care Center. She was seriously thinking it wasn’t worth it.
If Johnny hadn’t been caught in the middle of this, Kit’s response would have been different, but she didn’t want to instigate an argument only to have Ellen take it out on the boy.
She looked at the clock on her desk. Three-oh-three. She sighed heavily. “I’ll be right there.”
“He wouldn’t let me ride.”
“I believe you.” Kit toted Johnny along the sidewalk toward the old building that had served as Home Life’s headquarters since 1948. “But I’ve told you before to avoid that kid. If he’s playing with something, you have to find something else to play with. If he’s not near you, he can’t fight with you.”
“But I was there first!” Johnny’s voice rang with the injustice of it. Obviously he’d had to explain this to Ellen, too, because his face crinkled the way it always did when he was truly frustrated.
“Then you should have walked away.” Kit heard her own advice and stopped. To hell with hurrying back to work. This was more important.
She knelt down in front of her son on the grungy sidewalk, holding his slight shoulders in her hands. “I take it back, Johnny. You shouldn’t have. You can’t walk away every time a bully tries to take something from you. You did the right thing. I’m glad you stood up for yourself.”
A dent formed in the perfectly smooth skin over his brow. “You are?” His blue eyes went dark with confusion. “But you just said—”
“I know, baby. But I was wrong. It’s easier to walk away from bullies sometimes, but it’s not always right.” She pulled him close for a hug, reveling in the soft, soapy smell of his skin and hair. She kissed the cottony-soft blond head and drew back. “Okay?”
“I don’t want to go back there.”
It broke her heart. He was there for her convenience, not because it was best for him. There was no pretending otherwise. She was best for him. And since she couldn’t be there all the time, she was going to have to find something else. Something that wasn’t Mizzzzzzz Phillips. “Remember how I told you I was going to try and put you in that Montessori school near our new house?”
“School?” His eyes lit up. He was enamored with the idea of school in the way only a person who had never been could be.
She nodded, but fear surged in her heart rather than the hope she saw in his. What if it didn’t work out? It didn’t bear thinking about. “Well, the application came in the mail today and I’m going to send it back to them this afternoon. Well, tomorrow afternoon.” After she was paid. The seventy-five-dollar application fee was nonnegotiable.
She knew because she’d tried to negotiate it.
“My new school,” he said with a small nod and the kind of smile that made her determine right there and then that she’d get him into the school even if she had to rob a bank to do it. “And Kyle Cherkins won’t be there, right?”
“No, he won’t.” She stood up again and took his little warm hand, leading him into the office. “Okay. Here we are. You know the drill. Sit quietly and color. No talking, no running, no interrupting me when I’m on the phone and no asking why Miss Pratt’s ankles are so wrinkly. Got it?”
“I know, I know.”
“Mommy! Mommy, Mommy.” Tap, tap, tap on her arm. “Look, Mommy.”
