fact. And almost twenty years later, driving to his parents’ house, he tried to convince himself that not telling her about his weakness and terrible mistakes was a gesture akin to love. He told himself this while attempting to ignore the rotten stench floating up from his guts.
“Where doggy?” asked Finn.
“He didn’t come with us, Finny,” said James. Ana opened her eyes, saw a mall before her, closed them again, her headache rotating.
And then it began. Finn started to snarl, and the snarl begat a kind of bark that was actually a cry, a sob, a wracking of body, a flailing of legs, small, strong feet pounding into James’s back as he drove.
“Dogggyyyyy!” he wailed through a wall of sobs and screams.
“Finn, don’t kick me! I’m driving!”
A huge truck went by James’s window, too fast, too close. He swerved, and bodies thrust forward and back.
“James!” said Ana, clutching her side.
“Doggyyyy! Want him! Want him! Want him!”
Ana’s stomach bounced up and down. She put one hand over her belly, one on the top of her head, holding both in place.
“Doggyyyy!”
“Make him stop,” whispered Ana.
“What?”
“Make him stop!”
“Doggyyyy!”
“What can I do?” shouted James.
“Just do your thing! Just do it!” A bile rose in her throat; she choked it back.
“Finny! Just stop it. We’ll get the dog later,” shouted James.
Finn seemed to regard the words as a challenge, ramping up the volume, the kicking. James felt Finn’s snot and spit flying in droplets through the car.
James took the next exit, following the signs to Tim Horton’s.
“Are you coming?” he asked Ana from the back seat, unstrapping the flailing body. She nodded, trying to unlock the door.
“Drug store,” she said, feeling her throat, parched and burning.
“Maybe you could fucking help me,” he said, but Ana didn’t hear him.
They split off from one another, then, Ana retreating to the relative calm of the small pharmacy in the strip mall. She bought a box of cold medicine, throat lozenges, a large bottle of water.
While she thumbed through a magazine, the pictures shifting and sliding in front of her eyes, James guided Finn into the handicapped stall at Tim Horton’s. There was no hook for Sarah’s diaper bag, a pink and yellow striped tote with the words “Yummy Mummy” stitched along one side. James placed it far from the sticky floor surrounding the toilet.
Finn was calmer. He stood, puffy and shellacked with snot, pulling at the toilet paper roll, pointing at random, vaguely disgusting objects that James had never noticed existed in a bathroom stall. “What’s that?”
“A wad of toilet paper someone stuffed in the lock.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s called graffiti.”
“What’s that?”
“It says: ‘Blow me.’ ”
“Ha!” Finn laughed.
Without a changing table, James was reduced to pulling off Finn’s Pull-Up as he stood, which meant shoes had to come off, which in turn meant he was standing in his stocking feet in the sticky circle. James located the wipes, which had been left open, and had become dry and useless.
“Wait here.” At the sink, James tried to dampen a wipe with water. It began to disintegrate in his hand, forming small globules.
A man entered the bathroom and nodded, began peeing in the urinal.
“What’s that?” cried Finn from the bathroom at the sound of the urine rushing with the force of a shaken beer can being dumped down a sink.
“It’s someone—” James hesitated. The man’s girth had not escaped him, nor the fact that he was wearing a sleeveless jean jacket with no shirt underneath. The word “peeing,” which sat on the edge of James’s tongue, didn’t seem adequate to the task, suddenly.
“—going—” he considered the word “urinating.”
“Tinkle?” shouted Finn, who had flung open the door of the stall, and stood naked below the waist, his pants around his ankles, Spiderman socks pulled up around his calves. He glanced at the man. “Giant go tinkle?”
“Yes,” said James, entering the stall quickly and shutting the door. He wiped the boy with a paper towel.
“Do you want to try to pee in the toilet? We should get moving on this issue.”
Finn looked alarmed.
“Toilet?”
“Don’t the big kids at daycare use the potty? Big kids go peepee in the toilet?”
James was speaking in a tiny voice, trying not to be heard by the giant who washed his hands at the sink, though James realized the giant could easily peer over the stall if he were so inclined.
James whispered again: “Let’s go pee in the toilet. Maybe later we can buy you some underwear.”
“Spiderman underwear?” Finn had seen this in the mall with James only a few