part. Now I realized that the part was all I had.
I was nobody’s wife or daughter or mother. And now I wasn’t even Calpurnia. What happens after the thing you based your life and identity on gets taken away? What do you do? Where do you go?
The Okefenokee Swamp? Key West?
I picked up a pebble from the path, plopped it into the lake, and watched the ripples spread. I thought about tossing french fries off the Daytona Pier and watching seagulls swoop down to gobble them in mid-air, and remembered that some problems are just too big to run from.
Once I read an article that said you have to clear your mind of questions to make room for answers, so I walked around the lake twice, three miles in total, trying to keep my brain as blank as possible, and got nothing for my trouble but a blister where the seam of my shoe rubbed my little toe. So much for enlightenment. Rounding a corner, I heard happy shrieks and squeals.
I go through phases when it comes to playgrounds. There have been seasons when I haunted them on a regular basis, admiring the sturdy, bandy-legged toddlers busily digging in the sandbox and the pink-cheeked infants slumbering in strollers, and dreamed of the day when I’d have one of my own. And there have been other seasons when I’ve avoided playgrounds at all costs, depressed because it felt like the dream was dead.
But with the blister getting worse and the pain becoming so intense that I was limping, I didn’t have a choice. I had to sit down, and the only place to sit was at the playground, on the empty end of a bench that was occupied by a twenty-something woman with messy blond curls, dark circles under her eyes, and an infant in her arms. I took a seat and bent down to slip off my shoe. The woman with the baby, who must have been watching, gasped and sucked air in through her teeth when I did, as if she could tell how painful it was just by looking. It did hurt, a lot.
“Ow,” she said, wincing at the sight of blood. “Hang on a second, I’m sure I’ve got a Band-Aid in here somewhere.”
I told her it was okay, that I’d be fine, but she paid no attention and plopped the baby, who was sound asleep, down in the bed of a big stroller that had seen better days, then started digging through a diaper bag, pulling out pacifiers, nursing pads, bags filled with cereal, plastic action figures, miniature boxes of raisins, and finally a bandage from its depths.
“Here we go,” she said, handing it over to me. “I hope you don’t mind Minions. My twins are crazy about them.”
“Thanks,” I said, then pulled off the backing and wrapped the bandage around my ravaged toe. Blood seeped out the side, making the cheery yellow Minions look ruthless and diabolical. “You’ve got twins?” I asked. “And a baby?”
“Boys,” she said, bobbing her head. “Marcus and Miles are five, Geoffrey is four, and Walt will be three next month.” She tilted her chin toward the slide and waved to a towheaded toddler who was laboriously climbing the ladder. “And this is Julia,” she said, reaching down into the stroller and scooping the sleeping infant up in her arms.
My jaw dropped. “You have five children?”
Five? How was that possible? In spite of the dark circles under her eyes, which she clearly had earned, she didn’t look to be more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, twenty-six at the most.
“Yeah,” she said wearily. “I can use my husband’s toothbrush and get pregnant. But we really wanted a girl. Now we’ve got one. Finally.” She smiled down at the baby, whose soft snoring made a little bubble of snot in her nostril inflate and deflate with every breath.
“I don’t know what I’d have done if we’d had another boy,” she said, looking up at me with earnest eyes. “Boys are holy terrors. Well, at least mine are.”
At that moment, as if to prove her point the twins—Marcus and Miles—came hurtling across the playground, leaping over a seesaw, emitting a war cry, like a band of savage, marauding Celts storming the castle, heading straight for our bench. The surprise attack came out of nowhere, a true “shock and awe” operation. Before we knew what was happening, the two little terrors grabbed the handle of the battered stroller and ran it off in the