real-estate deal. I walk through the site with the foreman. This is a pro bono one-week job to fix up the recreation center at Finch Park. It is not a big job and there is no structural damage to the building, which limits the danger to my men. When the girls were young they played soccer and softball on the town teams in this park. Kelly and I used to cheer them on from the sidelines. I was happy to do the favor for the town, and besides, it falls under the heading of what goes around comes around. I will get this favor back many times over from the local planning and zoning commissions. The next time I want to bend one of the absurdly outdated zoning laws or build an addition that is over scale, my renovation of the rec center will be remembered.
When I’m ready to leave it’s late afternoon. I walk across the field to my truck, skirting the edge of the town’s summer day camp. It is arts-and-crafts time. Little boys and girls are seated at picnic tables, heads bent over sheets of brightly colored construction paper. Fat crayons and what look like the cardboard centers of toilet paper rolls are piled in the middle of the tables. None of the children’s legs are long enough for their feet to touch the ground.
I sit in my truck and watch the children before I turn on the engine. It has been a long, odd day, and I am tired. I watch the children’s legs—some chubby, some rail-thin—swing above the grass. I think of Eddie’s children, and the replication of his smile and his eyes. I replay my meeting with them, and imagine that this time I know that the movement in the book bag is nothing more than the little boy’s favorite pet. I bend down and loop the lizard gently over my finger, which makes the girl smile and the little boy send out his infectious laugh. The three of us stand in a circle and the lizard seems happy to sit on my hand. The girl and boy talk to me about their day and about all of their worries and concerns. They don’t stop talking until the woman next door calls for them. Then we wave good-bye to one another, with the boy and girl continuing to wave as I walk toward my truck.
I watch the campers’ legs swing at the picnic tables as they draw shapes on the construction paper and then color them in. Children’s art turns reality upside down and sideways. It’s filled with purple grass and orange clouds and green people. I want to reimagine my daughters’ childhoods like I did the scene on Noreen Ballen’s front lawn. This time I won’t let Lila and Gracie grow up alone in their rooms and I won’t walk away when I see disturbing things through half-opened doors. This time I will go in and grab the punk boy by the arm and throw him out of my house. I will let Gracie know that she is worth more than what he saw in her.
But this rewrite is not as easy to believe in as my encounter with Noreen’s little boy and girl. I have failed in too many moments with Gracie and Lila over too many years. I gave them too much room, too much freedom. I think that probably we all had too much freedom, the two girls and Kelly and me. Maybe Catharine was right, and we should have gone to church every Sunday and eaten together as a family every night and listened for clues to the kind of women the girls were growing into while they said prayers before bed. But we didn’t do any of that and now there is no firm ground beneath our feet and it is too late to take stock in any new rules. You cannot discipline grown children. You cannot change the tone of a marriage after thirty years.
I TAKE my boots off and leave them by the back door so I don’t track in any dirt. I find Kelly in the living room, curled up on the couch with a tall stack of magazines on her lap. The central air is going full blast; the hairs on my arms stand up at the sudden change of temperature.
She looks up at me and says, “I made our reservation for Saturday night.”
“Our reservation?”
“At La Manga’s.”
Of course. I had forgotten. Well, not exactly