couple of starlings were bathing themselves in the brown puddles underneath the seesaw.
“Lookmama thebirdis takingabath!” said Mikas, pointing enthusiastically. Lately, he had begun to talk rapidly and almost incessantly, but not yet very clearly. It wasn’t always easy to understand what he was saying.
“Yes. I suppose he wants to be nice and clean. Do you think he knows it’s Sunday tomorrow?”
She had hoped that there might be a child or two in the playground, but this Saturday they were alone, which was usually the case. She gave Mikas his truck and his little red plastic bucket and shovel. He still loved the sandbox and would play for hours, laying out ambitious projects involving moats and roads, twigs standing in for trees, or possibly fortifications. She sat on the edge of the box, closing her eyes for a minute.
She was so tired.
A shower of wet sand caught her in the face. She opened her eyes.
“Mikas!”
He had done it on purpose. She could see the suppressed laughter in his face. His eyes were alight.
“Mikas, don’t do that!”
He pushed the tip of his shovel into the sand and twitched it, so that another volley of sand hit her square in the chest. She felt some of it trickle down inside her blouse.
“Mikas!”
He could no longer hold back his giggle. It bubbled out of him, contagious and irresistible. She leaped up.
“I’ll get you for this!”
He screamed with delight and took off at his best three-year-old speed. She slowed her steps a bit to let him get a head start, then went after him, catching him and swinging him up in the air, then into a tight embrace. At first he wriggled a little, then he threw his arms around her neck, and burrowed his head under her chin. His light, fair hair smelled of shampoo and boy. She kissed the top of his head, loudly and smackingly, making him squirm and giggle again.
“Mamadon’t!”
Only later, after they had settled by the sandbox again and she had poured herself the first cup of coffee, did the tiredness return. She held the plastic cup to her face and sniffed as though it were cocaine. But this was not a tiredness that coffee could cure.
Would it always be like this? she thought. Just me and Mikas. Alone in the world. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Or was it?
Suddenly Mikas jumped up and ran to the fence. A woman was standing there, a tall young woman in a pale summer coat, with a flowery scarf around her head as though she were on her way to Mass. Mikas was heading for her with determination. Was it one of the kindergarten teachers? No, she didn’t think so. Sigita got hesitantly to her feet.
Then she saw that the woman had something in her hand. The shiny wrapper glittered in the sunshine, and Mikas had hauled himself halfway up the fence with eagerness and desire. Chocolate.
Sigita was taken aback by the heat of her anger. In ten or twelve very long paces, she was at the fence herself. She grabbed Mikas a little too harshly, and he gave her an offended look. He already had chocolate smears on his face.
“What are you giving him!”
The unfamiliar woman looked at her in surprise.
“It’s just a little chocolate. . . .”
She had a slight accent, Russian, perhaps, and this did not lessen Sigita’s rancor.
“My son is not allowed to take candy from strangers,” she said.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . he’s such a sweet boy.”
“Was it you yesterday? And the other day, before that?” There had been traces of chocolate on Mikas’s jersey, and Sigita had had a nasty argument with the staff about it. They had steadfastly denied giving the children any sweets. Once a month, that was the agreed policy, and they wouldn’t dream of diverging from it, they had said. Now it appeared it was true.
“I pass by here quite often. I live over there,” said the woman, indicating one of the concrete apartment blocks surrounding the playground. “I bring the children sweets all the time.”
“Why?”
The woman in the pale coat looked at Mikas for a long moment. She seemed nervous now, as though she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
“I don’t have any of my own,” she finally said.
A pang of sympathy caught Sigita amidst her anger.
“That’ll come soon enough,” she heard herself say. “You’re still young.”
The woman shook her head.
“Thirty-six,” she said, as though the figure itself were a tragedy.
It wasn’t until now that