saris, burkas, baseball caps backwards on the heads of brown boys, their underwear waistbands exposed. A celebration of the interstice of commerce and immigration. Or something like that.
James headed toward the most expensive corner of the mall, a children’s store with fall displays: kids in rainboots with animal snouts on the toes; umbrellas resembling frogs. He grabbed a basket. After staring at the labels for several minutes, he realized that the child’s age determined the size. Finn was two and a half, so he piled size threes in the basket. James thought, Wouldn’t it be great if the size were still the age? I’m forty-two, give me the forty-twos please.
He selected carefully: nothing with slogans, nothing overly sporty. But it was difficult to find anything without baseballs or soccer balls or team numbers emblazoned across the chest. He thought of Sarah, and her pride over second-hand bargains. What would she make of this? James found a pair of runners hipper than the ones Finn had been given by the social worker. Blue Adidas with a seventies retro stripe, but tiny.
The clerk ringing through his purchases was blowsy, overly effusive.
“These are sooooo cute,” she said, folding a pair of jeans. “Totally popular for fall.”
The credit card had his name on it, but it was Ana’s account; would this piece of information have made the saleswoman less solicitous?
Only when she dropped Finn’s new shoes into the bag did James realize that if you swapped his laces for Velcro straps, he was wearing exactly the same pair.
The door opened quickly, lightly, which surprised Ana. She had expected the creaking of Al Capone’s vaults to match her sense of invasion. She drew the scattering of mail and flyers to her body.
Straightening, a grim old lady smell washed over her, spiked by something sour, foul. Ana put down her briefcase and an empty suitcase on wheels. She made two tidy stacks of mail – urgent and not – and took off her heels. She moved quickly, glancing at the clutter of toys in the living room, the clothes and shoes strewn. That giant bag of cat food was still there, resting against the wall. A neighbour had apparently taken the cat, informing James when he came by that the cat basically lived at her house anyway. Ana barely remembered it: black, maybe, and fat. Looking at the cat food, she regretted that she had never bothered to learn its name. She would take the bag to the neighbour later.
The kitchen was Pompeii: plates of half-eaten food, a booster chair covered in Cheerios and chunks of browned banana. She tracked down the smell to old milk gone solid in a blue plastic cup covered in cartoon bees, sitting on a counter.
Ana was filled by a rush of conquering energy. She marched into Sarah and Marcus’s room, pulling open drawers until she found jeans, a T-shirt, both too big, but clean and folded tidily, which surprised her. Ana placed her skirt and blouse on hangers that she put over the doorknob, careful not to let her clothes touch the ground, which was covered in a thin layer of dust. Grey balls of fluff made space for her as Ana moved around the room in Sarah’s clothes.
She rolled on a pair of Marcus’s sweat socks. In this uniform, she set to it, opening windows, gathering dirty laundry and tossing toys into wicker baskets.
And she worked, yellow gloves filling garbage bags, scrubbing soldered food from plates, keeping the kitchen sink filled to the rim with soapy bubbles. Draining the fat swirls and food chunks and refilling, over and over.
After a couple of hours, Ana noticed the silence, the noise of her breathing. She hit play on the stereo (and dusted it, too). A familiar CD, a lament; spare guitar, the kind of music James used to play for Ana, tears in his eyes: “Hear this part? It really starts here …”
The music carried up to Finn’s little room, which was like wandering into Sarah’s force field, like hearing her calling: This is how much I love him. The white curtains were covered with tiny embroidered trains. Red bunnies repeated on his bedspread, and the throw rug was a scurry of cuddly bugs. All these crowds of miniatures, thought Ana, stripping the bed, throwing scattered toys into a toy box. She should take some toys home, too.
She looked through a stack of books: Tell the Time With Pooh, Olivia Saves the Circus, Scaredy Squirrel. Which ones were right for Finn?