that he would miss the opening credits of The Simpsons rerun that started at seven. He practically broke a sweat shoveling food into his mouth with one eye on the digital microwave clock.
Leah, meanwhile, was giving us a sneak preview of what she’ll be like as an adolescent, rolling her eyes every time we asked a question and emphasizing every word she spoke to us when she’d deign to grace the conversation with her chirpy little voice.
“May I please be excused?” Ethan asked, eyeballs nearly popping out of his head with anticipation. Problem was, his mouth was still full, so it came out “maya pease be estude?” Luckily, Abby speaks fluent gibberish. She’s been living with me a long time.
“Not just yet,” she said. “Chew and swallow your food first, wash it down with some water, and wipe your mouth with a napkin.” Asperger’s kids, generally speaking, don’t like to watch people eat, and they don’t see much point in sitting at the table after they’ve finished eating. Not to mention, Bart Simpson, Ethan’s role model, was about to start writing on that blackboard to signal the seventeenth rerun of an episode Ethan still doesn’t entirely understand.
He grumbled a little, but that was muffled by macaroni and cheese, so it was easy to ignore. Ethan did follow his mother’s instructions to the letter, though. As with many autism spectrum children, Asperger’s kids tend to be very specific about doing what they’re told, and do not vary in the least from instructions. He chewed, swallowed, drank, and wiped, an inch from hyperventilating.
“Now may I please be excused?”
Abigail nodded wearily. I try to stay away from such conversations whenever possible, and was staring down at my plate to avoid having to look at Leah, an adorable little girl who has the table manners of a rhinoceros. Ethan leapt up and started to run for the living room, before Abby reminded him to clear his plate from the table. With mere seconds to spare, he made it to the television, and Nirvana.
“So, did you have a lot of homework today?” Abby asked Leah, who was chewing so slowly it was impossible to tell if she was still alive.
“I told you!” she shouted. “I had three pages!”
“You didn’t tell me,” Abigail said with no outward trace of tension.
“I told him!” Leah pointed at me.
“Him?” I looked down at myself. “Him? I used to be ‘Daddy.’”
She rolled her eyes and exhaled. Parents can be so inconvenient.
Abby’s eyes had a faraway look, which meant she was trying not to scream. “All right, young lady, just exactly what has put you into such a mood that. . .”
The front door flung itself open, and Leah’s best friend Melissa flung herself through it. Most of the people we know have given up on the formality of ringing the doorbell or knocking, and Melissa is through that door so many times a day I’ve been thinking of putting in a turnstile.
Leah’s face brightened like a Hawaiian sky after a thunderstorm. “MELLIE!” she screamed, and ran toward her counterpart. They hugged like they hadn’t seen each other two hours earlier, which they had. The remainder of Leah’s dinner went untouched, and Abby sighed, scraped it into the garbage under the sink, and put the plate in the dishwasher.
It was just a little bit of a surprise when the front door opened again, and Melissa’s mother Miriam Bonet walked in, with equal disregard for our doorbell. I made a mental note to test the button later to make sure it was still operating. Miriam and her husband Richard have become the closest friends we have in Midland Heights, and she was carrying a small box that looked like a mini-cooler, except that it had ventilation holes in its sides. Inside it was a lizard.
“Is that IT?” Leah squealed. She raced to Melissa’s mother before Miriam even got a chance to take her jacket off. Miriam, normally a rational person, was beaming from ear to ear. She nodded.
“This is it, honey,” she told my daughter. Abby walked to the dining room, where the females had converged. Leah was busy thanking Miriam so profusely it bordered on embarrassing. Ethan stayed in the living room, where the trials and tribulations of yellow people with blue hair who say “d’oh!” were far more real to him than anything going on in the next room.
“I didn’t know you were bringing it tonight,” Abby told our guest.
“I didn’t know she was bringing it at all,” I chimed