the procession just fast enough to hug and kiss her relatives. They held a homemade sign. Elisabeth couldn’t make out what it said.
She had miscalculated. She wasn’t wanted. She shouldn’t have come. She turned and walked away. When Andrew asked why she was home so soon, Elisabeth told him she had a headache and needed to lie down.
Now, two days later, she was back. Headed for the white Unitarian church tucked behind the science building. Specifically, the College Children’s Center day care, located in the church basement, and run by Maris Ames, a soft and cheery woman with thick, almost-purplish hair.
She met them at the door with a smile. Gil grinned back appreciatively.
As of three days ago, he could walk. A step or two at a time, and then he’d fall down or grab hold of a piece of furniture. It was a milestone every child reached somewhere around this age, and yet Elisabeth and Andrew were awestruck.
While Gil perused the classroom, pulling blocks and books and bins from where they belonged and dumping them on the floor, Maris explained that during the academic year, the school was staffed by students from the Early Childhood Education Department.
“Lovely girls. Each handpicked by yours truly, and not a dud among them,” she said. “I can sense a hard worker when I see one. I’ve been at this for forty years. In summertime, we have excellent help as well. Older gals with experience. Grandmotherly types.”
Elisabeth smiled. She liked this woman.
Her neighbors said the school was overpriced. But one of the good parts about living in the city for so long was that she had a skewed sense of what things ought to cost. To her, almost everything here seemed reasonable, if not downright cheap.
“And you’d have room for him soon?” she asked.
“As soon as you’d like.”
Elisabeth had been thinking of having Gil start the following week, but now she said, “Maybe at the end of July?”
“Sure,” Maris said.
It would give her that much more time with her baby, who felt less like a baby every day. Maybe Faye could sit with him some, since she’d be off for the summer. Elisabeth had vowed to herself to try and let her mother-in-law in more. They had no longer just moved here. They lived here. She ought to make a go of it.
Things would be different, having Gil away from home all day, not being able to look in on him whenever she wanted. She thought he would thrive in the presence of other kids his age. But she would miss what they’d had this first year, the cocoon of the two of them, plus Sam.
Sam had only been with them three days a week. Day care would be full-time. Elisabeth felt overcome with regret, knowing how much of his life would have nothing to do with her. It made her want to quit work and stay home doing arts-and-crafts projects with Gil for the next ten years, even as she knew that she’d lose her mind.
Andrew’s fellowship was soon to end. He had no plan for what might come next. The provost at the hippie college had hinted at keeping him on in some kind of mentor capacity, but who knew where that would lead. She needed to write a book.
When Elisabeth thought of Sam, she felt like she had ruined something, even though their arrangement would have come to an end anyway. She would still be standing here, scanning the brightly colored room for choking hazards as she pretended to listen to Maris Ames’s thoughts on the Montessori method.
Elisabeth assumed Sam, like the rest of them, had gone home by now. She couldn’t believe there had been no goodbye.
All day yesterday, she’d half expected her to show up.
The party had not gone as planned. When they woke, the sky was dark and heavy with rain. Elisabeth tried not to care. There was nothing she could do about the weather.
Even as she told herself this, she said to Andrew, “Today is going to be a disaster, I can tell. Yesterday was perfect. Why didn’t we do this yesterday?”
“Because it wasn’t Gil’s birthday yesterday,” he said.
“We should have canceled,” she said. “Done something just the three of us.”
“It’s going to be fine,” he said.
Nomi’s train was due to arrive at eleven. She was coming on her own and staying with them for two nights. Elisabeth had imagined her best friend looking on, admiringly, as she hosted a large, joyous affair. The kind of