Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,90

of a man in Cobble Hill Park, holding a camera.

Beware this pervert! she wrote. I spotted him this morning surreptitiously taking pictures of two little girls on the playground.

Someone else commented that she had seen him doing the same thing in the past, and all hell broke loose. In a matter of hours, the guy’s picture was on every mommy blog and message board in the city.

The next day, the original poster wrote a brief mea culpa: I have since learned that the man whose photo I shared yesterday is the father of those children he was photographing, so I am deleting my previous post.

That was it. No apology for smearing the guy, no collective horror over what they’d done to him.

Despite swearing off the group after that, Elisabeth thought to herself now that there was no harm in taking a look, just this once.

The post of the moment, added after midnight, was from a woman who wrote that her husband was out of town on business, and there was a live mouse squealing and writhing around on a glue trap in her kitchen. It had managed to pull up a single leg, but the detached foot was stuck to the pad, along with the other foot, still attached to the mouse.

I know some of you rave about TaskMaster, that site where you can book someone by the hour to move stuff/build furniture/run errands/whatever. Is it reasonable to reserve someone for an hour right now to come deal with this?? If I give a huge tip???

Elisabeth put the phone down.

* * *

—

She woke the next morning feeling relaxed. Friday. Sam arriving soon.

Then Elisabeth remembered—no Sam today. No Sam for the rest of the month.

Andrew left early for work.

The baby was crabby. He could sit now, but still couldn’t crawl, and it frustrated him. He whined half the time. Elisabeth hated the sound. She felt awful for him. She placed him on his hands and knees, holding his stomach a few inches off the ground.

“You’re almost there,” she said. “You can do it.”

She played him some Raffi and gave him a wooden spoon to bang against a pot. Gil stuck the spoon in his mouth.

At nine o’clock, she looked at her phone. Only an hour had passed since Andrew went to work. It felt like days. Elisabeth considered breaking her own rule and watching TV in front of Gil. But after flipping through the channels twice and finding nothing of interest, she decided it wasn’t worth the guilt.

At nine-fifteen, while filling a bottle with formula, she realized she had forgotten to cancel therapy.

“Shit,” she said.

Violet wouldn’t let her back out this late. She would make Elisabeth pay for the session either way.

She and Gil were still in their pajamas. Elisabeth plopped him in the center of her bed with three board books while she hurried to get dressed. When he started to cry, she added her cell phone to the pile of enticements.

She put Gil in a fleece jumpsuit with a smiling elephant printed on the butt. She gathered diapers, bottles, toys, a change of clothes, the stroller. Maybe she would take him out to lunch after, make a day of it.

Gil cried in the car, all the way to town. She wondered if he was teething. Faye had said to rub whiskey on his gums when the time came. This struck Elisabeth as something for which the authorities might come and take your child away, but she said she would keep it in mind.

The public lot was full. She circled the small downtown four times before she spotted a tight space at a meter. Elisabeth squeezed into it, ignoring that her bumper was touching the car in front of her and the one behind.

She unfolded the stroller like an accordion on the sidewalk, then lifted the baby from his car seat and placed him inside, tucking a thick blanket over him.

Her appointment should have started six minutes ago. Violet would act put out, she was certain.

Elisabeth rushed the three blocks to her office. As she crossed Calvin Street, a Hispanic woman coming in the other direction looked at the baby and exclaimed, as if she knew him.

“Chiquito!”

She made a face, puffing out her cheeks as far as they could go, then pretending to pop them.

Gil laughed.

Elisabeth gave the woman a strange smile, and kept walking. She scanned her memory. She felt certain she had never seen her before.

Violet answered the door to her office with a disappointed