to play video games and eat raw cookie dough out of the container. The girl next door who used to babysit is no longer available.
Children are resilient, I think. And that’s good in so many ways—they fall down, they dust themselves off, they get back up and do it all over again. But resilience brings a sort of callousness with it, an acceptance and tolerance that piggyback along. In Anne’s eyes, what happens to failures is nothing more than the way things are. A situation to be shouldered and shrugged over. Until now.
The doorbell rings.
“Yeah. Me too,” I say, hurrying out of her room. “Be right back.”
Malcolm is in the kitchen doing his preinspection of dinner plates before they go into the dishwasher. “Can you get that, El?”
The courier tonight is the same woman who delivered Freddie’s yellow card on Sunday night, and the padded envelope shows the same Fitter Family Campaign logo, the happy little sunshine family in the upper left corner. I’d like to take a Magic Marker to it. Or a flame torch. Since the envelope is addressed to me, I sign the courier’s tablet.
“Sorry, ma’am,” she says before she turns to walk down the path to her waiting car. As if she knows.
I prepared for this before Malcolm came home.
In my right pocket is an old Metro pass, hard plastic like a credit card. There’s probably ten bucks left on it, but I won’t be using the Metro anytime soon, so I turned it into a prop with a bit of silver paint from our Christmas decoration stash. It’s a shitty facsimile, but no one’s going to see it up close.
“Who was that?” Malcolm asks, drying his hands and folding the dish towel carefully in thirds. It looks nicer that way, sure, but nice doesn’t mean dry. I let it go.
“School stuff,” I say, waving my fake silver identification at him. I’ve already torn the envelope and pocketed the yellow card that was inside. “They updated some system over the weekend, and we all got new cards. Something about a security breach.”
To my surprise, all he says is, “Good. Can’t be too careful about security these days. Want to watch a movie, Anne?”
So it worked.
The rest of our evening is pleasant and horrible, pleasant because instead of Madeleine Sinclair force-feeding us more of her Intelligence-Perfection-Wisdom crap and talking up the benefits of a twenty-first-century master race of prodigies, Malcolm and Anne are watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie that we all agree is one of his best. The evening’s horrible because I’m in the kitchen imagining Anne returning from school tomorrow afternoon to find my car gone, my closet half-empty, and a note stuck to the fridge she’ll find as soon as she starts rummaging for a snack. Sorry, but I’m abandoning you. It won’t say that in so many words, but it might as well.
Anne sniffles once from the living room, and Malcolm’s arm reaches around, settling on her shoulder. “We’ll be fine, honey,” he says. “You’ll see.”
Stewart acts out another comic line, stands tall and lean and a little gawky on the television. He reminds me of Joe: clean, honest face, warm eyes—even in grainy black-and-white—and a touch of self-consciousness that I find endearing. He’s no macho man, no People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive contender or Nobel Prize finalist, but neither was Joe. My old friend-turned-nondate was just a good guy. Well, okay. Joe was strong and sexy. But he was other things, too.
I only miss him when I think about him. Which is often.
Lying in bed next to Malcolm, who says he’s dog-tired tonight, I fantasize about Joe. Maybe not even Joe himself, but a good guy, a Jimmy Stewart, a man who might run his hands over me tentatively at first, who would kiss me softly before trying anything beyond first base, and then, once things started smoking, would take me to the moon and back. I think about how much I’d like that, and how, at forty-something, those are nothing more than fantasies, experiences I’ll never have again.
As soon as Malcolm’s breathing slows and deepens in its steady sleep rhythm, I creep downstairs to the kitchen. There’s