of mail Helen slipped under the door said visitation. The word inside my head was hypocrite. The lovely combination was what got me out of bed, helped me read the address on the letter, delivered me to that address on time.
We met in the park along the two-lane highway to town. Years of driving the truck or riding my bicycle along this road, I’d seen that park a million times. But I’d never seen anyone there. I’d never once brought Perley there to swing on the swings or to brave the tall slide. Now I knew why. I knew why the swings sat empty and the slide was covered in pine needles. It was the visitation park. People knew to stay clear of it. Somehow, I’d known, too. Parents played with their children here as a performance, while some social worker sat on a bench nearby, watching. Maybe people stayed away to give undone families some privacy. But more likely people knew the truth. Trouble is catching. If you played with your children at this park, an ordinary day might suddenly become a visitation day. You’d find yourself alone at the end of it, your kids waving to you from the back of the social worker’s car. Pariah Park. Fear Park.
But fuck that. Who cares about the park? Who cares about it when Perley was in it? He stepped out of the caseworker’s Camry and came toward me like he was still a baby, pigeon-toed and tumbling. He cut through the frost-covered grass of Pariah Park, and I thought, Let’s just live here. You’re here, I’m here, what else do we need?
But all I said was, “Perley.”
Perley said, “Mama L.” But when he was four feet away from me he stopped. He just stopped, like I was behind a pane of glass. He stopped and looked at me. And I saw he’d changed. It had only been two weeks, but he was different. Something in his eyes. I’ll know you anywhere, my boy, I’ll know you by your toes, by your pinkie fingers. I’ll know you. I wanted him to come closer, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. So I sat down in the grass. There was a thaw that day. The temperature was climbing toward fifty, but the ground was hard and cold. I killed ice crystals sitting on them. Perley pushed back his hood. He gazed at me without smiling. His breath made hard quick clouds.
I said, “I love to see your face every day. Are you all right? Are you hungry? Are they taking care of you? Will you come home soon?”
The caseworker, that child-woman I refused to recognize, came up behind him, swinging car keys. “That’s an inappropriate question, Lily,” she said. “And it’s a lot of pressure on Perley. If I were you, I’d use visitation time to play together, not to ask him when he’s coming home. Let me assure you, the home he’s in is a perfectly good one.”
Perley took a step closer to me. He was wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, the hood attached to an unfamiliar puffy coat. His blue jeans were stiff, cuffed at the ankle. “Where’s Mama K?” asked Perley.
“She had to go to work,” I said.
“She doesn’t go to work,” Perley said. He looked at me sideways. “It’s probably that she doesn’t want to see me.”
“She does want to see you,” I said. “She went to work to save money to bring you back home,” I said.
“That’s enough,” the caseworker girl said. “That’s really enough. It’s not appropriate to talk to Perley about details of the case, especially when we don’t know the outcome. It’s not fair to him. The swings in this park are some of the best in the county, really state-of-the-art. You’ve got one hour. I’ll go sit on that bench over there.”
Perley and I walked over to the wood chips. His body was shielded from me beneath the enormous coat. I couldn’t even hold him right. I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to. He sat on the state-of-the-art swing. “You’d better push me,” he said, so I pushed him.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry this is happening to you,” I said.
“What I think is weird is that there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said, like observing an unusual insect. “I mean, even though you’re my own mama, and you always promise me that you’ll find me and bring me back again, that you’ll know me by my toes, actually they