The Kingdom of Childhood

made me angry, this evidence that for all of his clownish frowning, all of his somber words about our loss, he and others had so little regard for what was left of her. I held the ball of silver-flecked blue wool in my hands and stretched out the rows of crochet work, trying to figure out what she had been making, and for whom. That person should have this, so they could hold it and know that even as she was dying, Bobbie had been working this little web borne of her thoughts for them.

And then I felt a hand sweeping my hair over my shoulder, followed, without hesitation, by lips touching my neck. I let out a small shriek and spun around, dropping the wool. Zach stood there grinning, his expression a little confused. “Sorry. I figured you heard me come in.”

“No. What are you doing here? Go, before Ms. Valera comes in.”

“She left. Nobody’s coming in.”

I picked up the ball of yarn from the floor and, as I straightened up, caught him undoing his pants. My face contorted with anger. “Jesus, Zach. No. Of all the places to come up with that idea. Not now.”

“Oh, c’mon. It’ll take, like, a minute. I’ll lock the door.”

“No.” I turned my back on him and grabbed the box of lanterns, wedging it onto the empty shelf. In the act of pushing its edge into place, the crochet hook slipped out of the ball in my hand and fell against the tile with a clatter. I tugged the string to bring it back up, and all at once, Bobbie’s last few rows of crocheting came undone like a zipper pulling apart. This time my shriek was not small at all, but one of raw and ragged anguish.

“What’s the matter?” asked Zach.

I dropped to my knees and picked up the raveled pile of yarn. The long string was kinked at regular intervals, like an undone braid. I looked up at Zach and in a furious voice asked, “Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, if you hadn’t come in here and scared the life out of me—”

“I just thought you wanted to see me.” His voice was hard, curt; as were his eyes. He pulled up his zipper and reclasped his belt. “Chill the hell out. It’s yarn. Jesus.”

He turned and left the room. The tile floor was cold even through my tights, and the slam of the door jarred me. And then I was alone in the familiar classroom, in its spacious silence, the shadows broken only by the hallway light that came through the small rectangular window on the door. I looked down at the loose pile of wool in my hands and, for the first time since the drive home after her funeral, cried in my grief for her.

17

The day after the Martinmas celebration, school was out for Veterans Day. Zach, having agreed to work for his dad for the day, awoke while it was still dark outside and groggily pulled on his clothes. As he nursed a commuter mug of green tea he stared out the window of the pickup truck at the abandoned Beltway, the white streetlights whizzing by in the darkness, the trees like thin, hard shadows behind them. His father, silent and nearly as tired as Zach, let the radio do the talking. Although he was the same age as Judy, his taste in music was better; he listened to the same stuff Zach liked, and Zach felt a fresh appreciation for it after weeks of tolerating Judy’s dentist’s-office radio station.

They arrived at the embassy, where his father was installing a new library, and carried in the tools. The buzz and whir of the saws brought Zach out of his drowsy haze, and soon enough he was hard at work. This job, like most of his father’s, required precision, care and neatness; the entrance was draped in sheeting that locked them into a plastic cocoon, and Zach found himself doing as much vacuuming as carpentry.

Crouched on the floor and waiting for instructions, Zach watched his father work. Like Zach, he wore safety goggles, a dust mask and a hard hat; only a few chunks of his Viking-blond hair peeked around the edges. His blond-lashed blue eyes were serious and sharp as he measured, making rapid calculations in pencil on the two-by- fours. When Zach was a child his father had seemed so big, and even now, at his adult height or nearly so, the man dwarfed him.

His father glanced up, catching Zach looking at him. “I appreciate your help, son.”

“Not a problem.”

“It’s good to have some time with you before the baby gets here.”

“Uh-huh.”

The older man stood and crossed the room, reaching into a bucket for a hammer. Zach pulled his mask down and took a deep breath, then coughed at the dust. His father grinned and passed him a water bottle.

“You’re quiet today,” he observed. “Something on your mind?”

Zach shook his head, but as was usual these days, he was lying. Alone with his dad, in the privacy of the shuttered room, he felt the uneasy urge to start a conversation he knew would lead to much more than he was prepared to discuss. If Judy were an ordinary girl, he would have a dozen questions for his father about relationships that moved too fast, and how to say no when it was what you meant deep down, and whether it was common for all the shimmer to burn off a relationship and leave only the sex. But he had grown to identify so strongly, and so uncomfortably, with his mother and Booger, that he was afraid anything he disclosed to his father would lead to him disclosing that. At one point he had wondered if he was wrong about his mother, if he was perhaps making too much of a simple flirtation; but now, older and wiser, he knew hiding an affair was so brutally simple that what he had witnessed was, at best, a poorly concealed one. He was glad he had not realized this while they were still in New Hampshire, or he doubted he could have restrained the urge to corner Booger on the path to the yoga studio and smash him into the pavement.

What a shit that guy was, Zach thought with a flare of anger. Walking right past Zach, and sometimes his dad as well, with his rolled-up mat under his arm, all serious about his advanced asanas. Zach suspected the furnace closet, with its collection of spare mats and the jutting towel-folding table of peeling linoleum. What kind of person had it in himself to do that—to politely ignore the kid and the husband while getting off with the wife-and-mother in between yoga sessions? What kind of guy would do that to someone as decent as his dad?

He hugged his knees to his chest and rocked on his feet, and his father said, “Sheesh, kiddo, are you ever flexible.”

Zach stood up and vacuumed the floor, again.