“I don’t know. I’ll text you, OK?”
“I love you.”
“I love you more.”
“I love you most.”
He heard her smile again, and then she hung up.
• • •
Lally and Lucas had apparently been hooked up to a sugar IV during the last hour of preschool, which seemed unlikely, but was empirically indicated. Both of them were in that state of little kid laughter where at any moment one of them might throw up. Frances watched them in the rearview mirror, torn between letting them laugh because, you know, children, and trying to calm them down so they didn’t implode. It was unclear why they were laughing, but apparently that shit was comedy gold. They were also amused by the enormous amounts of toilet paper and paper towels on the floor of the minivan. Momma went to Costco.
Of course, by the time they pulled up in front of Frances’s house, they were pale and angry with each other, and only the immediate application of an episode of Blue’s Clues (classic Steve, on Netflix) and some goldfish crackers settled the waters. As she made them lunch, Frances answered in her head for Blue, and wished she had a handy-dandy notebook. This world, the world of the preschooler, was where she felt most comfortable these days. After going through this phase twice before she knew resistance was futile, and mommy-ninja’d her way through most of the challenges Lally threw at her.
With a fourteen-year-old, a ten-year-old, and a four-year-old, Frances finally felt she had some kind of paradigm for understanding her experience of parenthood: Raising kids was like warfare. Not in the “dramatic death of millions” kind of way, obviously, but in the “struggle for peace” kind of way. Babies and little kids were like trench warfare. It was physically exhausting, psychologically draining, and there was a lot of flying mud and screaming. Shit went everywhere. Your clothes were ruined. You ate when you could, slept when you could, and got interrupted at the whim of the enemy.
Elementary-age kids were like campaign warfare. You knew there would be times of stress—like forcing a child to get a shot at the doctor, or to do their homework, or to give up on the concept of becoming a Pokémon trainer in the real world—but in between those intense sessions there was a lot of boring routine. One minute it would seem as though you were making progress, with promising overtures on both sides, but then two minutes later someone chucked a grenade and everything caught fire.
The big change, however, was what happened when the hormones kicked in. Then it was a guerilla war against an unseen counterinsurgency. Everything seemed much calmer on the surface, but any minute an improvised explosive device could cut you off at the knees or a sniper could get you in the back of the neck. You could never fully relax, and there was a lot of tiptoeing about and quizzing other kids for intel.
Sighing, Frances filled three little bowls with mac and cheese and joined Lally and Lucas on the sofa. She watched Steve do his thing, and continued her inner debate about how Salt and Pepper could have managed to conceive and produce both Paprika and Cinnamon. Salt was a crystal, pepper was a seed pod from a plant, paprika was also a seed pod. OK, so yes, she could see that, but cinnamon was the inner bark of a tree. She had wondered this before, which is why she had Wikipedia’d all that stuff and had, in fact, a fairly high level of knowledge about the international pepper trade as a result. It still bothered her, and she worried that Mrs. Pepper was a little tough on Paprika, especially once the baby came.
• • •
Ava was angry, and Frances had no idea why. She had no way of knowing if her daughter was angry with her, or with someone else, or just furious at the world in general. Not that it mattered. Ava often came boiling out of school ready to fight, as if she’d been simmering ever since drop-off, and had planned everything she needed to say for a convincing victory and the ultimate vanquishing of the adult world. But then she just sat there, letting her silence shout at her mother instead. Could anyone emanate silence as forcefully as a fourteen-year-old? No wonder people associate poltergeist activity with adolescence; they can beat you around the head without raising a finger. Frances felt a headache starting and took a deep, cleansing breath and slowly let it out.
“Why are you sighing at me?”
Frances shot her daughter a look. “I wasn’t. I was just breathing.”
“Well, quit it.”
“Completely?”
There was a pause.
“No,” replied Ava. “Not completely. I’m not tall enough to reach the pedals from over here, and if we crash on the way home I’m sure I’ll get blamed.” She picked at her nail polish.
“Not to mention that you’d have to explain to Anne, Iris, Charlie, and Bill why their kids were all in the hospital.”
Ava relaxed a little. “Charlie and Bill would be fine, but Anne would be pissed. She’s a little bit scary.”
“Anne?” Frances raised her eyebrows.
Ava was looking out of the window. “Yeah. Sometimes she looks at me as if she wants to snap my neck and throw my body on the ground.”
Frances pulled to a stop at a red light and turned to Ava. “Really?”
Ava nodded but didn’t elaborate, her mind already somewhere else. Frances looked in the rearview. Theo, Kate, Wyatt, and Milo were chattering away about God only knew what, and Lally and Lucas both had the thousand-yard stare of mid-afternoon preschoolers who were only a year or so out of taking a nap. None of them were paying any attention to her conversation at all.
She tried to reel Ava back in. “How was school?”
Ava shrugged. “Same same.”
“Same same good or same same bad?”
“Same same repetitive, which I think is what the phrase same same implies.” Her
