“I can’t eat another bite,” Molly said, “and it’s so good it’s killing me, that’s the tough part, but even so, my stomach won’t let me eat even one bite more. Can I ask the waiter to wrap up this last enchilada and I’ll take it up to our room?”
I’d been staring out the window. Into the pitch dark. Just the lights of a few businesses and a stream of cars along the interstate. I’d been thinking about more or less nothing. Mostly feeling instead.
I was feeling that I needed to go to the restroom. But I was resisting.
“We don’t have a fridge up there,” I said, dragging my mind back to the moment.
Etta was sitting up in a booster chair. Disturbingly wide awake. Her eyes lit up when I looked at her face and she looked back at mine. She was eating refried beans with a spoon, or anyway, she had been. Now she was drumming the spoon on the table, sending bits of beans flying.
“Doesn’t matter,” Molly said, “because it won’t be sitting out long. I only need, like, forty-five minutes or an hour and by then I’ll digest what I just ate and then it’ll be gone.”
“I have to go to the restroom,” I said.
My eyes were still locked with those of my beautiful daughter. We seemed to be enjoying staring at each other. I wondered briefly if we had stared at each other like this before we almost lost each other. Maybe. But I couldn’t remember.
I didn’t want to go to the restroom, because I didn’t want to leave her. I decided I’d pick her up and take her there with me.
I’d been allowing myself to get dehydrated through that long day of driving. And then, once we sat down at the restaurant, I put away about five glasses of iced tea, nursing that bottomless drink like a person dying of thirst in the desert. And it had caught up to me.
But I didn’t want to leave my daughter alone with this girl.
In a way it was silly. Because Etta had already been alone with this girl. Who then gave her back to me.
In another way it wasn’t silly. I barely knew her. Her mental and emotional stability level was a great unknown. She could have been anything. I had no idea why her own mother had thrown her out of the house.
More importantly, I was paranoid now. I had a sort of PTSD over losing her.
“So go,” Molly said, knocking me out of my thoughts.
I rose. Leaned over the table and lifted Etta out of her booster seat.
“She can stay here,” Molly said. “I’ll look after her.”
“She might need to go, too.”
“You just took her before we started eating.”
I paused. Stammered over some lame explanation that never quite came out into the light.
“I just don’t like being apart from her,” I said at last.
And we hurried away. Before I could hear any more of Molly’s thoughts on the matter.
When we arrived back at the table, Molly had her last enchilada wrapped to go. Her face seemed sullen. She avoided looking me in the eye.
The baby still on my hip, I grabbed up the check from the edge of the table.
“I’ll go pay this at the cashier,” I said. “And then we’ll walk back.”
“Fine. Whatever.” But before I could walk away, more words spilled out of her. “You know,” she said, her voice harder now, “if I couldn’t be trusted to take good care of her, you wouldn’t have her right now.”
I sighed. Tried to form my words carefully.
“That’s very true,” I said.
“So then what was that all about?”
“I’ve just been really paranoid since . . . you know.”
“But I would still think you would trust me. I mean, I’m the reason you got her back.”
“It’s not just you,” I said. “Anybody could come along and grab her. And why put it on you to be the one who has to be fast enough or strong enough to keep it from happening?”
“Right,” she said. “Fine. Whatever.”
And I walked off to pay the check. With Etta.
It was after midnight when I had to get up and use the bathroom again. Etta and I were in one bed. I’d finally gotten her to sleep just moments earlier. Molly was in the other bed, over by the window. I thought she was asleep, too, but I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t want to risk waking Etta. And if I dragged her into the bathroom with me, she would definitely wake up.
I watched Molly’s back in a thin stream of desert moonlight. It poured into our room through a gap in the curtains. I watched for several minutes, looking for any irregularity. Any movement that would suggest she was awake.
I decided to chance it. Or, rather, I simply needed to.
I literally ran to the bathroom. Used the toilet as fast as I possibly could. Ran back out without stopping to wash my hands. I couldn’t see Etta, who was all lost in the bedsheets. Not in that absence of light. So I rushed over and felt around.
She was there.
I sat on the edge of the bed and let out a panicky sigh. Or, more accurately, the sigh of panic leaving my body. The borderline of crossing back into no panic.
I lay down carefully, so as not to wake her.
“So what was your excuse that time?” Molly asked. Her voice was quiet, probably out of respect for the baby. But also even and sure of itself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
But I knew.
“I just think it sucks that you don’t trust me. Especially with the baby. When was I ever anything but good to that baby?”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve just been finding it hard to trust lately.”
She didn’t say another word that night and neither did I. I’m not sure if she slept or not. I wrapped one arm tightly around my sleeping child. And somewhere in the very early morning I might
