26. Dulcie
DULCIE
My school bag is packed beside the door when Magnus says the presentation has moved.
He has Kit in the crook of one arm. Our son is fed and entirely uninterested in the phone Magnus holds in his other hand.
“They’ve brought it forward,” he says. “The outside delegation can only stay until early afternoon.”
“What time?”
He tells me.
“That’s my session.”
“Yes.” His gaze moves toward the folder in my bag. “Could you ask whether?—”
“No.”
The word comes faster than I expect. My stomach has already tightened. I am standing in my own hall with my coat half on, feeling the old uncertainty about whether I will be allowed to keep a perfectly ordinary plan.
He looks up from the phone.
“My return has been in both our calendars for weeks,” I say. “You agreed to have him through lunch.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t start with moving my work.”
Kit wriggles. Magnus sets the phone on the little table and adjusts his arm before answering.
“I was about to ask you to change it.”
“Yes.”
I finish putting on my coat. He watches the movement, then looks at my face.
“What time does your mother—” He stops himself.
“She’s not the solution either. Both our jobs count. Mine doesn’t become the movable one because yours pays more.”
There is a silence long enough for me to wonder if we have returned to the beginning.
Then he says, “You’re right.”
He lowers himself into the chair, with Kit secure against him, and picks up the phone. I stay where I am while he calls the executive who has been preparing the presentation with him.
“I can’t attend the revised time,” he says. “You’ll lead it. You have the figures and the authority to answer their questions.”
He listens. His jaw tightens once.
“Yes. The follow-up discussion too. Don’t hold it for me.”
A few more words about a page in the materials. Then he ends the call and puts the phone facedown.
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
I take my bag. My body is slower than my mind to believe the conversation has finished.
At the chair, I kiss Kit’s forehead. Magnus tilts him enough to make that easy. He doesn’t ask me to stay until he feels better about the call.
“Tell me how the book goes,” he says.
“I will.”
Outside, I stand beside my car and breathe once before I open the door. Then I drive to work.
A child has put a sticker on my chair to reserve it.
The sticker is a pear wearing a hat. I am told that it represents me.
“Is it the hat?” I ask.
“No. The pear.”
My colleague turns away to hide a smile. I set down my bag and take possession of my fruit-shaped authority.
There are questions about Kit. Does he have teeth? Can he hold a pencil? Does he know I have come here? I answer them while helping untangle an apron. Then a child brings me the page with the enormous doorway.
“You said you’d help write the people.”
“I did.”
He sits beside me. I put a fresh pencil between us and ask where he wants the first name.
He points inside the door.
“You’ve left lots of room.”
“Some people are long.”
He means the names. I almost miss it because I am looking at the width of the doorway instead of listening.
We work our way through his family. He tells me who belongs on the page; I write the letters lightly, and he goes over them, some harder than others. One person needs to be outside because she is arriving. Another is upstairs, although he hasn’t drawn an upstairs yet.
“Shall we leave room?”
He nods. Then he takes the pencil and adds a staircase which would be alarming in any actual house.
Across the table, a girl has drawn two roofs and become stuck between them. She has used nearly all the paper on the first house. Her second is very small, and she doesn’t like it.
“My dad’s house isn’t little.”
“Have you run out of page?”
She nods angrily.
I bring over a second sheet and lay it alongside hers.
“We could join them. Or start again on a bigger piece. What would you rather do?”
She thinks, then pushes the sheets apart.
“They don’t touch.”
“All right.”
We try a folded strip between them. Open, both houses have room. Closed, the page will fit inside the book. She makes the strip into the road she travels between them, adding a car so large that it is unlikely to stay in either lane.
“Who goes in the car?” I ask.
She tells me. I write what she wants beneath the picture, and she reads it back with several additional facts which she feels I should have included.
I get another pencil.
The morning fills with small decisions. A cat requires whiskers on the other side of the page.
Somebody wants to replace a picture drawn during my leave because the baby in it has grown.
We put the old one behind the new one, making a flap, and three other children immediately want flaps for reasons of their own.
One boy sits with an untouched sheet long after the others have started.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
“I don’t know what to draw.”
“What do you like doing at home?”
He shrugs.
“Tell me something that happened yesterday.”
After a pause, he says he dropped a spoon behind the refrigerator. His grandfather tried to get it with another spoon, which is now also behind the refrigerator.
I make myself wait.
Then he laughs.
“Would you like to draw that?”
He takes the brown crayon. The refrigerator becomes the largest thing on the page. His grandfather is represented mostly by a pair of legs.
At the next table, my colleague helps two children finish gluing. She catches my eye as I pass and nudges my forgotten water toward me. I drink while inspecting a carefully labeled purple dog.
By late morning, the pages are ready.
We clear a space on the rug. The children bring the drawings down from the wall, one at a time, and decide on an order with much more negotiation than I anticipated. Everyone agrees that the cover belongs first. After that, certainty becomes scarce.
We settle it. I thread the soft ties through the reinforced holes while small hands hold the covers still. Someone pulls too soon, and we begin that part again. The folded page goes in where it can open fully. The grandmother with her own page follows the cat that occupies most of another.
Then I place the finished book on the low table.
For a moment nobody touches it.
“Can we?” a child asks.
“That’s what we made it for.”
The first page turns. Then the next.
A girl leans forward so quickly that her elbow lands on my knee.
“That’s mine.”
“I see it.”
“No. That’s my house.”
“Yes,” I say. “It is.”
She looks around at the other children, making certain they have understood. Beside her, the boy with the wide doorway waits until we reach his page, then carefully traces each name with his finger.
My knees ache from the rug. There is dried glue on my sleeve. Someone has moved the pear sticker from my chair to my bag.
I stay until every page has been seen.