4. Gus
Gus
The first day of kindergarten starts before the sun is up, when Teddy climbs into my bed and puts his face an inch from mine.
“Does my teacher know about me yet?”
“Know what about you?”
“Anything,” he says, like I’m stalling.
“She knows you’re coming. The rest you get to tell her yourself.”
He considers that, decides it’s acceptable, and goes downstairs to brief June instead. “—and if there’s a fire drill, I already know about fire drills,” I hear him telling her as I come down.
“Noted,” June says. “Eat the eggs.”
By the time I’m at the counter, he’s dressed in the dinosaur shirt, the backpack is by the door, and there’s a breakfast on the table that nobody burned.
Nora used to talk about this morning back when he was a baby — she had opinions about the backpack, the first-day breakfast, all of it.
I dreaded it for a year. It turns out dread is easier with staff.
Over the eggs, Teddy announces that everybody has to come to drop-off. Everybody. It’s a rule he has just invented, and nobody has the heart to repeal it, so all four of us get in the car.
Margot speaks from the back seat. “You can drop me at the corner.”
“It’s the first day.”
“The corner is fine.”
I look at June. June looks at the road. “The corner it is,” she says. Margot gets out at the corner of her own first day of fourth grade, braced, and doesn’t look back.
At the kindergarten steps, Teddy grips my hand hard enough to matter and pretends he isn’t. June takes my phone out of my other hand. “You’ll want this on yours, not mine,” she says, and gets the picture. Teddy, gap in his grin, dinosaur shirt, September sun.
In the car, the quiet after leaving a kid somewhere new. I pull out slowly, in case he changes his mind and runs for it.
“He didn’t cry,” I say.
“You sound disappointed.”
“I had a whole speech ready.”
“I know. It’s in your jacket pocket. You kept touching it at breakfast.”
I drive a block. “You watch people for a living, or is it a hobby?”
“Four families’ worth of practice,” she says, looking out her window. “Nervous dads aren’t hard to spot.”
I look at that photo of Teddy four times before lunch. I don’t tell anyone that.
He comes home loud. “There are a lot of kids and none of them know anything about dinosaurs,” he reports at dinner. “I’m going to teach them. Actually, some of them don’t even want to know.”
“Actually,” Margot repeats, flatly, to her plate. He’s said it nine times since the meatballs.
“Also at the store I laid down on the floor and yelled,” Teddy says.
“You what?”
“About cereal. I was really loud.” He says it like a kid describing a roller coaster. “June sat down on the floor too. People looked at us.”
I look at June. She keeps eating. “He needed a minute,” she says. “The floor seemed like the best place to have it. We worked it out down there.”
“I got the regular cereal,” Teddy adds, in case I missed the ending.
“What did you two talk about? On the floor.”
“Private,” Teddy says. June keeps eating and offers nothing, and that, apparently, is that.
“And swim’s moved,” June says, nudging the evening along, “so Thursdays we’ll—”
“It moved to Wednesdays.” Margot sets her fork down. “The email came Monday.”
The table goes quiet a second. She’s right — she’s always right, that’s the thing about Margot, she’s right and she deploys it — but it’s the tone. It’s the tone she uses on people she expects to leave.
“Wednesdays, then,” June says, easy, and writes it on her hand with the pen from her pocket. “Thanks. I’d have had him at the wrong pool.”
“May I be excused?” Margot says, and is gone before the answer.
I find June at the sink after, and start apologizing for Margot’s tone at dinner. She doesn’t let me get through the first sentence.
“She’s not wrong, though. It was Wednesdays.” She hands me a wet pan. “Her mother died, and three years later there’s a stranger with keys to her house making her brother laugh at dinner. She’s doing everything right, if you think about it from inside her.”
I stand there holding the pan. Three candidates, two grief books, one school counselor. The first person to say something about my daughter that feels true is the nanny, on a school night, in dish gloves.
“The counselor says she’ll come around,” I say, mostly to see what June does with it.
“Maybe. But I’m not going to sit around waiting for her to change.” She pulls the drain plug. “She’d feel me waiting. That’s just more pressure on a kid who’s already carrying plenty.”
“Where’d you learn all this? The patience. The sitting on floors.”
“Four families.” She peels the gloves off, one finger at a time. “Kids are the same everywhere. They want to know two things — who’s in charge, and who’s going to leave them. Everything else is snacks.”
I laugh, which surprises both of us this late in the evening. She hangs the gloves over the faucet and says goodnight. I stay in the kitchen a while after she’s gone.
The first week of school, June tucked a joke on a sticky note into Margot’s lunch.
The notes came back — not crumpled, returned, flat in the front pocket of the lunch bag, no comment.
Nothing to call her out on. That’s how Margot does it.
June never said a word. She just stopped sending notes and started drawing a small picture on the napkin instead.
A raccoon. A volcano. The napkins don’t come back.
Then, a few days ago, I came down the back stairs and heard the two of them in the mudroom. I stopped where I was, which I’m not proud of and would do again.
“You don’t have to like me,” June was saying. Even, no wound in it. “I’d just like to know which one we’re doing, so I can plan.”
A silence with thinking in it. Then Margot: “The one where you drive me to school.”
“I can do that one.”
That was the whole negotiation. Nobody hugged. My daughter offered the coldest arrangement she had, and June took it without flinching. I stood on the back stairs a while after they’d gone. Nobody has gotten that close to Margot in a year. It took the one person she’s been keeping at arm’s length.
The drives are going fine, apparently. I asked Margot about them once.
“We listen to a podcast.”
“Which podcast?”
“Volcanoes.” A beat, and then, because accuracy matters more to her than the war does: “June found it. It’s not bad.”
Later I checked whether she was set for the morning. “Backpack’s by the door?”
“Correct,” she said, and went up.
Correct. She’s been saying it for weeks — to me, to her teacher, to the pediatrician. Somewhere in the last year my daughter stopped saying yes. I can’t find the day it happened, and there’s no one alive I can ask.
Some nights it’s June’s turn to read to Teddy, and I find reasons to be slow in the upstairs hall. She does all the voices. My son howls. I stand just outside the light from his doorway and listen. Then I go down and don’t mention it to anyone.
And Saturdays I still make the pancakes. They’re still burnt. Teddy has opened negotiations to get June to take over, at the table, while I’m standing right there with the spatula.
“Weekends aren’t my kitchen,” she says, every time, and eats the burnt one off the top of the stack like it’s the one she wanted.
She could cook them better. She lets them stay mine. I don’t have words for what that’s worth, so I top up her coffee instead.
For a couple of days after that second weekend, June went somewhere quiet — flawless with the kids, elsewhere in the eyes, a lot of wiped counters. I re-ran everything I’d said and came up empty. By Tuesday she was back. I didn’t ask.
When Carol collected the kids that week, she asked, buckling Teddy into her car, “How’s the new girl working out?”
“Good. They’re eating vegetables, and Margot hasn’t fired her yet.”
Carol looked at me over the roof of the car, a beat longer than the joke deserved. “She’s young,” she said.
“She’s good at the job, Carol.”
“I said young. I didn’t say anything else.” She got in and rolled the window down halfway. “Tell her the children come to me with sunscreen on. It’s still light out.” Which is Carol for: I’m watching, and I love them, and those are the same thing.
I stood in the driveway deciding all of it meant nothing.
* * *
Tonight the Cascades had a sponsor dinner downtown — season’s three weeks out, so everybody wants an hour of me — and I get home late.
The kids are back from Carol’s and asleep.
One lamp on in the kitchen, and June in it, writing tomorrow on the fridge schedule.
Hair loose, sleeves pushed up, and I notice — the way I’ve been noticing for two weeks now and refusing to call it anything.
She’s lovely in a lamplit kitchen. She also works for me.
So I stop the thought there, where I’ve stopped it every night for two weeks.
“How was it?” she asks.
“Fine. I gave the eight answers.” It comes out flat — the truth, not the bright version I give in public. That keeps happening around her. I’ve decided not to look at why.
“Which eight?”
“Best game I ever played, best player I ever faced, do I miss it. How are the kids, what’s the secret, would I coach. How’s the knee. And whether the Cascades are going to be any good.”
“Are they?”
“That one gets the longest answer and the least honest one.” I hang my jacket on the chair. “You want the honest one, they’re young and it’ll hurt all winter.”
“See, that was interesting,” she says. “You should lead with that.”
“Nobody pays for that.”
Something crosses her face, there and gone, and she squares the markers on the counter into a straight row. Then she looks at me the way she reads Teddy when he says he’s not hungry. “Have you eaten?”
The question hits me harder than a question about dinner should.
“Not really. There was food going around on trays, but people kept me talking all night.”
“So, no.” She’s already at the fridge. She takes down one of the containers, mine, Tuesday’s, and puts it in the microwave like this is a system we agreed on.
Maybe it is now. The plate she sets in front of me is my own cooking, which should be a sad thing for a man to feel grateful about, and isn’t, tonight.
“What did I miss here?” I ask, eating my Tuesday chicken at eleven at night while she fills in the little boxes.
“Margot finished her book and started the next one without a library trip, so she’s getting them from somebody she’s not naming. Teddy said he wasn’t hungry and then ate a full dinner. And the garage light’s out. I’ll get the ladder tomorrow and change it.”
“I can do the light.”
“You’re at a breakfast tomorrow. I’ll do the light.” She caps her marker. “Carol brought the kids back around six. She stayed a few minutes.”
“How was that?”
“Fine. She looked through the fridge while we talked.”
“She’s protective,” I say.
“She should be,” June says. “So am I. It’ll be fine.”
I want to ask which of us she thinks she’s protecting. I don’t. It’s late, she’s staff, and I have a breakfast to be charming at in the morning.
“Teddy needs a dinosaur that starts with R by Friday,” she says, not looking up. “For sharing time. He’s been briefing me on the candidates, and he told me to prepare you ahead of time — his words — so Dad doesn’t panic.”
“How bad is it?”
“The current favorite is Rugops. The backup is one that’s technically not a dinosaur, and if you call it a dinosaur there will be a scene. I’m quoting again.”
“I never panic.”
“He says you’ll panic.”
“It’s pronounced ‘coaching,’” I say, and she laughs — the quick one that escapes before she can stop it — and pins the schedule flat with one hand.
She stops in the kitchen doorway on her way out, half in, half out, one hand on the frame. “Goodnight, Gus. Eat the broccoli too.”
She’s up the stairs before I answer. And I’m standing in my kitchen with a fork in my hand, forty-nine years old, stuck on something.
Have you eaten? Somebody used to ask me that.
Not Nora — in our marriage the cooking was mine, so she never needed to ask if I’d eaten. Not my mother, who’s been gone eleven years. Somebody. The answer sits just out of reach, the way a name does at three in the morning. The harder I look, the further it moves.
I rinse the plate and check the doors. At the top of the stairs I stop a second — her light off, Margot’s off, Teddy’s night-light steady. Full house.
Somebody used to ask me that. I let it go the way you let a song title go, trusting it to come back on its own.
The laptop stays closed that night. It doesn’t even occur to me until morning.