21. Dulcie
DULCIE
Dad puts the bread on the table in the same basket he uses for everyone.
Magnus moves his glass out of the way. There isn’t much room. Kit’s bag occupies the chair beside mine, and Mom has set a dish in the middle that still needs a spoon.
“It’s in the drawer behind you,” she tells Magnus.
He gets it.
There was a time when seeing him in my parents’ kitchen would have made me watch everything at once: the chipped plate, Dad’s old sweater, whether Mom offered the right sort of drink. Today I am trying to get a burp out of Kit before my lunch goes cold.
He takes his time.
“Your food will keep,” Mom says.
“He’s thinking about it.”
Dad leans toward him. “Take your time. Nobody’s rushing you.”
Kit produces a noise that makes Magnus laugh before he can stop himself. I laugh too. For several seconds nobody has to decide what the afternoon means.
When Kit settles in the portable bassinet near my chair, Mom brings tea. Magnus waits until she is seated.
“I asked Dulcie if I could say this with her here.”
Dad puts down his cup.
“I lied to your daughter about the marriage I was offering her. I expected her to accept what I wanted because I had money and because she loved me. When she refused, I kept trying to make decisions for her.”
Mom’s hands close around her mug.
“At my mother’s house, you stood up for her. I treated you as though you were interfering. You were doing what I should have done.”
“You should have given her something honest to choose,” Mom says.
“Yes.”
Dad looks at him for a long time. “Would you have respected my daughter if she’d stayed easy to manage?”
Magnus doesn’t answer quickly. I am glad of that. An instant denial would make me want to leave the table.
“I would have told myself she was happy. I wouldn’t have had to look at what I was doing to her.”
“That’s not respect.”
“No.”
The refrigerator clicks. Kit sleeps through it.
“I’m sorry for the way I treated her, and for expecting you to help me bring her back. I won’t ask you to speak for me.”
“Good,” Dad says.
Mom gets up to take the teapot to the counter. She doesn’t touch Magnus’s shoulder as she passes. He doesn’t watch her as though she has forgotten something he is owed.
I take a bite of bread. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.
After lunch, Dad takes Kit to the living room. I hear the beginning of a detailed explanation of the lamp, followed by Mom telling him the baby has heard that one.
Magnus and I remain at the kitchen table.
We discussed the call yesterday. I told my director he wanted to correct the message he sent, and she gave me a time when she could listen. I said I wanted to be present. Nobody arranged it around me.
He sets his phone on the table and turns on the speaker. When she answers, he says who he is and that I am beside him.
“I had no authority to tell you Dulcie was leaving her job,” he says. “She hadn’t resigned. I sent that message because I had decided what I wanted her to do, without her agreement.”
“I understood that her employment decisions came from her,” the director says.
“Yes. I wanted to correct the impression I tried to give you.”
She pauses. “Thank you for making that clear. Dulcie, I’ll see you this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
We end the call.
Magnus looks at me. “Is there anything else you need me to correct with her?”
“No. She knows the rest.”
He nods. He doesn’t offer to drive me or say he might come inside.
Before he leaves, we confirm the practical things for Kit. The support is written down now. A lawyer Dad found through a friend read the terms before I agreed to anything and told me which two lines to have changed. Magnus changed them.
The money continues separately from visits, with no requirement that I report on my feelings before it arrives. I have kept my own savings and my own account. Nothing in the arrangement makes the rental his to inspect.
“If a visit changes because Kit or I need something different, it doesn’t change the support,” I say.
“It doesn’t.”
“Or depend on whether I ever come back.”
“No.”
He has already made the first payment on the day we agreed. It pays for things our son needs.
He says goodbye to Kit in the living room, checks the next visiting time with me, and leaves before I go to school.
The classroom smells of paper, soap, and the particular kind of glue that survives every attempt to clean a table.
For a moment I stand in the doorway and let it all reach me.
My colleague looks up from a tray of drying paintings. “You came on a quiet afternoon.”
Behind her, someone announces that a building has exploded. Another child says it has only fallen over because there was a giant.
“I can see that.”
She laughs and comes to hug me. She asks about Kit, then about me, waiting for both answers. I show her a photograph. She admires his cheeks and tells me the children have been asking whether he can walk yet.
“Some of them are impatient about staffing.”
I put my bag down in its old place.
The family-book pages are still on the wall, beneath OUR FAMILIES. The cover waits on the low shelf, but there are pages still needing words and drawings. The child who refused to draw a family has made a house with a door so large it takes up most of the paper.
He comes over while I am looking.
“That’s for everybody to get in.”
“You’ve made it very wide.”
“Otherwise they get stuck.”
I sit on the small chair beside him. My knees remember it before the rest of me does.
“Will you help me write the people?” he asks.
“When I’m back properly. Today I’m visiting.”
He considers whether this is acceptable, then shows me where my chair has been moved.
“They put it there.”
“Did you approve?”
“No.”
“We’ll have to investigate.”
At the next table, two children have reached the point of disagreement where each is holding the same piece of cardboard and calling it mine. My colleague is helping someone wash paint from a sleeve. I pull over a chair.
“What were you making?”
A garage, says one. A house for the animals, says the other. Both answers arrive at the same time.
I ask them to show me where the door would go. They point at opposite ends. I wait while they notice.
“They could have different doors,” one says.
The other thinks about it. “But the giraffe needs a big one.”
We find another piece of cardboard. I hold the first steady while they mark the openings. By the time my colleague returns, they are arguing about whether a giraffe can park in a garage. It is a much more useful argument.
She meets my eyes over their heads and smiles. I realize I have gone several minutes without wondering how I look or whether somebody is pleased with me. I have been listening to children and knowing what to ask next.
In the office, the director brings out the return schedule. We settle the first days for when Kit is nine weeks old, the hours already discussed before my leave, with room to review how they work. I write them in my own calendar.
She doesn’t ask whether Magnus agrees.
“I want to finish the book with them,” I say.
“They’re waiting for you.”
On my way out, I stop by the classroom again. A child presses a paper covered in circles into my hand.
“For your baby. They’re wheels.”
“He’ll be pleased. He doesn’t have any yet.”
I carry it carefully to the car.
At Mom and Dad’s, Kit is awake in Dad’s arms, listening to what appears to be a revised account of the lamp. He turns his head when I speak. I take him, breathe in the warm smell of him, and tell him I have brought an important present.
I put the drawing against the back of the sofa where Kit can see it, though he is much more interested in my face. I tell him about the giraffe and the very large garage door. Dad listens too, asking the sort of unnecessary question that would keep the classroom occupied for another twenty minutes.
For once I have a whole story to tell that begins somewhere other than my marriage.