Chapter 4
COLT
The kid bites me.
Not a nibble. Not a gumming. A full-commitment, top-and-bottom-teeth bite on the meaty part of my right hand between the thumb and forefinger, delivered with the intensity of a creature three times her size and no hesitation.
I check my hand. Rosie watches me check it with an expression of complete indifference and wipes her nose on my shirt.
I'm sitting on the floor of the diner because I was moving chairs and the kid was on the floor and …
Somehow the sequence of events is unclear to me even as it's happening.
Rosie spent the first two minutes ignoring me, the next thirty seconds biting me, and is now dumping the contents of a sippy cup onto my boots with the focused precision of someone conducting an experiment.
"She does this," Joelle calls from the kitchen. I can see her through the serving window, chopping something. "Ride it out."
I stay on the floor. My boots are wet. My hand has a semicircle of tooth marks turning pink. Rosie sets down the empty cup and looks at me like she's deciding what to destroy next.
She picks up a plastic cup from a stack I'd put on the table, one of the cups Joelle bought for the Christmas dinner. It’s the kind that comes in sleeves of fifty from the Dollar Store. She holds it up, examines it, and throws it across the floor. It bounces off the base of the counter and rolls.
I pick it up and give it back to her.
She throws it again.
I'm reaching for it the third time when Joelle appears in the kitchen doorway with a knife in one hand and an onion in the other.
"You know you don't have to keep giving it back."
I hold the cup. "She seems to want it."
"She wants to throw something. The cup is incidental."
I put the cup on the counter, out of reach. Rosie tracks it with her eyes, calculates the distance, gives it up. She reaches down instead and pulls my boot lace out with a yank that has real conviction behind it.
Joelle goes back to the kitchen.
Rosie pulls the lace. I watch. She pulls it again, the whole length this time, and holds it up like a prize.
I don't know how old she is, but what I know is she's operating on a logic I can't follow, which is a feeling I'm getting used to in this diner.
She puts the lace down. Picks it up. Puts it down.
Then the rhythm changes. She stops pulling it toward herself and starts setting it on my knee. Picks it up, sets it on my knee. The motion is the same but the direction has turned around.
Oh! She's handing it to me.
I sit with that longer than the moment probably calls for. A kid I've known for forty minutes, who bit me and emptied a cup on my boots, has decided to start giving me things. There's no reason it should do anything to me. It does it anyway.
And I think about Brenna.
She used to tell me I was never in the room.
I argued it then. I was in the room. I was right there.
I was at the desk in the next room making the money that paid for the room.
I get it now, sitting on a diner floor with a wet boot and a kid's shoelace on my knee.
This is the room. The floor is the room.
The part where nothing gets built and nothing gets solved and a small person hands you a lace for no reason and the only job you have is to be there to take it.
That was the room the whole time, and I spent ten years standing another one.
I take the lace. Hold it. Rosie grabs it back and the game starts over, and I let it, because apparently I have nowhere I'd rather be than the floor of this diner losing a contest to a toddler. That is new information about myself that I will examine later.
Joelle comes back. I don't know how much time has passed. Twenty minutes, maybe. The kitchen smells like onions and Rosie is sitting on the floor between my legs with my boot lace in one hand and a piece of tinsel she's found somewhere in the other.
Joelle stands in the doorway and looks at us. Whatever's on my face, she reads it and the corner of her mouth moves.
She crosses the room. She puts her hand on my forearm, the bare part, between the rolled-up sleeve and the wrist. Her fingers are cold and the cold runs straight up the arm to a place it has no business landing.
I have spent two years memorizing her hands from the wrong side of a coffeepot.
This is the first time one of them has been on me. I hold very still.
"Thank you," she says, softly, because the diner is empty and there's no one to perform brightness for.
I don't know what to say back, which is standard.
I look at her hand on my arm, then at her face, then at her hand again.
Her knuckles are red. There's a piece of onion skin on her sleeve.
I want to tell her that I'd sit on this floor every night for the rest of my life if it kept that hand on my arm.
What I actually do is nothing, because the distance from that to my mouth is infinite.
She takes her hand back. The spot warm up after it's gone.
Rosie drops the boot lace and reaches for her mom. Joelle picks her up and carries her to the booth by the window and sets her down. Rosie curls against the vinyl, puts her thumb in her mouth, closes her eyes, and is asleep before her shoulders settle. One second upright, the next flat.
"She'll be out for a bit," Joelle says. "She runs until she drops. Always has."
Joelle goes back to the kitchen.
I get up from the floor, which takes longer than it should.
I sit in the booth across from Rosie. She's breathing through her mouth.
The tinsel is held tight in her fist. Her pigtails are crooked, one higher than the other, tied with rubber bands that don't match, and I find I have feelings about the rubber bands not matching that I am not equipped to process.
Here is what I understand, sitting across from this sleeping kid: if I move, the booth might creak, and if the booth creaks she might wake, and if she wakes, the hour Joelle needs in that kitchen is gone.
The whole calculation is that simple and that total.
There is nothing else I have to do tonight. There is nothing else I want to do.
Through the serving window, Joelle glances out at me. I see her mouth move: you can move.
I don't.
Rosie's hand opens in her sleep and the tinsel falls onto the booth seat. Her fingers curl around nothing and then relax.
I stay put.
It's the most useful I've felt in seven years, and I haven't done a single thing.