Chapter 2
PATTY
The pajamas live in the bottom drawer of the guest room dresser — two pairs of Noah's, one pair of Maddie's she hasn't worn since she was nine.
I buy him a size up every winter. Last year's had rocket ships.
This year's have sharks, on account of a phase in July that has apparently been made permanent.
There are four rocks on the sill above the sink and nine drawings on the refrigerator under the magnets from the tire place.
Framed in the hall is a picture Maddie made in second grade of a house with six windows.
In the window on the right there are two stick people, one tall, one round.
I know which one is me because she gave me the glasses.
In the cabinet by the stove is the pancake mix I use for the dinosaur ones, which I buy two at a time.
The store moved it to the bottom shelf last spring, a discovery that cost me eleven minutes and which I complained about at length to a teenager in an apron.
They aren't hard, dinosaur pancakes. You pour the batter in a blob with a tail on it.
Noah has told me more than once, seriously, that mine are the best ones, because his mother's don't have tails.
I know Tessa's peanut allergy is contact and airborne both.
I know his teacher last year was Mrs. Bhandari, and the year before that Miss Kelly, who left to have a baby.
I know Maddie's flute lesson moved to Thursdays.
I know Noah runs a fever fast, that he goes quiet before he goes hot, that he'll tell you his legs hurt a good hour before the thermometer catches up.
I know he won't take the pink medicine off a syringe but will take it from the little cup if you let him hold the cup himself.
I know the pediatric office puts you on hold for eleven minutes at four in the afternoon and two minutes if you call at eight fifty-eight.
I know Maddie's locker combination, which she told me in September, made me swear about, and which I have never used.
I sat up the whole night of his ear infection last February, because Emily had the stomach thing herself.
I had him on my chest in the recliner from eleven until almost four.
When Jack came down at five thirty to make the coffee, he stood in the doorway a minute, then went for a blanket and put it over the both of us.
That's what I have. I would not trade it.
That Wednesday he wanted the sharks on before dinner, which is not how it goes. Pajamas come after the bath at his mother's house. At mine there's no bath, so pajamas are whenever, a thing he has known since he was four and has never once mentioned to Emily, because he isn't stupid.
"They're clean," I said. "I did them Sunday."
"Are they in the drawer?"
"Where else would they be."
He went and got them himself, then came back with the shirt on backward, tag under his chin, so I turned it around while he stood there with his arms up like a man being fitted for a suit.
"These are getting short."
"They're not."
"Your wrists are out."
"That's how they go," he said, which settled it. Then he wanted to know if sharks sleep. I said I'd look it up. He said he already knew, which is his way of saying he wants to hear it twice.
Emily called at four fifteen to say she'd be closer to seven than six thirty. Behind her I could hear a lockbox rattling and a man saying something about the crawlspace.
"Is he eating?"
"He'll eat here."
"Don't let him have the peanut butter crackers before dinner."
"Too late."
"Patty."
"He had two."
"He had six."
"He had four," I said, which was true, which she accepted, which is roughly how we've run things for six years.
"Did he do the reading log?"
"He did four pages of it."
"That's not four pages, that's four minutes."
"It's four pages, Emily."
After I hung up he wanted to know if he could watch the shark one.
I said after dinner. He wanted to know whether after dinner meant after the eating part or after the dishes part, and I told him it meant after the dishes part, which is how a person gets a six-year-old to carry his own plate to the sink.
I put that plate in the dishwasher and went straight back to thinking about the word.
Jack came in at five with the ballgame still going low in the truck, loud enough that I could hear it through the window. He kissed my head and went to the sink.
"Chicken again?"
"Pork chops."
"Even better."
"Don't say that until you've had them."
I let him get through the hand washing. I let him get the towel. Then I said, "Why did you correct her?"
He turned around with the towel still in his hands. "Who?"
"Ms. Ocampo. In the parking lot."
"Oh." He hung the towel on the oven bar crooked. I straightened it, and he didn't notice. "She had it wrong on the list."
"Had what wrong."
"Your name." He got a glass down. "I didn't want it printed wrong on a nametag and then you're standing in a room full of people with a thing on your shirt that isn't your name."
"It's a first-grade nametag."
"Still." He filled the glass at the tap and drank half of it standing up with his elbow out, the way he does. "I figured you'd rather have it right."
"Right."
"Yeah."
I laid the chops in the pan, which was hot enough that they made the noise, and for a second I let that be the only thing in the room.
"The kids have always called me Patty," I said.
"That's what I told her."
"Have they?"
He set the glass down. "What do you mean, have they."
"I mean have they always."
"Since Maddie could talk."
"Okay."
I turned the chops. There's a moment when you turn a pork chop where you find out whether you waited long enough. I had. They came up brown and clean off the pan. I was weirdly pleased about that, with the rest of me working somewhere else, because I had just remembered something.
Last October — not this October, last one. Noah was five. We were at the Halloween thing at the fire station, where they open the bay doors so the kids can sit up in the truck. I was standing there holding two cups of cider when he came running back with his hat in his hand.
"Grandma Pat," he said. "Grandma Pat, they let me honk it."
And Jack said it light, easy, not unkind, in the exact voice you'd use to tell a kid his shoe was untied. "Patty, bud."
A fireman was lifting the next one up into the cab. Somebody's radio crackled somewhere back in the bay.
And Noah said okay, because he was five. He took the cider out of my hand, drank half, gave me back the rest.
Standing in my own kitchen a year later with a fork in my hand, that memory came at me the way a step does when it isn't there.
"Jack."
"Mm."
"Last year at the fire station. Noah called me Grandma Pat."
He was looking at his phone. "Did he?"
"You told him it was Patty."
He looked up. "I don't remember that."
"I do."
"Okay." He set the phone face down. "Then I probably did. What's — is something wrong?"
Is something wrong. The eyebrows doing what they do. He meant it, too. He's been asking me that for fifteen years, and he has believed every no I ever handed him.
"How many times have you done that?"
"Done what?"
"Corrected somebody."
He actually thought about it, standing there in his work pants with his hands on the counter behind him, looking up at the ceiling the way he does when he's counting something.
"I don't know. When it comes up."
"How often does it come up?"
"Patty."
"I'm asking."
"It comes up," he said. "Kids get it mixed up. Teachers guess. The dental office had you down as grandmother one time on Maddie's form and I fixed it, because if there's ever an actual emergency you want the paperwork clean."
"The dental office."
"That's a real thing. If somebody's got to consent to treatment — "
"I'm not talking about consent forms."
"I know."
"I'm talking about a six-year-old at a fire station."
He didn't say anything.
"He was five," I said. "He wasn't filling out a form. He'd just honked a fire truck."
"I know how old he was."
"Then what were you protecting?"
"Nothing. It's — " He made a shape in the air with one hand, a leveling motion. "You let a kid start calling people whatever, then you've got two of everything, then somebody's counting."
"Who's counting?"
"Nobody's counting."
"You just said somebody's counting."
"I said then somebody's counting. That's the whole reason you don't let it start."
The pan had gotten too loud. I moved it off the burner, then I shut off the fan over the stove as well, so there was nothing left in that room to talk over.
"I've never made a thing out of this," I said. "Have I."
"No."
"Fifteen years."
"Patty — "
"I'm not making a thing out of it now. I'm asking you a question and you keep answering a different one."
He put his hands up an inch, palms out, that peacekeeping gesture. "What's the question?"
"Who told you to do that?"
"Nobody told me to do anything."
"Then why is it automatic?"
"It's not automatic."
"It came out of you in half a second in a parking lot."
He opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he took the towel off the oven bar, folded it, hung it back up crooked, and that time I let it be.
"I'm going to go change," he said.
"Jack."
He stopped in the doorway with his back to me.
"I'm not angry."
"I know."
"I don't think you do."
He waited a second, then went up. If he'd thought I was angry he'd have stayed in that doorway and argued with me about it.
I heard him on the stairs, then the closet door, then the drawer that sticks. I stood in my kitchen with two pork chops going cold and understood the thing in the plain flat way you understand that the milk has turned.
It wasn't a slip in a parking lot. It was a policy, and I'd been living inside it for years without anybody telling me it was there.