Cutting Teeth(52)

“I—I didn’t know you worked here,” she stammers.





TWENTY-TWO




“Mission accomplished?” Darby asks her husband upon his return from putting Lola down for bed, now looking about an inch shorter than when he’d left to head upstairs.

Well, don’t look at me that way, she thinks defensively. It’s not her fault she had the wherewithal to call dibs on Jack this evening because everyone knows Jack is the easier one to get to bed—much less time spent on negotiations that go nowhere—and yet she does feel a little at fault. Like, as the mother, it’s always her sworn duty and hers alone to take care of the hardest bits, the way the Secret Service has to take a bullet for the president. Where did that stupid feature come from, anyway? It seems hardwired into her, but who programmed it there? That’s what she would like to know. Whether this bug might be one that’s fixed for future versions of mothers. She has her doubts.

Darby leans down to try to stuff another dinner plate into the dishwasher, never a method to her madness, dishes face this way and that. It used to drive Griff bonkers, but now they’ve got bigger problems, so that’s nice.

He shrugs. “She kept trying to tell me this story about this photograph in her picture frame. It’s that woman. You know the one? On her dresser. I don’t recognize who it is—”

“Oh, shoot.” Darby pauses to switch on the garbage disposal. She lets the rattle die. “That’s the one that comes in the frame when you buy it. The stock image. I haven’t changed it out yet.” She’s not nearly as embarrassed about this as she should be. She’s been meaning to replace it with the photo of Lola petting a stingray for her birthday at the aquarium, but then never got the picture printed. She used to get pictures printed all the time. She took disposable cameras to sleepaway camps and college parties. Such a surprise to get the photographs back, opening the flap of the envelope and sliding the glossy pictures out to flip through, careful to avoid fingerprints. It feels sort of pointless now. She has gobs of pictures on her phone. It runs out of memory space at an alarming rate. She’s the queen of pulling out her camera right after her kids do something particularly cute or precocious, Darby’s voice in the background, What were you saying about your bear? Tell me again that thing about your brother? Could you sing that song for Mommy, just one more time, please? Her children stare blankly at the camera, or worse, pick their noses. Darby can’t imagine not taking this detailed record of her kids. She can’t imagine how it would look if she had a lock screen on her phone depicting a background other than Jack and Lola looking adorable. It’s like wearing a wedding ring out in public. You don’t have to, but you really should if you don’t want to invite questions about your commitment. And so it is: Her phone, like her brain, is running out of mental space thanks to her to children.

“How long’s it been in there?” he asks, more amused than accusatory. He looks different in a way she can’t quite put her finger on. More grown-up? Less Griff-like? No, that can’t be it, but she has the strangest feeling she hasn’t gotten a proper look at him in a while. That day, that day on which Miss Ollie died, seems to have permanently messed with her mind.

She rips a paper towel off the roll and begins swiping it over the glass-top stove. She made a chicken and quinoa concoction she learned about on TikTok that didn’t come out right or, if it did, wasn’t very good. “About a year so far,” she says. “I’m thinking of making that my next New Year’s resolution. What do you think?”

“I think it’s prudent not to try to take on too much, yeah,” he teases, though, truth be told, she can’t guarantee the next eight months will proceed any differently from the last twelve, so it’s entirely possible that stock photo image will still be there, waiting for her, come January.

“She had this whole backstory about the woman,” Griff says. “She has a mean little daughter who steals things from Lola and won’t give them back. She was getting really worked up about it. I had to take the picture down and put it on our dresser.”

“She’s pretending.” Darby considers. “And stalling.”

“I don’t know. It’s weirder than that, though. It’s like she doesn’t know the difference sometimes between real and imaginary. It’s just—”

She stops wiping the stove. “What?” Her heart stomps around in her rib cage.

“I don’t want to say it.” He shakes his head.

“Say it,” she insists. The not saying it is worse, obviously.

“Creepy,” he mumbles.

“Don’t say that,” she snaps at him, and he gives her this look like, Have you lost your mind, woman? “We’re her parents.” As if that settles it. Game over. Sorry, she just doesn’t understand what he’s after, what point he needs to prove.

Lola is quirky, maybe even a tiny bit weird. So what if she makes up elaborate histories for strange photographs. And has tantrums that are maybe on the more aggressive end of the spectrum. And fibs on occasion. You know who else was probably a tiny bit weird? Mozart. Picasso. Bobby Fischer, if he’s even real. Though so far no signs point to Lola being a genius. Jeffrey Dahmer probably wasn’t the most normal four-year-old either and he likely hadn’t even started eating people yet, so in that regard, Lola does happen to have a head start.