“No. Steve can’t carry boxes. He plants sunflower seeds around the lawn.”
“Steve gardens?”
“He puts sunflower seeds in his mouth and then he sprinkles them all over the lawn, so we’re going to have plenty of sunflowers in case we have to stay up here for many years and never come down to the city.”
Nat continued to rabbit on about Steve and apocalypse while Karen reached into the hole and carefully extracted a wrinkled and partly torn Teva active sandals box in the unfortunately combined colors of tan, yellow, and brown, the v in “Teva” presented as a pair of wings draped over the adjoining letters. Who came up with this typography? And didn’t Masha and Senderovsky get into a discussion about this missing box last night?
“So wait,” Karen said, “if Steve didn’t bring the box down here, who did?”
Nat looked at Karen with worried eyes. Anxiety presented itself as a dry patch at the back of her palate. It made her want to burst out in nervous language, what she had overheard her mother call monologuing. The dilemma: Was it right to share a secret about her daddy with Aunt Karen? At dinner Aunt Karen said many things about her father, the kinds of things the teachers at Nat’s Kindness Academy would consider “out of bounds” and which Nat often overheard with great interest from her square on the Quiet Mat. But Mommy had explained to her before the guests arrived that older people liked to “make fun,” that was how they showed love for one another, by making jokes that sometimes sounded cruel—for example, that Daddy was a “bad dresser.” Karen was very handy with such jokes, but Mommy explained she was a very loving person underneath. （Underneath what?） And probably the Teva box was part of a game, a scavenger hunt for grown-ups. So it was okay to reveal the truth.
“Daddy put it in Steve’s hole.”
“What?”
“And he didn’t even ask Steve’s permission,” Nat whispered.
“Well, that’s very interesting,” Karen said. She stood up, her joints creaking. “You know what we should do?” Nat shook her head, excited to be part of the game. “Let’s take the secret box to my bungalow, make sure it’s safe from Steve, and then figure out our next steps.”
“Yay!” Nat shouted.
“Let’s do it quietly and make sure no one sees us.”
They ran up the hill like spies broaching an enemy compound, sneaking serious looks back and forth. Oh, my heart, thought Karen as she watched Nat run ahead of her, a singular mole at the nape of her neck, her arms engaged in jerky jogging motions she must have picked up from her father on the rare occasion he had to move quickly. Karen didn’t know how to talk to a child. She wasn’t like Masha with her “prairie dog kisses.” And yet the child had sought her out first thing in the morning. Karen and her sister Evelyn also had their version of the Quiet Mat when they were Nat’s age, when English was still as thick as oatmeal in Karen’s mouth, although, unlike Nat, they also had each other.
Karen opened the door to her bungalow, and the breathless child scurried inside, jumping on a beanbag, which must have been Sasha’s or Masha’s attempt to channel the American idea of “families.” There were also several framed Dr. Seuss posters, rough faux-Scandinavian wooden toys, and a board game called Love Is Letting Go of Fear—in other words, the waiting room of a child psychologist.
And so what? Karen thought. Was this not better than growing up in Elmhurst with her own parents, where every word and every gesture was a command, a note of displeasure, an infringement on childhood’s sovereignty? Was this not progress? Who was she to criticize Nat’s parents? At least one of them was trying.
They settled in front of each other on a Southwestern-style area rug with their legs crossed. Karen was about to open the box ceremoniously but thought better of it. “Let me just make sure it’s nothing bad,” she said to Nat.
“What do you mean by ‘bad’？”
“Something for adults only.” Nat opened her mouth with pleasure. Many things were converging in her mind: grown-ups “making fun,” a groundhog’s residence being conscripted for nefarious purposes, a box that was “for adults only.” All this, too, seemed tied to the Actor’s bestowal of approval last night, all these signs of new beginnings, alliances, and responsibilities. Nat wanted to grow up, but not entirely. Although she and college were separated by exactly one decade, Nat dreamed of attending the one in the neighboring village so that she could still be close to her mommy. She had heard that many graduates of her Kindness Academy ended up at that exact college. The collegians drove large hand-me-down cars into her village, where a burrito restaurant catered to them, and moved at a leisurely pace around the two main thoroughfares, sometimes pausing to point out something in a store window and laugh. Unlike Nat’s young classmates, they never seemed to carry books around or read them, no Llama Llama Red Pajama for them, but they often gave Nat a hazy smile （they were stoned） that seemed to be an invitation to join them someday, to wear pointy glasses and drink tall horchatas from a single straw.