“I left my daughter alone for over two hours. When she was eighteen months. You?”
“My son fell out of a tree. On my watch.”
“How old? How high?”
“Three. Very. He broke his leg. He was playing in his tree house. I was right there, but I had my back turned. I was texting. It happened in a minute. Silas decided that he wanted to fly. My wife. My ex-wife, told the hospital what happened.”
“And now you’re here.”
“And now I’m here.” Tucker raises his plastic cup.
She knows she should have higher standards, that she’s perhaps attaching too much importance to his height, the feeling that if she were in danger, she could take refuge in his body, that all he’d have to do is wrap her in his arms and she could hide. She used to love how tiny she felt next to Gust.
She’s not the only one who’s found a favorite. All around them, conversations are hungry and rushed. Mothers are sauntering on the lawn. Fathers are weighing their options. Several older dolls are overheard calling their parents “embarrassing.”
In his old life, Tucker was a scientist. He designed drug trials for a pharmaceutical firm. He owns a house in Germantown, had been remodeling one room at a time. A friend is staying there this year. He’s paying that friend to remodel the kitchen. Frida asks about his prognosis for return.
Tucker turns red. “Do we have to talk about that? I am a father learning to be a better man.”
“Seriously? That’s what they have you say? We have to say ‘I am a narcissist. I am a danger to my child.’ Does that mean you’re getting him back?”
“If I don’t blow it. My counselor said my chances are fair. What about you?”
“Fair to poor.”
Tucker gives her a sympathetic look. The words don’t hurt as much as they usually do. Loneliness clouds Frida’s judgment. If there were no fence and no dolls and no consequences, she’d take him to the woods.
“Why did you do it?”
Startled by his candor, she begins telling him about her one very bad day, but her explanations sound especially pathetic after eight months in uniform. She tells him about leaving the house to buy a coffee, driving to work for the forgotten file, how she thought she’d return right away. She admits to wanting a break. He admits he left out some details. He was texting another woman when Silas fell.
“I know, I know. It’s so cliché.”
“It is.”
She asks the woman’s age, bracing herself, feels relieved when he says the woman is older, a colleague. That it was a flirtation, not an affair. They compare divorces. Tucker’s hasn’t been finalized. His ex-wife has custody. She’s taken up with the father of one of their son’s friends. A writer. A fucking stay-at-home dad. Tucker’s expression turns ugly as he complains about the new man. His anger makes her nervous. This might be how she looks when she talks about Susanna. One minute reasonable, the next blinded by fury.
“I should go,” she says. He touches her elbow, sending a shiver through her whole body. She remembers Will leading her to his room.
“You’re judging,” Tucker says.
“That’s what we do here.” She gets up and goes to look for Emmanuelle, asks Emmanuelle to say goodbye to Jeremy.
Tucker is still watching her. “Stay,” he says. “I’m enjoying this. Aren’t you?”
Frida returns to her chair. Tucker puts his arm around the back of her seat. She should be thinking about her daughter. She can’t risk losing Harriet because of a man who let his son fall out of a tree.
* * *
The mothers compare notes at dinner: which fathers are creepy, which are fuckable, which are spoken for, which seem gay. Beth says Frida is practically married. Meryl says Tucker is old and super basic, but he has a full head of hair and seems like he might have money.
Frida shares what she learned about the fathers’ program. Her classmates shake their heads. They’re surprised, but not. They’re angriest about the phone privileges. The rumors that the fathers’ evaluations are easier. The rumors that the technical department handles all changes of blue liquid.
Frida tells them about Tucker’s almost cheating on his ex. His son’s broken leg. Linda says it’s all relative. The trio of middle-aged white women are thirsting for an insurance salesman who hit his fourteen-year-old daughter and made her buy drugs for him. There are some truly harmless men, fathers whose only crime was poverty, but they met bad fathers who spanked, bad fathers who broke arms and dislocated shoulders, bad-father alcoholics, bad-father meth addicts, some ex-cons. One man, who might be mentally ill, said he doesn’t want to leave. He’d do the course a second time. He told Beth that life at the school is better. Three meals a day, air-conditioning, a bed. He couldn’t get over the size of the mothers’ campus.