Freya and Tom were waiting outside Kamp Wahoo with Phoebe Figgs. Kay was 20 minutes late. “I’m so sorry.”
Phoebe had been with 60 children for more than eight hours. She was unimpressed. “Pick up is between 4 and 4:15.”
“It won’t happen again.”
But Phoebe looked like she knew otherwise.
On the way home, they stopped for ice cream at Foxy’s. Tom, with his Moose Tracks, leaned against her, and Freya, with her vanilla chocolate dip, sat close enough for Kay to place a hand on her thigh. Freya didn’t move away, she softened, put her head on Kay’s shoulder.
“Mum, when can I get my ears pierced?”
“When you’re 11.”
“But Najma already has hers done.”
“Have we already had this discussion? I seem to remember—”
“Please, pleeez, Mum, everyone has pierced ears. I’m like a freak.”
Tom mugged: “When can I get my ears pierced?”
“I think your nose.” Freya pinched it for good measure.
Then the phone rang.
Kay knew who it was.
“Mum, Mum.”
She should tell him about Ammon. She should say, “You know that trap? I met the kook responsible.” She should tell him about the basement and Frank and Maria. They would have a chat, a conversation, back and forth, they would wonder, they would puzzle over it, conclude together.
“Your phone, Mum.”
Tom tapped her thigh.
Freya grabbed her handbag, rummaged inside. “It’s probably Dad.”
The ringing stopped. Freya held the phone aloft. “It was Dad.”
A car drove past, a dog leaning out the window, smiling and barking, tongue out. Kay watched the dog. Who was to say it was well-treated at home? Only that moment of being mattered, the open window, the smells striating the air, the rush of wind on its fur. The car turned into traffic, abandoning Kay to herself and the dark, oily matter that filled her.
She smiled at her daughter. “We’d better call him back, then.”
“Daddy!” They said when he answered. “Daddy!” How complete their delight.
“I’m learning to dive,” Freya told him. “I have to go up on the diving board and it’s really high, and the first time I got water up my nose, and it was, like, the worst ice cream rush ever.”
When Tom’s turn was done—a long story about a child at camp who’d choked on a carrot stick and Mrs. Figgs had hit him on the back and the carrot popped out all covered in green gunky stuff—he handed the phone over to Kay. “Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Hello.” She wondered if the children would note her formal tone.
“I’m sorry to ask you this.” He didn’t sound sorry. What did sorry sound like from Michael? “But I need you to pay Pearl Street Digital. Take it from the general account. I’ll send you an email with the details.”
“Of course, no problem.”
“How are you?”
“Fine. We’re all fine. And you?”
“Delayed in Schipol. Severe winds over the Sahara. Flights canceled.”
Kay wondered if this was a euphemism for a boutique hotel in Amsterdam, two days with Barbara, wandering the canals arm in arm.
“I’d better go,” he said.
She didn’t hang up right away; she was certain there must be something else to say. He was still speaking, but it took her a moment to grasp that he was not speaking with her, his voice muffled.
Accidentally, he hadn’t disconnected the call. He was saying, “Has Morton got those permissions yet?” to someone else.
To Barbara?
Has Morton got those permissions yet?
His life out there, his Action Man life of permissions, permits, locations, sandstorms in the Sahara. While she groveled on her knees disinterring apple cores from the sofa. Did Barb, in her chic Italian culottes, know what happened to a doll’s hair if you held it over an open flame? Did she know it wouldn’t go nice and curly; rather it would shrink and wad in a stinking mass and the doll’s face wilt like old wax? Did she know how to comfort a child holding this Burn Victim Barbie? The pathos required?
Kay swallowed hard. Her bitterness appalled her. She ushered her children toward the car. As if there was urgency, purpose. But there was only dinner and the savage mortality of motherhood.