The family cook, from long ago. When people like that were allowed. When you lived in your sparkly suburb, when Project Indigo consumed your life. But after the servants were long gone B kept bobbing up out of the blue, banging on the door of Salt Cottage and hollering for any grown-up to scat and yes yes, yada yada, the carrots would be mixed in with the bolognese sauce and the kids would be in bed by eight. And you knew he’d be teaching them to turn eyelids inside out and do the alphabet in burps, but Motl and you obeyed for they adored him, his stories and tickles and teasing and jokes, and it was a blessed circuit-break; a release, from the intensity of parenthood, for a couple of hours at least. He always outstayed his welcome and never went home when he should, as if he was always trying to slip into your family, as if there was nothing else. His mantra is that there are only three ways to live now: to participate, flee, or transcend. And he chooses to transcend. ‘With kids. Any I can get.’
And now, and now, it is time to surrender to trust.
Because B is Motl’s unmovable choice in this. The unlikely saviour: ‘Have some faith, Mrs, have some faith.’ But you’re just not sure about this man now embedded in your kids’ life.
Yet in that pale space right now, well, everything is upended, and you can only smile at that. Your children are suddenly in a dear white balloon of a room all hazy with a lemony light and the sun is bursting through clouds like tent ropes from heaven and life is good, so good, in this place. Certainty has spread through all three of them like parachutes floating them, gently, to the ground. Soli is renewed. Radiant. She hates not knowing, just like you; everything, always, has to be under control and now B is here and he’s a thread to her parents and everything is okay and she can hand over responsibility and her face is ironed out.
Examine everything carefully. Hold fast to that which is good.