“Breakfast!” I called. Ellie slouched down the stairs in slow motion, like she was dragging herself through reduced Nutella. I grabbed a box of Whole Foods’ pricy, organic version of Honey Nut Cheerios from the pantry, and scooped coffee into the filter. The phone began to buzz against my breast.
“Hello?”
“Did you just call?” Janet asked.
“Nope. I must have boob-dialed you.”
“I feel so special,” she said. “Did you see the story?”
“Just the headline.”
“Well, the article’s adorable, and the picture looks great.”
“Really?” Part of me felt relieved. Another part knew that Janet would tell me I looked cute even if the picture made me look like a manatee in a dress.
“Yeah, it’s . . . CONOR, PUT THAT DOWN!” I winced, poured water into the coffeemaker, and shook cereal into Ellie’s preferred Disney Princess bowl.
Ellie pouted. “I WANT FROOT LOOPS!”
Of course she did. Needless to say, I’d never fed her a Froot Loop in my life—all of her food was low in fat, high in fiber, hormone-free, made with whole grains and without high-fructose corn syrup, with, of course, its name correctly spelled. Dave’s mother, the Indomitable Doreen, had hosted her for a weekend, during which Ellie had discovered the wonders of highly processed sugary breakfast treats. “I only gave it to her once!” Doreen had told me, her voice laced with indignation, even though I’d asked in my least confrontational tone and hastened to reassure her that it was no big deal. Clearly, once had been enough.
“I’ll send you the link!” Janet said. I slid the coffeepot out from underneath the filter and replaced it with my aluminum travel mug. “Let me know if you need me to—DYLAN, WHERE’S YOUR JACKET?”
“I’ll see you tonight,” I said. Janet had three kids, five-year-old twins Dylan and Conor and a nine-going-on-nineteen-year-old daughter named Maya, whose pretty face seemed frozen in a sneer and who already regarded her mother as a hopeless embarrassment. Janet and I had met in the Haverford Reserve park when Ellie was two and I was still attempting (when we could still afford for me to attempt) the life of a nonworking stay-at-home mom. I’d gone to the park to kill the half hour between Little People’s Music and Tumblin’ Tots. Janet was standing in front of a bench with her hands over her eyes, a short, medium-sized woman with light-brown hair in a ponytail, Dansko clogs, and a gorgeous belted white cashmere coat that I correctly identified as a relic of her life as a career lady (no mother of small children would ever buy anything white). “Okay, ready?” she’d called.
Her boys nodded. They were dressed identically, in blue jeans and red-and-blue-striped shirts. Over a glass of wine, the first time we met for drinks, Janet told me that the boys shared a single wardrobe. After her third glass, she confided that she was convinced she’d mixed them up on the way home from the hospital, and that the boy she and Barry were calling Dylan was actually Conor, and vice versa.
“One . . . two . . . three . . .” she began. The boys had dashed away and hid as Janet counted slowly to twenty. When they were gone, she’d looked around, sat down on the bench, and picked up her latte and an issue of The New Yorker. I watched for a minute, waiting until she’d turned a page. Then I cleared my throat.
“Um . . . aren’t you going to look for them?”
“Well, sure. Eventually.” She closed her magazine and looked at me. She had a heart-shaped face, olive skin, and a friendly expression. She wasn’t beautiful—her eyes were a little too close together, her nose too big for her face—but she had a welcoming look, the kind of expression that invited conversation. She smiled as she watched me finish daubing Ellie’s cheeks with sunscreen, then start swabbing the bench with a sterilizing wipe.
“Your first?” Janet asked.
“However did you guess?” My stroller was parked in front of me. Hanging from the handlebars were recycled-plastic tote bags filled with fruits and vegetables that I would cook and cut up for the nutritious lunch Ellie would eat two bites of, then push around her plate. Tubes of sunscreen and Purell were tucked into the stroller’s mesh pocket, along with BPA-free containers of snacks and juice, and a copy of The Happiest Toddler on the Block—which I already suspected my daughter would never be—stuck out from the top of my pink-and-green paisley silk Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bag.
“All that effort,” Janet said, and shook her head. “I did all of that with my first. Sunscreen, hand sanitizer, organic everything, baby playgroup . . .”