She’d meant to do this task alone, but impulsively she picked up Milo early from preschool, right before nap, which she knew would win his gratitude. He hates nap. He hasn’t napped since he was two and a half. “Naps are stupid,” he likes to say. “Naps are jackass.” Though she knows she shouldn’t let him say jackass, she’s so amused by the way he uses it as an adjective that she finds it hard to make him stop. She loves the vehemence of his pronouncements. She loves the smile that breaks across his face when he sees her. She loves the appreciative sound he makes—mmmm—when she gives him a bite of something good. Where they let her hang her signs, she buys a treat for herself and Milo to show her gratitude. So far they’ve had real lemonade, fries, a blueberry muffin, and they’re topping it all off with an ice cream cone, sitting at a little table in a café that looks like a log cabin. The ice cream is an enormous scoop of dripping chocolate that she’s ceded entirely to Milo, who’s struggling mightily to conquer it. “You need to lick around the bottom,” she says. He pushes his whole tongue against the top, shifting the scoop into a dangerous tilt. “No, the bottom,” she says. “The bottom. Do you want me to show you?”
“I can do it,” he says, loudly, and she looks away, resisting the urge to snatch the thing from him before it ends up on the floor, or in her lap. Looking away, she catches the eye of a woman at the cash register. The woman is waiting for her change, holding a brown bag of something to go, and for some reason she is turned around, looking at Jennifer. Jennifer freezes, but the woman immediately breaks her gaze, returning her attention to the girl behind the counter. Jennifer turns her own head, too, but she is in the grip of adrenaline now, adrenaline that tells her to be watchful, to be ready at any moment to flee, and she keeps the woman in her peripheral vision. The woman probably just glanced over because Milo was loud. She knows this. She should shake the habit of bracing for confrontation.
But then the woman looks again, and once her change is in her hand she approaches, fumbling with her purse. Time stretches, as in the slow slide into a car wreck. There is endless time, and yet somehow not enough time to stop what’s about to happen. Milo is still fighting his ice cream cone, chasing the drips around the side with his tongue. They’re faster than he is. Some part of Jennifer registers that his frustration is building, but there’s no time, either, to head off the tantrum or the tears. The woman gets very close, her head cocked like she’s trying to place Jennifer’s face. Her expression is pleasant as she does this, but it could morph, at any moment, into wary confusion, or even horror. “I recognize you, don’t I?” she says. Jennifer absorbs these words with the vacant calm of someone who expected disaster. In the last year she’s developed the ability to climb down into the deepest part of herself as if into a storm cellar, pulling a trapdoor shut behind her. After three weeks on the Mountain she hasn’t lost the skill. At the woman’s question, she is gone. It is her body, and not herself, that answers, “I don’t know.”
Now the woman looks at Milo, who is growling at his cone. Nothing conforms to our wishes, not other people, not ice cream, which must insist on melting, dripping sticky down our hands. “Yes,” the woman says. “I’ve seen you two at the playground.”
“Oh,” Jennifer says. She nearly sways in her seat, and puts her hand on the table. “That’s right,” she adds, hardly knowing what she’s saying. “I recognize you now.”
“My son and—I’m sorry, what’s his name?”
“Milo,” Jennifer says, and Milo looks up, snaps, “What?”
“That’s right, Milo. My son and Milo have played together. I think they’re about the same age.”
“What, Mommy?” Milo asks.
“Nothing,” Jennifer says. “I was just telling her your name.”
Milo shoots the woman a look, wearing a deep, disgruntled frown. “Why?”
“You played with her little boy at the playground, remember?”
Milo cocks his head, his expression suddenly pleasant. “What’s his name?”
“It’s Ben,” the woman says. “And I’m Megan.”
“Jennifer,” Jennifer says. “Nice to meet you.” She’d offer her hand to shake, but she’s afraid it would be trembling.
“Megan and Jennifer.” The woman—Megan—laughs. Jennifer is bewildered. She’s back in her body, but sluggish, as if she’s been sedated. “We just need a Heather,” Megan says. “Seventies names.” Jennifer tries a polite chuckle.
“Where’s Ben?” Milo says. He’s given up on his ice cream, dropping it onto his napkin on the table, where it pools and spreads. He wipes his fingers on his pants, which doesn’t get his fingers clean but does distribute the mess.
“He’s at school,” Megan says. “He goes to the preschool at the church in Sewanee.”
“That’s where I go!” Milo says. Understanding dawns in his face. “I know Ben,” he says. “He has Spider-Man shoes.”
“Oh,” Megan says, glancing at Jennifer, who interprets that glance as question or judgment.
“Sometimes I get him before nap,” she says. “He doesn’t nap anymore, and it’s hard on him to lie there quietly for two hours.”
But Megan doesn’t care about naps, or why Milo isn’t in school. “We should get them together,” she says. “Set up a playdate.”
“Yes,” Milo says, “yes, yes, yes.” He’s bouncing in his seat, chanting the word. Megan laughs again. Jennifer gives herself an inner slap. Be normal, she exhorts herself. Be friendly. She can almost remember how it’s done. “Hmmm,” she says, playacting. “I get the feeling Milo would like that.”