1. The kids, of course.
2. The house. Its wainscoting in every room. Its claw-foot tubs. The butler’s bell that still works. The only slightly chipped stained glass window in the front foyer. The maze of crooked stairs and multiple stairways that lead to each floor. The nicotiana that blooms beside the front porch and fills the evening air with its sweet smell. My bookshelf-lined office. The screened-in porch that inexplicably juts from that office, even though it’s on the second floor. The house is the kind of house I imagined myself in as a child growing up in a split ranch in Indiana. Of course, I also imagined a husband but I won’t go there.
3. My monthly column “Food Is Fun!” in Family. My job is to create recipes that are healthy, interesting, and delicious. Nothing like creamed canned tuna on toast like my own mother used to make. Instead, I write about things like fun Asian food—cold noodles with peanut butter sauce, steamed dumplings, wilted bok choy. The kids hate this food I make for the column. They want what they call “real food”—macaroni and cheese from a box, chicken nuggets, fish sticks. Still, every Friday night, after a week of researching ideas and writing my column, we all sit down together and test my recipes. They grimace and gag and spit out my carefully rolled turkey meatballs, my tortellini with a creamy artichoke heart sauce, my delicate flan. “Kids love cream sauce,” I write later that night, after my own kids have gorged themselves on nacho cheese tortilla chips and gone to bed. “And they will take to artichoke hearts the way our generation took to SpaghettiO’s.”
I like this column because I get to be creative, for one thing, and because I get to bring in $2500 a month, which makes me feel independent from my no-good, suddenly incredibly wealthy, married to somebody else husband. I mean ex-husband. But I won’t go there.
4. My cookbook, Cooking for Kids Is Fun!. It sold moderately well in big cities like Boston and Los Angeles and failed miserably in places like my own home state of Indiana. The book is filled with sidebars about things like the joys of berry picking with your kids, then going home and making fresh jams and cobblers. On the back cover is a black-and-white picture of me grinning foolishly, with a somber Cody on one side of me and a scowling Madeline on the other, standing in front of our 1919 enamel Glenwood stove, looking like we were straight out of Little House on the Prairie. Did I mention that I also love that stove?
5. (or is it 6?) Family is sending me to Italy to research authentic Italian recipes. When I get back, I get to write a feature called “Traveling With Kids Is Fun!” My editor, Jessica, a single, childless woman in her twenties, is delighted by even the moderate success of the cookbook. “I’ve got big plans for you,” Jessica said, and on my good days I imagine summers in Asia, in South America, in India. I imagine more cookbooks, a wider audience. I imagine myself as famous as that wonderful ex-husband of mine, Scott, as rich as Scott. That’s on my good days. Did I mention that I don’t like Jessica? She is fifteen years younger than I am, a real blonde, a Harvard graduate. She dates an MTV talk show host. She wears short dresses and knee-high suede boots in colors like lavender and baby blue. Jessica is a hard person to like.
7. (or is it 6? There is no 7 (or is it 6?))
I took that list and folded it very small, the way I folded notes in school that were not meant for just anybody to read. It proved things, this list. It proved that my mother did not like Jessica even though whenever she talked to her on the phone she gushed and said things like, “You are something else!” It proved my mother was crazy jealous of my father, just because he was brave and smart and had done something meaningful with his life, unlike her. It proved how insincere and insecure she was. How could a person like my mother keep a person like my father in love with her? If she had been different, someone more like his new wife, Ava, we would still be a family. The list proved everything.
On the way to school the morning after our mother gave us the thrilling news about the trip to Italy, Cody made an announcement: He was afraid. He was afraid of Mount Vesuvius erupting and then burning us to death while we were in Italy. But I knew, and even our mother knew, that he was also afraid of swimming in the ocean because there could be sharks; of sailing because there could be icebergs; of sleeping alone because there were ghosts, vampires, strangers; of flying because planes crashed or, worse, disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. Cody was probably the only five-year-old kid who preferred the History Channel over Nickelodeon.
Mom put on her most cheerful voice.
“We probably won’t even see Mount Vesuvius, buddy,” she said, glancing into the rearview mirror at Cody, who sat stiffly smack in the middle of the backseat.