I watch Heidi sauté the chicken, carrots, peas and celery in a skillet in the kitchen. In a saucepan, she adds butter and onion, cans of chicken broth. I bless my lucky stars for real chicken and not chicken crumbles. She pours it all into a pie crust and pops it in the oven. She tries not to look at me. When our eyes do intersect, she says, “She needs our help,” just like that: her new catchphrase, her mantra.
I haul my laptop and printer to the floor so we can eat at the kitchen table. I try hard to be theatrical about it so Heidi can see what an inconvenience this has become. She ignores the moan, the heavy thwack of the printer on the hardwood floor, the “oh, shit” when my legs get tangled up in the cord and I all but trip. Heidi is still unshowered for the day, still sporting the lilac robe, her hair now thrust into an unruly bun. She’s wearing her glasses.
Her hands tremble as she yanks dinner plates from the kitchen cabinets. Zoe is in her bedroom, still listening to boy band music and, no doubt, inventing all sorts of scenarios in her mind in which her parents disappear. Little does she know her best chance of ridding herself of Heidi and me lies on the other side of the bedroom wall, resting at Heidi’s suggestion. From time to time I detect the babble of that baby, doped up on Tylenol to keep a fever in check.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
She frowns at me and says, “I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
But I imagine there’s more to it than that.
On the edge of the counter, her cell phone, placed nose to nose with Zoe’s confiscated one, rings, and she picks it up, her eyes roving over the display screen before she sets it back down, the call ignored.
“Who was that?” I ask, arching my back after the weight of the printer.
“No one,” she says, “telemarketer,” but when she goes to retrieve Zoe and that girl for dinner, I sneak a peek and see that Jennifer called for the second time today. Two missed calls, the phone reminds her, from Jennifer Marcue. Two waiting voice mails.
We sit at the table, like one big happy family. Heidi holds the baby. The girl, Willow, Heidi reminds me with a firm kick to the shin when I mistakenly call her Wilma, scarfs down the meal as if she hasn’t eaten in a week. She won’t make eye contact with me, though every now and then her eyes stray to Heidi’s, but for me, there’s no such luck. She stays away from me, three feet or more, as if I might just carry the plague. I tell myself it has something to do with men, but maybe it’s just me. She jumps when I move too quickly, skidding my chair out from the table and standing to fetch a glass of milk.
Heidi is watching the baby, the way her eyes oscillate under translucent eyelids in her sleep. A smile toys with her lips, and I wonder what life would have been like if Heidi had been given the big family she always talked about. Heidi hungered for a huge family, a half dozen kids, maybe more. I was never really sure how I felt about it. Kids, sure. I wanted kids. But five or six, like Heidi talked about, I didn’t know. Of course it didn’t matter how I felt because it never came down to that. Before I could be too concerned with a houseful of kids, we got the diagnosis from the doctor that would forever change our lives.
Suddenly kids weren’t the issue; it was whether or not my wife would live or die.
But still, I wonder what it would have been like had Zoe not been an only child. Would family meals have been like this—strained and unnatural, the only sound the gnashing and grinding of food—or would dinnertime have been rambunctious: hair pulling and knock-knock jokes, name calling and kids taunting each other, rather than withdrawing themselves into silent seclusion as our sole child chooses to do? Those stereotypical only-child myths—that they are lonely, selfish and maladjusted—all seem to apply to Zoe, and I watch as, out of the corner of her eye, Zoe peeks sideways at the girl beside her, and I wonder: what is that expression that crosses her face? Hate? Envy? Or something more? Something different?
Zoe, sitting at the table, wrapped up in a gray blanket because she is perpetually cold, scoops the innards of her chicken potpie out with a fork, and then asks, “What even is this?” while staring at the broth that oozes across her plate like water from a dam.
“Chicken potpie,” Heidi says, setting a forkful in her mouth. “Try it. You’ll like it,” she says. I watch her manage the baby and eat her meal, a woman skilled in the art of motherhood. It wasn’t that long ago that she juggled baby Zoe at the kitchen table.
Zoe says that she hates peas, and we all watch as she draws her fork through the goo, separating piles of carrots and peas, chicken and celery. She picks at the crust, and lays a nibble of pastry on her tongue, letting it dissolve.