“Oh, please,” said Karen, making a superior face. “You were out cold.”
The truth was that, although Matt’s failure to help get Ruby up and out in the morning annoyed Karen in theory, in practice she found it easier to do it herself, without another tired and hungry body in the way—and doing everything the wrong way. The few times that school year that Matt had made lunch for Ruby, he’d put her sandwich loose in her lunch box and it had fallen apart. And then, according to Ruby, and even more traumatically, it had gotten soiled by an also-unwrapped pear.
Karen and Ruby arrived in the classroom with one minute to spare. There were just over a dozen parents in attendance, most but not all of them women. The majority of them were in jeans or sweats. A couple of them sported office attire. One mother, a smiley Yemeni woman whom Karen always exchanged warm hellos with, was wearing a long skirt and hijab. Karen had tried and failed to retain the woman’s hard-to-pronounce name in her memory, and now it seemed too late, too insensitive, and too embarrassing to ask what it was again. Of course, what qualified as embarrassing was all a matter of perspective. At Ruby’s eighth birthday party the year before, the woman’s out-of-control daughter, Chahrazad, had gratuitously flashed her Hello Kitty underpants at a male classmate while belting out the pop-song lyric “‘Heeeeeeyyyy, sexy lady,’” an awkward incident that Karen had still found less mortifying than the fact that, after the party, Chahrazad’s mother had stood in front of Karen’s building, forbidden, Karen had concluded, from entering another man’s home.
While Ruby went to the closet to put away her coat and backpack, Karen made her way over to her best mom-friend in the class, Louise Bailey, who went by Lou. A freelance publicist and semi-stay-at-home mother of two—she had a daughter in fifth grade named DuBois and a son in Ruby’s third-grade class named Zeke—Lou was also, hands down, the most stylish mother at Betts, if not the only stylish mother at Betts. “It’s ridiculous how amazing you look,” said Karen, who that morning, like every morning, was wearing nondescript basics in black and gray. Although she’d given up trying to be fashionable more than a decade ago, she still appreciated others who hadn’t.
“Oh, please,” said Lou, who was six years younger, three inches taller, ten pounds thinner, and wearing leather stovepipe jeans and a nubbly poncho she’d knit herself.
“Meanwhile, the excitement builds,” said Karen.
“Can’t you see me holding my breath?”
“I need more caffeine.”
“Hands off, girl.” Lou clutched her travel mug to her chest.
“No fair.”
“I bet you slept more than me last night.”
“I bet you I didn’t,” said Karen, a chronic insomniac who had grown accustomed to getting by on five or six broken hours of sleep.
“Don’t waste your money,” said Lou. “DuBois threw up six times between midnight and five.”
“Oh no. And okay, you win—”
“Welcome, parents of Room Three-oh-three!” Ruby’s teacher, Tammy Hunt, shouted to be heard over the buzz of collected parents. A broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced triathlete of twenty-six, Miss Tammy had been an Outward Bound leader along the Canadian border before getting her master’s in education. Her energy, dedication, and enthusiasm were still in evidence. So was her ability to command large groups of white-water rafters spread out across a quarter mile. “Over the past several weeks,” she went on in a shockingly loud voice, “your awesome kids have been busy creating their own amazing community!”
“Ow,” muttered Karen.
“And today we’re inviting you to come explore it and to be the people in our neighborhood,” Miss Tammy continued to trumpet.
“Where’s Mr. Rogers?” Lou muttered back.
In suppressing a giggle—as a child, she’d belonged precisely to the Mister Rogers–watching public-television demographic—Karen accidentally released a noise that fell between a grunt and a snort. At the same moment, Ruby returned from the coat closet. “Mommy, come see!” she said, taking her mother by the wrist and leading her to the back of the classroom.
There, lined up atop a row of paint-splattered base cabinets, converted breakfast-cereal boxes formed a miniature skyline. A box of Frosted Flakes had been turned into a firehouse. A Life Cinnamon cereal had become a police station. A Nature’s Path Organic Heritage Flakes box was now a grocery store. And a jumbo-size Cheerios, donated by Karen—Cheerios being the one mass-market cereal she was currently willing to buy—was a bank.
Or, at least, Karen assumed it was a bank, given the fact that her daughter had covered the box with royal-blue dollar signs. Unless it was supposed to be a pawnshop? Did her daughter know what a pawnshop was? Karen was contemplating the likely answer—to her knowledge, there was only one pawnshop still left in her actual neighborhood, no doubt soon to be shuttered and reborn as another luxury town-house development featuring oil-rubbed-bronze bath fixtures and radiant flooring—when Ruby lifted her gray-green eyes to her mother and said, “Do you like my Citibank?”
“Sweetie, Citibank is just the name of one particular bank,” Karen said quickly. She was alarmed to think that her daughter had so thoroughly internalized a corporate brand that it had become interchangeable in her mind with the thing itself. Never mind the brand’s contribution to the financial crisis of 2008. Though from what Karen had read, all the big banks were to blame. And besides, as a fund-raising professional, she relied on the largesse of financial-industry executives. “I think you just mean bank,” she went on.
“Bank—whatever,” said Ruby, clearly annoyed.
“I know that was all you meant,” said Karen. “Anyway, you did a great job with the decorations!”