Not for the first time that day, Karen found herself at a loss for words.
She was clearing the plates when Matt came through the door. “Hey, stranger,” she said, struck by how handsome her husband looked in his royal-blue-and-white checked shirt. It was her favorite shirt on him, even if she preferred it tucked to untucked.
“Hey—what’s going on in Macaroni-Land?” said Matt. He came over and kissed Karen hello on the lips. Was it possible that, just as she’d become attracted to another man, they’d finally made up?
“Not much,” said Karen. He wasn’t just loyal, she thought. He was cute too.
And Ruby adored him. At the sight of him, she rushed into his arms, crying, “Daddddddyyyyyy.”
“Hello, Scooby Doobie the Ruby,” he said. Sometimes it seemed as if the less the fathers did, the more their offspring received them as heroes.
While Matt read Ruby a page from The Guinness Book of World Records—Ruby never tired of hearing about the tallest man, a record currently held by an eight-foot-three-inch Turk with prominent ears—Karen crafted a response to Michelle with the aim of respectfully addressing Michelle’s concerns while subtly pointing out that (a) Mia was not necessarily an innocent party in the whole thing, and (b) the whole kerfuffle was essentially over nothing.
Hi, Michelle. I’m very sorry if Ruby upset Mia and, by extension, you. I talked to her about it tonight, and she said it was just a joke between friends—and that Mia also sometimes teases her about having a vagina. That said, I’ve reminded Ruby that other people’s private parts are not to be discussed, not even as part of a game, and I think she understood. I hope we can get the girls together for a (G-rated) playdate soon! LOL, Karen
Ordinarily, Karen might have waited up to see if Michelle responded. But that night, she went to bed at the same hour as Ruby. She was unable to keep her eyes open a moment longer. She’d also reluctantly agreed to give up her Friday morning to chaperone Ruby’s class trip to a nearby botanical garden, and the school buses were leaving shortly after dawn.
As if the day ahead weren’t daunting enough, Karen woke to a bone-chilling drizzle falling from a charcoal sky. But a promise was a promise. And so, she caffeinated herself into compliance, dressed in four layers, then went to rouse Ruby.
Forty minutes later, as she headed up the bus’s narrow aisle, Karen found herself unexpectedly claustrophobic and eyeing the emergency exits. Her thoughts alighted on the field trips of her youth with their frantic scrambling for a willing but socially acceptable seatmate. To her recollection, the odd kid out (often Karen) always got paired with the teacher, bestowing on him or her instant pariah status. But that morning, Miss Tammy had already made arrangements to share her bench seat with Jayyden, no doubt with the motive of keeping a close eye on him. The two sat in the first row, just behind the driver and several rows ahead of the next student in the class.
To Karen’s surprise, Ruby wanted to share a seat with her mother. The two wound up in the third row from the back, across from Mia, who was perfectly turned out that morning in purple rain boots and a matching purple polka-dotted raincoat with a tie belt. At the sight of the girl, Karen experienced a twinge of hostility on her daughter’s behalf. It was Mia, after all, who had tattled to her mother about Ruby’s X-rated playground shenanigans. Then again, Mia was a child and Karen was an adult. “Hi, Mia!” she forced herself to say in a chirpy voice. “I like your raincoat!”
“Thank you,” Mia answered, then turned back to her seatmate, a stocky girl with pigtails, a heavy jaw, and half-moon shadows under her liquid eyes. Karen had seen the girl many times before but hadn’t yet attached a name to the face. Mia began whispering in the girl’s ear, causing Karen to worry that Ruby would feel excluded. Yet Ruby didn’t seem particularly bothered. Or maybe she hadn’t even noticed, preoccupied as she was with Karen’s phone, which she’d brazenly taken out of Karen’s bag and begun to play Candy Crush on. So Karen tried not to care either. And when Mia and the other girl stopped whispering, Karen leaned into the aisle and said, “I’m Ruby’s mom. What’s your name?”
“Empriss,” the girl replied.
“Hi, Empriss!” said Karen, mentally scrolling through the class list that had been distributed at the beginning of the year and recalling with sudden fascination that Empriss Jones was the girl who lived in a family shelter for victims of domestic abuse. Karen knew this because, for fun—if that was the right word—she would occasionally, secretly Google-Earth her daughter’s classmates’ street addresses. That was how she knew the shelter was located in a five-story salmon stucco building with filthy windows draped with white sheets and nary a tree in sight on the street out front. It faced a highway on one side and a bus depot enclosed by a chain-link fence on the other. Stealing another glance across the aisle, Karen noted with curiosity that Empriss was dressed in clean leggings and a hoodie and what appeared to be a pair of brand-new Nike sneakers with bright white laces. The only detail that was amiss was that her Frozen T-shirt was several sizes too small. When she raised her arms, a substantial subsection of tummy spilled out over the gap.
Finally, the bus pulled up in front of the botanical gardens, and the class disembarked. The tour guide was a fashionably butch young Korean woman dressed in a baseball cap, a vintage windbreaker, and ripped jeans. In a booming voice, she introduced herself as Meghan, then began to apologize. Owing to the exceptionally cold winter and late arrival of spring, it turned out that nothing was blooming that was supposed to be blooming, including the cherry blossoms that the class had specifically come to see. (The third-grade science curriculum was all about the life cycle of flowering trees.) Not surprisingly, after twenty minutes of traipsing through fields of wet leaves, the kids began asking when they could eat lunch. But Miss Tammy told them they were being disrespectful to Meghan, who continued to apologize as she took them through the gardens.
Finally, Meghan led them to a basement area beneath the administrative building. Wet, cold, and now ravenous, the children sat down at metal tables and tore into the brown bags that Miss Tammy had asked them to bring from home. Ruby and Karen sat across from Mia and Empriss. As Ruby peeled open her YoKids organic yogurt, and Karen dug into her quinoa, feta, and heirloom tomato salad (she had also brought blueberries), Empriss unpacked a thin white-bread sandwich with a fluorescent orange interior, a vending machine–size bag of Cheetos, and a sugar-sweetened “grape drink.”