“Last week,” he said, and so she nodded. Though the complex stressed healthy eating, and Izzy herself was responsible for setting up the weekly menus, she had managed to bring a box of Fruity Pebbles into the house, her favorite cereal as a child, and shared it with Cap, who was instantly mesmerized by the radiant, neon colors of the cereal. A single bowl of the cereal was more sugar than he’d probably had in his entire life up to that point, but she had wanted something special for him, a treat. And it wasn’t as if sugared cereals were forbidden. There were no restrictions on diet, but most of the parents seemed set on continuing the healthy eating that had been stressed when the children were living communally. No candy or fast food, obviously, but Link and Julie admitted that they gave Eliza Kit Kat bars on special occasions and Irene once informed some of the family that her dad had given her a packet of Pop Rocks one time and the other children were immediately jealous. Of course, this was the new way of living, the way the children and their parents, while still part of the larger family, had made a hidden life for themselves within the complex’s homes. And so, Izzy allowed Fruity Pebbles and felt no less a good mother for it.
“Fruity Pebbles it is,” she said, and Cap cheered, jumping to his feet and running to the kitchen. Izzy swung her feet onto the floor and followed her son, listening to him hum “You Are My Sunshine” as he gathered the bowl and spoon and a napkin to set the table. Izzy reached into a cabinet and, in the very back, she retrieved the box of cereal and poured a generous amount into the bowl, the skittering sound making Cap shake with excitement. Izzy returned to the table with the almond milk and soon Cap was powering his way through breakfast, still humming, his legs pumping. Izzy made herself a cup of iced coffee with concentrate from the fridge and she sat at the table with Cap. The breakfast table was strewn with Magic Markers and paper, as Cap had been drawing the night before, several pictures of an idea he had for an amusement park where kids wore jet packs and flew around. She held up one of the drawings, the sign for the park announcing it as FLY WORLD. One child’s jet pack had apparently caught on fire and the child was hurtling to the ground, but there were staff members waiting with a trampoline to catch her. “It’s a good thing you made sure there were trampolines at Fly World,” Izzy said to Cap, pointing to the faulty jet pack in the picture. Cap shrugged as if to say, Of course you need trampolines if you’re going to run a successful jet-pack amusement park. “Even though the jet packs sometimes blow up,” he said, so earnestly that Izzy felt her heart flutter, “nobody ever dies at Fly World.”
At the mention of death, Izzy waited to see if Cap would once again bring up Hal. For the past seven months, ever since Cap had been reunited with Izzy and he had realized that it would be only the two of them instead of the traditional families of the other children, Cap would often ask about his father. And Izzy was dismayed and slightly embarrassed to realize that she didn’t have much to offer in the way of answers to Cap’s questions. He would ask what Hal’s favorite food was and Izzy, who honestly had no idea, would try to remember any food that Hal ever ate. It was like walking through a fog into a world that Izzy could not entirely believe had really existed. Her time before the complex, before the Infinite Family, felt, for better or for worse, like a punishment that she had endured and was now free of. She did not even have a picture of Hal when she moved into the complex, but had found a few pictures online and printed them off for Cap. She had considered e-mailing the Jacksons and asking for more pictures and details of Hal’s life, but decided that involving Mr. and Mrs. Jackson in her new life, especially since they had never once contacted Izzy after Cap’s birth, would be a mistake. And so Cap and Izzy made their way with what little Izzy remembered of Hal. His penchant for soda in glass bottles. His fondness for the Velvet Underground. His easy humor and genuine kindness in the classroom. Whatever she gave Cap, it did not seem to be enough. Before, he had nine other dads, plus Jeffrey and Dr. Grind and all the other male staff members who would come to the complex, but now, in the transition, it was as if he had lost a permanent claim to those men, and now it was just Cap and Izzy, no father to speak of. A few times, Cap, making peace with his new situation as best as he could, would say to Izzy, in confidence, that he would sometimes make-believe that Dr. Grind was his father. “I know he’s not my real dad,” Cap then admitted, “but he’s, like, my number one pretend dad.” Izzy had no strength to argue or try to find a sensitive way to expand the topic. She merely nodded and said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Now that Izzy had graduated from college, with a bachelor’s degree in art that she could not imagine putting to any use, she had moved into the kitchen at the complex to work full time. Chef Nicole had decided to leave to start her own restaurant, and Izzy had taken over as the head chef, and she loved the idea of staying close to home, to be near Cap and the other children.
Of course, now that the families had broken into individual units, the work was a little less involved. Families ate breakfast in their own homes, so Izzy was only responsible for the children’s snacks and lunches and the entire family’s dinners, which were still a communal affair. She missed Nicole, who had given Izzy a new set of knives as a present when she left, but she enjoyed the quiet of the kitchen and having access to any ingredient she could want and all the freedom to make the menus.