DAN TEXTED AT seven to say that he was working late, a text Sabrina didn’t see right away because she was giving Amelia a bath, and when they came out of the bathroom—Amelia in her pajamas with her dark brown hair combed back and ready for bed—Sabrina was confronted with an entire box of Cheerios whose contents were now on the kitchen floor, where Owen was sitting and shoving handfuls of the tiny Os into his mouth.
Sabrina didn’t say a word, just yanked Owen up from the floor so hard that he immediately started crying and dragged him into his bedroom, where Amelia had retreated and was sitting on her bed with a slightly scared look on her face. Sabrina shoved Owen down on his bed and turned him over and spanked him, hard, on his bottom. He turned and stared at her and then started screaming even louder.
Shit. Shit shit shit. Before her kids were born, Sabrina had lots of notions about good parenting, one of which included never, ever spanking her children. That had gone out the window around the time Owen turned three and was a complete monster, and she couldn’t figure out any other way to make him listen to her. Until the one time he got in trouble at nursery school and started crying and asked the teacher if she was going to spank him “like Mommy,” and Sabrina got a phone call from the school director reminding her that Slope Montessori had a no-physical-discipline policy, and that applied to what went on at home too, and so Sabrina had promised it would never happen again. She didn’t tell Dan about that phone call; he would have gone on a rant about how they were paying thousands of dollars a year to have someone who saw Owen for two hours a day, three days a week, tell them how they should be raising him, and even though she didn’t really disagree, she also couldn’t fathom not having those six hours a week, when Amelia was napping, to herself.
Since that phone call two years ago, though, she had kept her promise—she hadn’t struck Owen or Amelia once. His sobs grew louder. “I was hungry, Mommy!”
“If you’re hungry, you tell me.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Amelia lie down and turn away from her, putting her hands over her ears. “You do not try to get the box of Cheerios down from the cabinet yourself. Do you understand?”
Owen just cried louder.
“I said, do you understand?” He finally nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to read to Amelia now and you’re going to go into the kitchen and clean up all the Cheerios.” It was Owen’s turn to look confused and frightened. “Put all of the Cheerios into the garbage can. I don’t want to see even one Cheerio when I come out there or you’re going to be punished again.”
It wasn’t until she’d read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Amelia, and Owen had cleaned up the Cheerios and brushed his teeth and gotten into bed, and Sabrina had turned out the light and gone back into the living room and poured herself a full glass of red wine that she finally checked her phone and saw the text from Dan. By now it was eight thirty, and she just texted back ok and turned on the TV, and so by ten, when she finally got into bed, she had gone through an entire bottle of wine. She passed out for half an hour or so and then woke up and realized it was now ten thirty and Dan still wasn’t home.
Sabrina hadn’t told Dan about what she’d seen at Isabel’s party. When she’d gotten home on Thursday night, slipping through the door at midnight, he had been awake, sitting on the couch working on his laptop.
“So, how’d it go?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Fine? Owen didn’t seem to care. Amelia seemed confused. She just kept saying, ‘This is Mommy’s job.’”
“And they went to bed without freaking out?”
“Yeah? They were probably asleep around eight thirty.” Okay, not terrible, Sabrina thought. “So does this mean you’ll be on daddy duty more often, then?”
Dan laughed. “You act like it’s a choice! I’d be happy to put them to bed more, I just can’t. This job is only getting crazier.”
“I met someone you work with, by the way.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Katya? Skinny girl, bleached-blond hair?”
She could have sworn she saw Dan do a double take. But when he spoke, he sounded totally normal. “Oh, yeah, Katya. She’s great. One of our best reporters.”
“Really?” Sabrina couldn’t picture this girl being a killer reporter. She was so…skinny. “How old is she? She seemed like a child.”
“You know, twenty-five or something? They’re all like that. They’re not like how we were.”
“How were we?”
“I mean, we were ambitious. But not like them. It’s like they were born with their life goals already imprinted onto their brains.”
Sabrina had snorted. “Yeah, I see that. Well, anyway, she seemed nice.”