Nathan shops online for groceries and simultaneously searches for recipes that will please his daughters. He hates the blogs he’s found but admits they have a point. Playful colors in food entice children. One father recommends food dye in pancakes, but it seems this father puts food dye in everything, and that’s not parenting, that’s entertaining. You’re feeding toxins to your children, you stupid son of a bitch. You deserve to have your kids taken away by CPS, the comments say. We’re calling them right now. Nathan clicks on a packet of food dye anyway, and it’s now in his basket. He’s going to make chicken nuggets and pizza bites and ravioli, all from scratch, and when a recipe calls for beef, he will use turkey instead. He orders supplies to woo his children, because they no longer like him, and it’s not because he’s a single parent. They have begun to look at him like he’s full of shit. The more he tries, the more full of shit they think he is. It’s in their eyes, the knowledge that Nathan doesn’t know what he’s doing, that they have been stuck with the less capable parent.
The anonymous emails are occurring more often, and they have become more specific. Be a man. Find your wife. You are responsible. Nathan blames Marion in his head and gathers information from the Internet on perfect parenting in the millennium. He does know that perfection should not be his goal. He simply needs to learn how to get his children to trust him. Or at least to look like they trust him. Yes. That would be fine.
Board of Trustees
We’ve hired a private investigator. He’s very good.
Where did you find him?
He was recommended by Elise from the parents’ association.
So Elise finally caught on about Greg’s late nights at the office. Good for her.
And you believe that he will be successful?
He’s worked these types of cases before.
Doesn’t Nathan need to be informed now?
He has been, in a manner.
But once we find her, then it will be different.
Then we’ll need to discuss with Nathan what course of action he’d like to take.
Give us our money or we send your bitch wife to prison.
Do you have to say everything that comes into your head?
And if we never find her?
We will.
But if we never do?
This pessimism of yours is getting old.
It’s a good question. The lawyers want to know. The longer we put off prosecution, the harder it will be to make a case in court. They’ll want to know why we waited.
Okay, worst-case scenario, Marion Palm is a leaf in the wind, an untethered balloon, a needle in the proverbial haystack. Then we will ask the Palms to make reparations or we’ll reconsider the girls’ enrollment. Maybe the teachers had the right idea. The sins of the mother and all that.
Isn’t that kind of spiteful?
Should we split the check?
I didn’t have an appetizer.
But we are educators.
We are expected to continue to educate the spawn of criminals? No, that doesn’t work.
I agree, cut the girls loose.
Not yet.
Not ever, probably. Most likely the Palm girls will graduate with their respective classes, and this distasteful episode will be entirely forgotten by all. We will find Marion Palm.
Who had the salmon?
Ginny’s Invited to a Party
Ginny has forfeited her right to go outside during her breaks, her homeroom teacher informs her; does Ginny understand? Ginny has no choice, so she says she does, but at lunch she sneaks by the hall master when a class trip returns from Greenwood Cemetery. It’s the entire second grade wearing matching T-shirts under their coats, holding etchings of gravestones. They are showing them to the hall master, who is loudly appreciating them as masterpieces, when Ginny slips out the front door.
Ginny’s friends didn’t want her to sit with them at lunch. They’ve even found a replacement, an English transfer student. She has a plummy accent, freckles, and talks about stones and euros and a boyfriend she left behind. How can Ginny compete? She’s returning to the smokers, who don’t trust her much but at least let her sit down.
There were other addresses in the report. One in Red Hook. There was also a work history; her mother worked at a Brazilian place in Manhattan. It’s closed now. Ginny thought she would investigate, but Sandy haunts her imagination and she doesn’t want to look at the report anymore. There’s nothing to find anyway.
She returns to the steps at the courthouse. She walks up them, two at a time, and reaches the portico quickly and flushed. The smokers greet Ginny, and someone offers her a cigarette, as they always do. This time, she accepts. It’s lit for her, and the smokers together teach her what to do. They tell her not to inhale this time, like they do; that takes practice. Three of the most seasoned smokers push smoke out their nostrils like angry bulls and smile. Soon, Ginny, soon, they say.
Ginny doesn’t inhale, barely brings the cigarette to her lips, but she adores the weight of it between her two fingers. At last she feels like she belongs somewhere. She practices tapping off the ash at the end.
When the first cigarette is extinguished, Ginny has passed some initiation rite, because an older girl, Chloe, invites her to a party. Come to my house first and we’ll get ready. I’ll text my address. She’s fourteen, wears eye shadow, and has several piercings up her ears. Ginny asks for another cigarette.
Long Baths
Marion is conflicted by her satisfaction in cleaning the midtown apartment. She’s good at cleaning, even likes cleaning, and when the Russian family praises her to Sveyta, Marion is gratified. They commend Marion’s skill at displaying and organizing their beauty products. The bathrooms are now the bathrooms of magazines, the matriarch tells Sveyta. Sveyta tells Marion, and Marion is humble, bows her head, tilts her chin to her left shoulder; it’s like a muscle spasm.
The Russian matriarch will never suspect that Marion’s gift for the bathrooms is informed by the long baths she takes. She waits until the family is away at their activities (shopping, ballet, and the murky business of the stepfather). She cleans the breakfast dishes, makes the beds, and waves goodbye as they leave, one by one.