The bacon and French toast were being wolfed, the smoothies being drunk. Timby was deep into an Archie Double Digest. My smile was on lockdown.
Two years ago when I was getting all martyr-y about having to make breakfast every morning, Joe said, “I pay for this circus. Can you please climb down off your cross and make breakfast without the constant sighing?”
I know what you’re going to say: What a jerk! What a sexist thug! But Joe had a point. Lots of women would gladly do worse for a closet full of Antwerp. From that moment on, it was service with a smile. It’s called knowing when you’ve got a weak hand.
Joe showed Timby the newspaper. “The Pinball Expo is coming back to town. Wanna go?”
“Do you think the Evel Knievel machine will still be broken?”
“Almost certainly,” Joe said.
I handed over the poem I’d printed out and heavily annotated.
“Okay, who’s going to help me?” I asked.
Timby didn’t look up from his Archie.
Joe took it. “Ooh, Robert Lowell.”
I began from memory: “‘Nautical Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer’s first selectman’—”
“‘Her farmer is first selectman,’” Joe said.
“Shoot. ‘Her farmer is first selectman.’”
“Mom!”
I shushed Timby and continued with eyes closed. “‘… in our village; she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill—we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue’—”
“Mommy, look at Yo-Yo. See how his chin is sitting on his paws?”
Yo-Yo was positioned on his pink lozenge so he could watch for dropped food, his little white paws delicately crossed.
“Aww,” I said.
“Can I have your phone?” Timby asked.
“Just enjoy your pet,” I said. “This doesn’t have to turn into electronics.”
“It’s very cool what Mom is doing,” Joe said to Timby. “Always learning.”
“Learning and forgetting,” I said. “But thank you.”
He shot me an air kiss.
I pressed onward. “‘His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen’—”
“Don’t we love Yo-Yo?” Timby asked.
“We do.” The simple truth. Yo-Yo is the world’s cutest dog, part Boston terrier, part pug, part something else… brindle-and-white with a black patch on one eye, bat ears, smooshed face, and curlicue tail. Before the Amazon invasion, when it was just me and hookers on the street, one remarked, “It’s like if Barbie had a pit bull.”
“Daddy,” Timby said. “Don’t you love Yo-Yo?”
Joe looked at Yo-Yo and considered the question. (More evidence of Joe’s superiority: he thinks before he speaks.) “He’s a little weird,” Joe said and returned to the poem.
Timby dropped his fork. I dropped my jaw.
“Weird?” Timby cried.
Joe looked up. “Yeah. What?”
“Oh, Daddy! How can you say that?”
“He just sits there all day looking depressed,” Joe said. “When we come home, he doesn’t greet us at the door. When we are here, he just sleeps, waits for food to drop, or stares at the front door like he has a migraine.”
For Timby and me, there were simply no words.
“I know what he’s getting out of us,” Joe said. “I just don’t know what we’re getting out of him.”
Timby jumped out of his chair and lay across Yo-Yo, his version of a hug. “Oh, Yo-Yo! I love you.”
“Keep going.” Joe flicked the poem. “You’re doing great. ‘The season’s ill’…”
“‘The season’s ill,’” I said. “‘We’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue’—” To Timby: “You. Get ready.”
“Are we driving through or are you walking me in?”
“Driving. I have Alonzo at eight thirty.”
Our breakfast over, Yo-Yo got up from his pillow. Joe and I watched as he walked to the front door and stared at it.
“I didn’t realize I was being controversial,” Joe said. “‘The season’s ill.’”
It’s easy to tell who went to Catholic school by how they react when they drive up Queen Anne Hill and behold the Galer Street School. I didn’t, so to me it’s a stately brick building with a huge flat yard and improbably dynamite view of the Puget Sound. Joe did, so he goes white with flashbacks of nuns whacking his hands with rulers, priests threatening him with God’s wrath, and spectacle-snatching bullies roaming the halls unchecked.
By the time we pulled into drop-off, I’d recited the poem twice perfectly and was doing it a third time for charm. “‘One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull.’ Wait, is that right?”
Ominous silence from the backseat. “Hey,” I said. “Are you even following along?”
“I am, Mom. You’re doing perfect.”
“Perfectly. Adverbs end in l-y.” Timby wasn’t in the rearview mirror. I figure-eighted it to see him hunched over something. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” Followed again by that high-pitched rattle of plastic.
“Hey! No makeup.”