She jumped up. “Where is he?”
“In my room,” Johnny admitted, his voice small behind her as she dashed out of the kitchen.
She rounded the corner to the small, dark hallway and heard repeated sneezes behind Johnny’s closed bedroom door. “You’re not supposed to lock him in there, baby, you know that.”
“I know,” Johnny answered, drawing each syllable out guiltily.
Kit pushed the door open and saw Steve, the black Labrador mutt, lying on the floor, sneezing and growling and trying to wrestle something off his nose.
“Damn.” She dropped to the floor and tried to calm the squirming dog down enough to remove the shower curtain ring she’d gotten out of the bathroom to make an earring for the stupid pirate costume. “Damn, damn, damn.”
“You said a bad thing!”
“You’re right.” She pried the ring open and pulled it off the dog’s nose, trying to resist saying another stream of “bad things.” “You know you’re not supposed to put people things on Steve. I’ve told you that like a hundred times already.”
“That’s not a people thing,” Johnny said, his voice stern with four-year-old condescension. “It’s a bathroom thing.”
“Today it’s a people thing.” Arguing with him was like arguing with a slick Jersey lawyer. He always came up with some loophole she hadn’t previously covered. Last week, in the late-night emergency pediatric clinic, it was that she’d never actually said not to put the wheels from his Matchbox cars into his ears. Now she looked at him pointedly. “But, for the record, keep bathroom things away from Steve, too.” She examined the plastic ring. If it had managed to squeeze that tightly on Steve’s nose, it probably wouldn’t be all that good for a toddler’s ear. Frankly it had struck her as a stupid idea when the woman from the local playgroup had mentioned it in the first place. Now she’d have to come up with an alternative before her deadline.
“What’s it for anyway?” Johnny asked, taking the ring from her and immediately getting it stuck on his fingertip. He barely had time to whip up a good whine before Kit reached over and pulled it off with a snap.
“It’s supposed to be for your costume.”
He looked skeptical. No, afraid. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither does Steve.” Upon hearing his name, the dog pushed his wet nose against her hand and she patted his head.
“I don’t like pirates.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I don’t like boats,” Johnny went on, clearly covering all pirate bases so that she wouldn’t try to convince him to be, say, a superhero pirate. “And I don’t like earrings. I don’t like them at all.”
Sometimes it felt as if he was plucking at her nerves as though they were strings on an out-of-tune ukulele. “Look, buddy, you don’t need to like pirates. You don’t need to wear the costume on Halloween. All you need to do is be a kid long enough for me to make sure these homemade costumes work so I can print them in my column.”
Though he was only four, Johnny had long since understood that all the quirky domestic things his mother worked on were part of her job as “Edith Chamberlain,” Home Life magazine’s monthly “Edith’s Diary” columnist. She’d been the managing editor of the magazine for five years now, but she’d taken over writing the column two and a half years ago when the real Edith Chamberlain—who had established the column forty years ago—had passed away.
“I don’t want to be a princess, either,” Johnny said in a small, husky voice. He’d been saying it ever since she’d taken him to the craft store to get the glitter for the princess costume she was also detailing in her article.
Kit gave the dog one last pat, then stood up. “Yeah, well, you’re just trying the costume on for me, then we’ll take it off really fast, okay?”
His voice went glum. “Okay.”
She looked at her watch. “In fact, we should do it now because your dad’s gonna come pick you up when he gets off work in an hour.”
“You said we could go to the pool!”
“We will. We’ll try the costume on really quick, then we’ll go to the pool and watch for him from there. Deal?”
“Okay.” He was already busy peeling off his sweaty Batman T-shirt and the pull-up diapers her mother kept telling her he was too old for.
“Just put him in regular underpants,” Kit’s mother would say. “If he messes them up, he’ll get uncomfortable in a hurry.”
“He doesn’t seem to have a problem with walking around in a poopie pull-up,” Kit pointed out every time. “How much difference will it make if it’s underpants instead? It would just make more work for me.”
But Kit’s mother was never wrong, even when she was patently incorrect. She just clicked her tongue against her teeth, shook her head knowingly and said, “You coddle that child too much.”
It wasn’t a surprising sentiment from her mother, she realized, considering the fact that Kit had done more to raise her two younger sisters than her working mom had, but it still made her feel bad.
“Got it!” Johnny called in a singsong voice. Kit hadn’t even realized he’d left the room, but he was walking back in with the pale blue princess dunce cap—she made a mental note to find out what the real name for it was before printing the column— perched on his head at a rakish angle. He dragged the satiny dress—made entirely with a tank dress from Target and cheap, shiny polyester fabric ironed on with stitching tape—behind him. The glitter they’d stuck on with glue left a vaguely Disney-like trail behind him.
She had to hand it to him, he really was a good sport.
Kit went to him. “Put your arms up.” He did, and she slid the dress over his head. She had to admit it looked pretty good. Perhaps a little like a trailer-park prom dress, but that was what Halloween was supposed to look like. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Comfortable? Move around a little bit.”
He struck a superhero pose, then ran across the floor and back again, feet stomping hard on the wood floor. Thank goodness it was just the Finnegans living beneath them, since they were both all but deaf. When he got back he nodded his approval. “It’s good.”
“I wonder if it will hold together,” she said, tugging gently at the hem. She was alarmed to see that the stitching tape was starting to pull apart when there was a knock at the door. “Wait there,” she instructed Johnny, pressing the hem together before getting up. “Don’t move.”
He stood still and she admired the costume one more time, hoping she might be able to improvise a quick fix. Maybe a glue gun? She was so distracted by the thought that when she opened the door and saw her ex-husband, it took a moment to compute. Why wasn’t he at work?
“Rick.”
“Daddy!” Johnny cried from across the room.
“Hey, bud.”
Johnny ran to Rick, arms outspread, dress coming apart more with every step. He threw himself into Rick’s arms, distributing pale blue glitter all over Rick’s Grateful Dead T-shirt.
Rick looked at his son. “What’ve you got on?”
Johnny flashed his mother a look of dramatic disapproval. “A princess costume.”
Rick looked over Johnny’s shoulder at Kit. “The column again?”
Kit