delicate brows pressed dimples into her forehead. “I want a puppy.”
Ugh! Not the dog thing again. The last thing I needed was another little baby to take care of, though I’d nearly caved last Christmas when Jack and I realized that having a puppy in the bed might bring Becca some comfort at night. “Santa doesn’t bring live animals,” I said quickly.
“I’ve seen him bring puppies in cartoons,” Scout said.
“And Alexa Vallone got a Bichon Frise for Christmas,” Becca added.
“Becca, you need to think of something realistic,” I said. “Santa doesn’t bring gifts that parents don’t approve of.” I had always warned my children that there would be no furry animals in our house anytime soon. With three children, one still in diapers, the last thing I needed was a fourth responsibility, especially one that shed and would never master its own bathroom skills.
“Scout, get your coat on. You can finish your list at home,” I said firmly, realizing that Scout was creating an illustrated list of toys she wanted from Santa. This task was right up her alley. In the past two years Scout had become intently focused on creating the perfect Christmas through compiling the perfect list that would lead to receiving a mountain of toys. Every year I felt anxiety at her potential disappointment, but each Christmas morning she seemed delighted with whatever display of toys and books and clothes I had concocted.
“If I take it home, Ms. Nancy won’t be able to send it to Santa,” Scout complained.
“I’ll send it to Santa,” I said with authority, feeling impatient. There was dinner to be made, e-mails and mail, laundry and bath time. Besides, I didn’t give up an hour of writing time to stand around at after-school care and watch my daughter draw.
“Come on, Scout.” Becca boosted her backpack on one shoulder, bundled in her jacket and ready to go. “You always do this. You always make us late.” Most days Scout can do nothing right enough for her older sister. I still remember coming home from the hospital with Scout bundled up in a receiving blanket and Becca snubbing us both, as if the wispy-haired infant was a rude visitor and I the traitor with the audacity to let her into the house. I still shudder when I remember the way she folded her arms and squinted up at me as if she didn’t recognize me at all. To this day, I don’t think Becca has gotten over the ruination of our quiet family of three.
“One minute,” Scout said insistently. “I just need to finish this rocket.”
I glanced down at the elaborate contraption she was drawing, a cartoonish aircraft with people in Santa caps riding on the wings.
“Don’t look!” she squealed, glaring up at me with a flash of silver eyes—her father’s eyes.
I folded my arms, turning away. “Getting in the Christmas spirit, I see. And I noticed today that you started decorating the house. Glued some pine cones onto my shoes, did you?”
“I told her not to,” Becca said.
“Am I in trouble?” Scout asked without looking up. “Or did you like it?”
“You’re not allowed to touch my clothes without permission, remember?” I spoke quickly, glancing over my shoulder to see if Nancy was listening. Sometimes I sensed that she didn’t approve of my system for disciplining the girls, loose though it may be, and it made me second-guess myself. Fortunately, she was off in the next room, setting up a video for Tyanna. “But we’ll talk about it later. At home. Let’s go, honey.”
“But I’m not done,” Scout whined, still drawing.
“We really do have to go, sweetie. Finish it at home.”
“Now you made me make a mistake.” She erased something in the corner of the page, then handed me the paper and scooted her chair back. “Hold it for me, but don’t look.”
I was already saddled with her backpack and my purse, my hands gripping car keys and Scout’s jacket. I snatched the paper, annoyed at my own impatience. “Fine. Jacket on. Got your backpack? Hats? Mittens? Come on, let’s go.”
Two blocks from home, I slowed the car and put the girls on the alert to holler if they spotted a place to park. Our modest, two-story row house did not come with a garage or driveway, and street parking was getting more and more difficult in a neighborhood where most households now had two or three cars: one for mom and the kids, one for dad and one for the teenaged driver. The upside to our location was that we were surrounded by lovely single-family houses with their own garages and driveways—ample room for their cars. The downside was that most Queens homeowners filled the garage with junk and parked in front of their house, despite the high rate of auto theft. In Queens, it seemed, you were safe in your house, but watch out if someone flags down your Jag. We’d even had a car stolen years ago—Jack’s old rust-bucket Honda from college—and though the car was recovered the day it was stolen, we weren’t enlightened until two weeks later, when we received a bill from a junk-yard charging us storage for those two weeks. Apparently, the city’s archaic system for recovering stolen autos allows the owner of the auto wrecking yard a chance to capitalize. When we went to claim the dented Honda with its shattered window, I felt angry and hoodwinked that we had to pay a storage fee although we didn’t even know the car was there, but Jack had shrugged it off. His head and heart were already vested in the sporty new Miata we’d bought as a replacement vehicle. So with congestion and theft, you’d think people would be happy to squirrel the car away in the garage. Instead, residents felt a sense of entitlement toward the parking spot directly in front of their house, a fact that I’d been reminded of by more than one neighbor.
“You gotta protect the spot in front of your house,” a dumplingesque woman whined at me in a shrill voice my first week in Bayside. We hadn’t even moved in yet; I was unloading a few plants and paper goods from my car when she waddled over and delivered the edict. She pointed to a wooden barricade blocking the street two doors down. “You need to save it or you’ll never get to park there.”
I blinked at the barricade. “I thought a construction crew was setting up there,” I told her. I resisted the temptation to suggest that the walk from her car might actually help chisel away a few pounds; I was new to the neighborhood and I didn’t want to tarnish my rep just yet.
“That’s my spot, in front of my house,” she said slowly, as if instructing a kindergarten class. “And welcome to the neighborhood,” she added. “I’m Bawb-rah.” That would be the Latin Barbara with a heavy Queens accent.
“Uh…thanks,” I told her, ducking inside to call my then-boyfriend Jack to report that we were moving into a lunatic neighborhood. Being a Queens boy, Jack was aware of the unwritten laws of parking. Being a rebel, he’d always defied them, even, as a teenager, going so far as to crash into neighbors’ garbage cans with his dented Chevy. Oh, that man I love! Sometimes I marvel that he never did time.
Jack and I decided not to buy into the parking-spot entitlement program, a decision that I occasionally questioned now that I had to circle for spots, double back, wedge my Honda in against someone else’s bumper, and lug groceries, baby and children down the block, holding hands and limping under the weight of a gallon of milk.
We arrived home to find Dylan asleep, a lump on the living room carpeting beneath his favorite red corduroy blanket. Despite his angelic smile, I felt a twinge of annoyance. A nap this late in the day would probably give him a bout of insomnia tonight, not to mention the fact that Dylan never napped when he was home alone with me. Why was that? Was I so overstimulating that my kid couldn’t doze off and give me an hour or so to work at the computer or tidy up the house?
Of course, the nap ended abruptly when Scout and Becca burst in and knelt over him, cooing and calling to him, touching his nose lightly and trying to make him twitch. Dylan uncurled himself, his face a mask of peace until it crumbled into the roar of a hibernating baby bear.
“Leave him alone,” I said, then turned to Kristen, an energetic college student who watched the baby in our home a few hours a day while the girls were in school so that I’d have a shot at getting some work done.