“You should be clearing away the used ones.” Tanya pointed to an empty tin that had been shoved to the side. “That’s part of the mover’s job. We want the booth to look neat and inviting—can’t let the mess pile up like that.”
“I was just getting to it.” Carol Lynn picked it up.
“Don’t forget you’re covering the drinks booth next,” Tanya said to Melanie.
“Right. We’ll be there.” She included me with a gesture.
Tanya gave a brusque nod. “Until then, keep things moving. We want the food hot and ready. Hot and ready.” She stalked off.
There was a pause and then Carol Lynn, Melanie, and I all looked at each other. I’m not sure who giggled first, but pretty soon all three of us were cracking up like fourth-graders who’d just given fake names to a substitute teacher.
“I’m failing food moving!” Carol Lynn cried out.
“The food’s hot but is it ready enough?” Melanie said. “I just don’t think we’re getting the ‘ready’ part right.”
Carol Lynn picked up the errant tin. “Lord knows we need people like Tanya to run things and she’s great for the school, but honestly, how she can bear to be like that is beyond me.”
“You’re not moving,” I pointed out. “Movers have to keep moving.”
“Look at me move,” she said and headed back to the grill area.
“See?” Melanie said to me almost accusingly.
“What?”
“She’s nice. You were all mean about her before, but she’s nice. She was telling me about her own divorce, how hard it was.”
“She dresses like a tween,” I said. “And she’s closing in on fifty.”
“So? You’re going to be judgmental about someone’s clothes?” She eyed my frayed jeans, my Vans, my long-sleeved old T-shirt with a tear at one shoulder seam.
“It’s different—”
A male voice interrupted me. “So did you ever find out what kind of veggie burgers you serve?” Veggie Burger Guy was back. “You were gone long enough.”
“I did,” I said. And then, realizing, “but now I’ve forgotten what it was. Oh, wait. Gardenburgers. I think. Or was it Boca burgers? It was a blue package. Or green…”
“Oh, forget it,” he said and turned away as someone else came up and asked for hot dogs and then there was a rush of people that kept us busy until Maria and her daughter arrived to relieve us and Melanie and I fled to the relative calm of the drinks booth.
As the lunchtime mania passed, things slowed down at the drinks booth even more. During a long and boring lull, I pulled out my cell phone and started playing a game on it.
“Hey, I know that music,” said a voice. I looked up. Coach Andrew was standing in front of me, on the other side of the counter. “Tetris, right?” I nodded. He said, “Where’s Noah?”
I closed the game and slipped the phone in my pocket. “With my mother.”
“Oh, you brought your mother? That’s nice.”
I gave a short laugh of disbelief. There was actually someone at the school who didn’t know who my mother was. “She brought me,” I said. “My mom kind of runs the board of trustees.”
“Oh, wow,” he said. “I had no idea.”
I wondered if it was now occurring to him that I had power at the school and he should be more careful how he treated Noah. I hoped so. “So,” I said, feeling the need to make polite conversation, “did you enjoy the dunk tank?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘enjoyed it’—you’re either burning up in the sun or sucking in some really nasty water. But the kids love it.”
“Your girlfriend has a good arm.”
He nodded, pleased. “She played softball in college.”
“I’m a little bummed I didn’t dunk you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? It wasn’t enough you tried to get me fired? You have to try to drown me too?”
“I didn’t try to get you fired,” I said stiffly.
“I was kidding,” he said, but there was an awkward moment where we were both just kind of standing there, not really looking at each other. “Can I have a Coke, please?” he said abruptly and held out a ticket.
I bent down and got a Coke out of an ice-filled tub. As I handed it to him and took his ticket in exchange, I said slowly, “Maybe I overreacted that day. I don’t know. It’s just… sometimes it’s a little rough for Noah here and I want to help him and I don’t always know what the best thing to do is. It’s hard.”
He studied me a moment, his eyes dark and thoughtful. “I’d feel the same way if I had a kid.”
It felt like we had both apologized, even though neither of us had.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“I turn twenty-six next month.”
He was less than a year older than me. “It’s intense,” I said, suddenly wanting him to understand. “Having a kid like Noah. You don’t know whether you’re—”
“Andrew! There you are!” His pretty, athletic girlfriend was coming toward us, moving quickly with the confident strut of a head-turner. “Is that Coke for me?”
“It is now.” He handed it to her.
“We can share.” She opened it with a quick snap of the ring. Her fingernails were neatly trimmed and painted a pretty light peach color. She noticed me as she took her first sip. “Oh, hi!” she said. “You were at the dunk tank with me! Where’s your cute little brother?”
I was confused, but Andrew cleared his throat and said, “That was Noah, one of our first-graders, and this is, um… Noah’s mom. I’ve completely forgotten your first name,” he added apologetically.
I told them, and his girlfriend put out her hand and said, “I’m Gracie.” We shook and then she leaned back comfortably into the curved part of Andrew’s arm. “That Noah’s a real cutie.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Are you a teacher too?”
“God, no.”
“Gracie works for a big PR firm,” Andrew said. “She makes famous people even more famous.”
She pushed her hip against his and smiled up into his face. “Speaking of my job,” she said, “we have to go home and change for that dinner tonight.”
“What are you talking about? It’s like six hours from now.”
“Guys just don’t get it, do they?” she said to me. “They get annoyed that it takes us longer to get ready, but all they have to do is comb their hair and put on a jacket and they’re done, right?”
I nodded politely. I almost never went out to fancy events, and even on those rare occasions when I did, there wasn’t any guy waiting impatiently for me to finish getting ready. Unless, of course, you counted Noah, who took longer than I did to get dressed, simply because he usually got distracted and forgot what he was doing halfway through pulling on his shirt or tying his shoes.
“I have to help organize the tug-of-war,” Andrew said. “After that, we can go.”
“Okay.” She moved away from his side. “Let’s walk around, see if we spot anyone interesting.”
He rolled his eyes. “And by interesting, you mean famous?”
“Not necessarily. Come on.” She pulled at him, tugging him away from the booth. He tossed out a quick good-bye to me over his shoulder then extricated his arm from her grasp, but only so he could put it around her waist.
They moved across the field together, and I felt a vague stab of something like jealousy. It wasn’t specific to them. I just felt lonely. It helped that I had seen Ryan recently, but as much as I liked having sex with him, it wasn’t the same as having a boyfriend. A boyfriend would have come with me to the Autumn Festival.
During all this, Melanie had dealt with the trickle of people coming up and wanting drinks. Once Andrew and Gracie had left, she moved closer to me and said, “Look over there,” in a low voice, twitching her shoulder to indicate which direction.
“What?” I scanned the field.
“Don’t stare,” she said. “It’s Marley Addison and James Foster—how cute is he?”
“Su
per cute,” I said, watching with interest as Coach Andrew and his girlfriend headed right for the school’s biggest celebrities. Gracie was bearing down on them with a determined square to her shoulders, but Andrew suddenly jerked her around and steered her in the opposite direction. What was that all about?
I turned back to Mel. “Foster’s not her kid’s dad, though, right?”
“Germaine Longman’s the dad. But she never married him.” Melanie had an impressive knowledge of pop culture.
“Think Marley will be doing a shift at the hot-dog booth?”
“It’s impressive she came at all,” Melanie said. “She must be a good mom.”
“The bar is set so low for celebrities,” I said. “I mean, I hate these things, but when I show up, no one praises my mothering skills.”
“I do,” Mel said and put her arm around me. Then released me as some little kid came up and asked for a Sprite. “That’s your third one,” she reminded him gently. “Does your mom know you’re drinking so much soda?”
He gave a very tentative nod that didn’t inspire any confidence. Melanie sighed and handed him the Sprite.
Linda and some friend of hers showed up a few minutes before two to take over at the drinks booth. After two hours of non-stop serving, Melanie was as relieved as I was to be free again. “Don’t ever sign us up for that much again,” I said to her as we walked away, and she didn’t argue.
We found all three of our kids together, eating hot dogs at a picnic table. My mother was there, too, her chair pushed back so she could talk to someone at the next table.
As soon as Noah spotted me, he bounced up and said, “They put my hot dog in a bun even though I told them not to and Grandma had to take it back and get me a new one and I got hit in the nose in the bounce house and Simon called me a crybaby.”
“Sounds like I missed all the fun.”
“I told Simon he was a jerk,” Nicole piped up. “He is too. And I told him to leave my cousin alone and after that he did.” She smiled proudly. “He’s scared of me.”
“Nicely done,” I said and high-fived her.
“So where’s Daddy?” Melanie asked, affecting nonchalance as she plucked a potato chip off of Cameron’s plate.
“He had to go,” Cameron said. “Don’t eat any more of my chips, okay?”
“He told us to tell you good-bye,” Nicole added. “You can have my chips, Mommy.”
“Thanks, sweetie. So… did you guys have fun with Daddy and Sherri?”
“It was okay,” Nicole said cautiously. “I missed you, though.”
Cameron was a good kid, but he didn’t have Nicole’s empathy. “We had the best time! Sherri went in the bounce house with us and all these kids recognized her and wanted to play with us. It was so cool!”
“That was nice of her.” Melanie’s voice was doing that thing where it got all high again.
“I don’t like her,” Noah said suddenly, looking up from his hot dog. He had a smear of ketchup on his chin. “She smiles like she wants us to brush her teeth for her or something.”
Melanie stared at him with a kind of delight. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said.
I reached over to give Noah a grateful hug. He submitted to it and then said, “Mom? I need to go to the bathroom like right now.”
On the way back from the bathroom, I stopped to get him a sno-cone. He couldn’t make up his mind which flavor he wanted and asked if he could get four different flavors on one cone. The high-school girl who was manning the booth went ahead and gave them all to him, in neat little colorful rows. I had to remind him to say thank you. I always had to remind him to say thank you.
We were barely five steps away from the sno-cone booth when Noah suddenly bobbled the paper cone, spilling its contents right down the front of his shirt.
“Noah!” I brushed roughly at the rainbow-colored ice bits on his chest. “Why can’t you be more careful?”
His face screwed up. “It’s not my fault! Why do you always yell at me?”
“How can it not be your fault?”
“Someone must have bumped me—”
“No one bumped you. No one came near you.”
“I didn’t mean to spill it! You act like I meant to!” He clutched at his chest. “It’s cold!”
“Of course it’s cold!” I snapped. “It’s ice, genius!”
Dr. Wilson picked that moment to walk right by us. His eyes flickered briefly over in our direction. He just kept going, but I knew that my moment of bad parenting had been noted and would be remembered.
With Noah’s shirt ruined, it was definitely time to leave. Mom wasn’t ready to go yet, so Melanie offered to drive us, but just as we were all heading toward the parking lot, Tanya came sailing toward us. “There you are!” she sang out. “We need help at the dessert booth. One of the moms who signed up for the last shift never showed and they’re swamped over there. I need you two to fill in.”
“We did two hours already,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Melanie said. “I can do it. I’m happy to help out.”
I nudged her elbow. “You were going to drive us home.”
She rejected my attempt to rescue her. “You can take my car and the kids. I’ll get a ride back with your mom.”
“Thank you,” Tanya said. “I knew I could count on you.”
“But not me!” I said brightly.
She gave a strained smile. “You’ve helped a lot too,” she said and left.
I walked Melanie over to the dessert booth. She stopped and clutched my arm. “No one’s bought our cupcakes!” she said with horror.
“You’re kidding me!” We’d spent an entire day baking and decorating those damn things. (Nicole had helped, while Noah and Cameron played video games.) We’d frosted them with thick chocolate frosting and sprinkled colored sprinkles on top. They looked homemade but not too ugly. Cameron and Nicole had split one and begged for more, but Melanie had insisted we save the rest for the festival.
Noah hadn’t been able to sample them because they had wheat in them. Gluten-free mixes were too expensive to waste on a crowd. “They look good,” he had said, a little wistfully but not angrily. He was a pretty good sport about his diet.
But it wasn’t hard to figure out why our obviously homemade cupcakes were being passed up: several other people had brought boxes of bakery cupcakes, which were easily twice the size of ours but cost the same number of tickets.
Maria Dellaventura was working at the booth, busily handing out the desserts in exchange for food tickets. She waved at us. “Good! Reinforcements. We went from having no one here to being mobbed. Cookies are one ticket, a slice of cake or a cupcake is two, and the croissants from Belwood Bakery are three.”
Melanie handed me her car keys and then circled round to join Maria on the other side of the counter. “You’re not staying?” Maria said to me.
“We already did our time. I’m not as scared of Tanya as she is.”
“Fight the power,” Maria said with a wink as she handed someone a cookie.
I took the three kids back to my parents’ house. They were so fried from running around in the sun and eating junk food that I let them collapse in front of the TV while I sat with them and fooled around on my laptop. A friend of mine had sent out a mass e-mail describing her first week as a graduate student in Australia, and I felt my second big jolt of jealousy of the day.
I owed a bunch of friends e-mails, so I spent a while composing ones that were funny and sounded like they had been quickly dashed off. Lately it felt like I had to work harder and harder just to sound casual and upbeat.
Maybe because I had nothing new to say about myself or my life. Oh, wait—I could tell all my cool friends I now belonged to an Event Hospitality Committee. Yeah, I’d rush to do that.
After about a half hour or so, my dad wandered by the TV room. “Oh, hi,” he said, peering in with mild surprise. “Look at all my handsome grandchildren.”
“Hi, Grandpa!” Nicole said, b
lowing a kiss to him.
Noah reached out and grabbed at the air like he was catching something. “Got it!” he said and pretended to chew and swallow Nicole’s kiss.
“Stop it!” she said with real irritation. “Grandpa, that kiss was for you.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I got it. I’m not sure what Noah just ate, but I definitely felt your kiss on my cheek. Where’s your mother, Rickie?”
“Still at the Autumn Festival.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Do you think I should go meet her there?”
“Probably not, since it ends in five minutes.”
“Have you eaten lunch yet?”
“It’s four in the afternoon, Dad. Of course we’ve eaten lunch. You want me to make you something?”
“I’ll scrounge,” he said and went on into the kitchen. He wandered past the doorway a little while later with a cup of coffee in one hand and a couple of Oreos in the other. Mom would have made him eat something healthier, but my dad and I tended to leave each other alone about stuff like that.
I heard the garage door soon after that and put my laptop on the table so I could go greet Mom and Mel. They came into the kitchen carrying platters that were still loaded with our cupcakes.
“Oh, boy,” I said. “Should we freeze them?”
Melanie put hers on the table. “No, Tanya suggested we drop them off at school tomorrow afternoon. The fourth-grade boys’ basketball team is playing a home game and our side is supposed to supply the snacks. You can do it when you get Noah, right? I won’t be there—it’s Gabriel’s day to pick up the kids.”
“Sure. Where do I leave them?”
She rearranged a couple of the cupcakes to make the display neater. “Just give them to Coach Andrew. He’ll know what to do with them.”
“You really can’t do it?” I said with sudden reluctance.
“Why?” She looked up at me. “What’s the problem?”
“You know. The whole Noah and PE thing. When I complained about Coach Andrew to Dr. Wilson. Makes things kind of awkward.”
“Oh, please.” Mel waved her hand dismissively. “Parents are in there complaining about god knows what all the time, Rickie. I’m sure he’s forgotten all about that already.”