“Yes,” she says, nodding vigorously.
“No,” Tita Gloria and Oliver chime in from behind her.
“I brought my spray sunscreen down, Frankie,” Lina chimes in from behind me. “Let’s dry you off and spray you down. It’ll be super fast. I promise.”
“Spray sunscreen isn’t as effective as the cream kind,” I mutter.
Both Lina and Frankie roll their eyes at me in a twisted sort of synchronization. “It’s fifty SPF, Dominic,” Lina assures me. “I’ll make sure to load it on.”
I walk over to a towel dumped unceremoniously into the sand and start drying a wriggling Frankie off. I hold my hand for Lina’s sunscreen and read the label after she gives it to me. “I think I’m just going to run up to your room and grab the sunscreen you packed, Frankie. Can you stay put for a sec?”
“Okay,” Frankie says, already turning around and heading straight for the water.
“Hold up, little lady,” Lina says. She rips the spray from my hand and holds it up to my daughter. “You’re gonna sit here and let me spray you, and then I’m going to set a timer for fifteen minutes before you’re allowed back in the water. AND—” she gets louder, grabbing Frankie’s attention when she senses it’s waning, “—I’m going to teach you how to make a drip castle in those fifteen minutes. Okay?” Lina starts spraying Frankie with one hand while setting a timer for fifteen minutes on her phone in her other hand, not bothering to wait for a response.
“What’s a drip castle?” Frankie asks, intrigued.
“I’m about to show you. Right after I finish spraying. But we’re gonna need dad’s help.” She glances at me. “Can you fill that bucket up with some water?”
I do so because Lina doesn’t seem to leave much room for negotiation, and I watch as she handles my daughter with a confidence and calm I may try to project but truly never feel.
“Pick your battles,” Lina tells me later, kindly, without sounding like a know-it-all. “And don’t pick all of them. By the time you ran back for her sunscreen and came back and tried to rub her down and made her wait another fifteen minutes, she would have lost it.”
“Thank you,” I say, genuinely. I play with the sand under my legs, rubbing it between my fingers, as we sit side by side watching Frankie jump in the waves with Ollie and Georgia. “I keep forgetting that you guys are all kid experts. But I don’t want you to feel like you have to work this week. We’re relaxing, remember?”
She’s silent for a second, so I look over. Something crosses her face, a flash of something, maybe surprise, to what I’m not sure, but it’s gone so fast I could have imagined it. “I miss working with kids,” she says after a moment of watching Frankie. “Most of my job is dealing with adults now. Staff, parents, district officials. Kids aren’t work to me. So don’t worry about it. I’m sure Oliver and Georgia and your aunt and uncle feel the same.”
“Adults do kind of suck,” I agree. “But kids are so much fucking work.”
“Not to me, not like this. Not when you’re hanging out on the beach building sandcastles.”
I hum. “You haven’t seen Frankie throw a tantrum yet.”
“At least I know that she can’t help it. Kids don’t have a handle on their big emotions. Makes it easier, more palatable to deal with, knowing that they don’t know how to grapple with all the feelings they’re feeling, that it’s up to adults to teach them how to do it. It’s a skill they have to learn.”
“Whereas adults should presumably already have that skill.”
“And it sucks extra when they don’t,” she agrees.
I’ve always felt this way while raising Frankie, but hearing a professional articulate it so calmly and eloquently, putting words to my feelings, makes it extremely validating.
“But what I’m trying to stop doing this week is working on principal stuff,” she continues. “I’m an assistant principal. I should have summers off.”
“And you’re not getting paid the principal salary, I assume?”
She shrugs.
“And you’ve been doing this for how long? Since Courtney Thomas was removed?”
She shrugs again.
I read in her face, in the tilt of her shoulders, that it’s likely been longer than that. I nod, and we sit and watch Frankie swim.
“Thanks for not pushing,” she says quietly. “I’m working on it.”
“I can tell.”
* * *
