“Don’t I live here?” she asks, and flops down on the couch. She immediately takes a throw pillow and covers her midsection. I don’t even know if she realizes that she does that, every time she takes a seat. “What’s for dinner?”
“I thought you ate at Sarah’s,” I say, and wince, because I don’t want her to read between the lines and think that I’m criticizing her for being hungry.
“I did and I didn’t.” Meret picks at the tasseled edge of the throw pillow. “I mostly picked.”
I glance up, sympathetic. “Did they make pork?”
Meret hates pork. She has boycotted it ever since she learned that pigs are smarter than any other domestic animal. “No, fried chicken and Caesar salad.” Color rises in her cheeks. “It’s hard, you know. If I only eat salad, they’re thinking,Poor thing, she’s trying so hard.If I eat the chicken, they’re thinking,Oh,that’swhy she’s huge.”
I wipe my hands on a dish towel and walk into the family room to sit beside her on the couch. “Baby,” I tell her, “no one is thinking that.”
“She asked me to come over Saturday to hang out.”
“That’s great!” There is too much cheer in those words.
Meret sinks lower into the couch.
“What did you work on today?”
Her face lights up. “We isolated the DNA of spinach.”
“Wow.” I blink. “Why?”
“Because wecan. It looked like cobwebs.” She drops the pillow, talking with her hands. “Did you know we share eighty-five percent of our genes with zebra fish? And that less than two percent of our DNA actually has the instructions to make proteins? The rest is called ‘junk DNA,’ because it’s just a bunch of random sequences that doesn’t seem to be code for anything important.”
“That’s a lot of wasted space in a chromosome,” I point out.
“Yeah. Unless itisimportant and no one’s figured out the DNA Rosetta stone yet.”
I tug on one of her curls. “Maybe that’s going to be your big contribution to science.”
She shrugs. “You know what they say. If you need the right man for the job…get a woman.” Then, suddenly, she launches forward and hugs me. Adolescence is like summer weather in Boston—storms chased by sunshine, in the span of a minute. Occasional hail. And every now and then, a cloudless sky.
I wrap my arms around her, as if I could cocoon her again, and keep anything bad from happening. I remember what it felt like to have her settled under the umbrella of my rib cage, to have a double beat of a heart. I still do. It’s just harder to hear, sometimes.
Just then Brian comes in. After calling the Perimeter Institute and canceling his speech at the last minute, he went to his lab. He tosses his briefcase onto the kitchen counter and eats a slice of mozzarella off a platter of caprese salad I’ve made. “Ugh,” I say, “not before you wash your hands.”
“She’s right,” Meret says. “A single gram of human poop can contain a trillion germs.”
“So much for being hungry…” Brian leans down and hugs Meret, and then, after only a tiny hesitation does the same to me.
I breathe in. Neutrogena shampoo. Old Spice.
I exhale.
“Meret isolated DNA today,” I tell him.
He whistles. “How much is this camp costing?”
“It was vegetable DNA. But still.” Suddenly she leaps up. “Oh! But thank you for my birthday present! It’s perfect.”
He must have bought her something and left it in her room when I was visiting with Win. His gaze slides to mine as Meret hugs him. “I’m sorry it was late,” he says.
“That’s okay,” Meret tells him.
I feel, for just a moment, a pang of jealousy. Why does he get a free pass, every time; why am I always judged?
I know parents with more than one kid say they love the kids equally, but I don’t believe it. I think it is the same in the other direction. A kid will say they love both their parents the same amount, but when there’s a rough edge, sometimes that ragged border fits flush against one parent, and prickles against the other.
