“Hey,” she says, answering in her I’m-super-busy voice. “What’s up?”
“I had a break,” says Steven. “So I thought I’d check in, see how everyone is.”
Louisa grits her teeth against the memory of their last conversation, about the Emergency Fund. Since then they’ve exchanged only texts. “Everyone is fine,” she says. She has one goal, and it’s to get in and out of this conversation without a fight.
“I’ve got to be back in the studio in ten, but I wanted to say hi to the kids. Can you pass the phone around?”
“I can’t, I’m actually not with them.”
“You’re not? Where are you?” Tiny bit of something in Steven’s voice—a morsel of judgment, perhaps? Or maybe merely curiosity. Louisa wriggles around for a moment in the middle of a paradox: what she has wanted for much of the past year for her and for the kids too was more of Steven’s attention. Now here it is, and it’s come at a time when she wants to eat her wrap and look at the water and imagine she’s on Pitcairn, so she resents it.
“I’m in town working, and the kids are at home. In fact, let me tell you about my genius scheme. I can’t believe I never thought of this before. Listen to this. I pay Matty ten dollars to keep an eye on Abigail and Claire. I pay Abigail seven dollars to watch Claire, and I pay Claire four dollars to get watched by Matty and Abigail so she doesn’t complain. But the super genius part is that unless they compare notes nobody knows about the other two.”
A long silence, and then Steven says,” Perhour?”
“No! No, of course not. I’d go broke. For the morning.”
“What about your mother?”
“Oh, well, really she’s driving the whole bus, obviously. But she’s never been the get-down-on-the-floor kind of grandmother, and she has a lot going on. This way I’m hoping they don’t bother her.”
“Are you payinghertoo?”
“No!” This conversation has taken a left turn when she expected it to go right. “Of course I’m not paying my mom, Steven, that would be so weird.”
“I agree.”
“My mom’s not a babysitter.”
“Of course not. But isn’t that one of the main reasons you’re there? So she can help out while you work?”
She shifts her bag onto her other shoulder, puts the hummus wrap on top for safekeeping. She’s flustered now. It’s not fair for Steven to make her feel flustered! “One of the main reasons we’rehere, Steven”—she leans hard on the first syllable of his name, a sure sign to both of them that she’s irritated—“is soyoucan focus on your company without us in the way.”
“Well sure,” he says reasonably. “But your plan was also to work on your book while your mom is there to help. I’m just not sure that paying the kids to watch each other is the way to teach responsibility.”
“Responsibility?” Is this conversation really happening?
“Yeah. Fiscal responsibility, and also personal responsibility. First of all, you’re way overpaying them, which isn’t teaching them the value of money—”
“Four dollarsI’m paying Claire!” she protests.
“—And personal responsibility too. My parents never paid us to watch each other when we were kids. We just hung out. It’s not really a job, to keep yourself occupied when your parents work, is it? It’s just something you have to do sometimes. I don’t know if this is how we want to go about it.”
“Weare not going about it in any way right now,” she says. “Iam going about it, because I am the one who’s here.” She glances at her watch. “Oh! Looks like your ten minutes are up. You’d better get into the studio.”
When she finds a bench, she releases the wrap from the bag, unwraps it, and chews it harder than she needs to.
Upon Louisa’s return all three of the children are near the water, screens nowhere to be seen. Vitamin D is flowing. Her father is working in the garden, with Barbara hovering nearby. Danny is backing the mower up the ramp and into his pickup. (He seems to be here every other day. Does the grass growthat quickly?) Louisa’s mother is lying down in her room. See? She wants to tell Steven. My genius planisgenius! Instead Louisa sits on the back porch in the white rocker and calls Franklin.
Louisa and Franklin were Ph.D. students together at Columbia—they listened to each other’s dissertation defense practices, theydrank pint after pint of dollar drafts at the 1020 bar, they bitched about their thesis advisors and other students in their program who published papers in journals before they did. When Louisa met Steven, she called Franklin at two in the morning to tell him she thought she was in love. When Franklin married Beau, Louisa served as Franklin’s best woman, opposite Beau’s sister, Shonda.
“Lou Lou!” Franklin is the only person ever in the whole world who can get away with calling Louisa this, and only sometimes.
“Franklin,” she says. “I’m sorry it took me a few days to call you back. I’m in summer mode, which means I’m getting nothing done except worrying about what I’m not getting done.”
Franklin and Beau live in Charleston, South Carolina, in a gorgeous, brick-fronted three-bedroom condo on King Street. Franklin teaches at the College of Charleston and Beau works at the Gibbes Museum of Art. They have no children, which means that Franklin has published at almost twice the rate that Louisa has. Okay, maybe that’s notjust becauseFranklin doesn’t have children. Franklin is also incredibly smart and really, really hardworking. But certainly his mind is less cluttered than Louisa’s on any given day.
“Sure, sister. I hear that. I’d ask how you are and all that other bullshit but actually in fact I think I’m just going to get right to it.”
