Page 9 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

Gus

The first day of kindergarten starts before the sun is up, when Teddy climbs into my bed and puts his face an inch from mine.

“Does my teacher know about me yet?”

“Know what about you?”

“Anything,” he says, like I’m stalling.

“She knows you’re coming. The rest you get to tell her yourself.”

He considers that, decides it’s acceptable, and goes downstairs to brief June instead. “—and if there’s a fire drill, I already know about fire drills,” I hear him telling her as I come down.

“Noted,” June says. “Eat the eggs.”

By the time I’m at the counter, he’s dressed in the dinosaur shirt, the backpack is by the door, and there’s a breakfast on the table that nobody burned. Nora used to talk about this morning back when he was a baby — she had opinions about the backpack, the first-day breakfast, all of it. I dreaded it for a year. It turns out dread is easier with staff.

Over the eggs, Teddy announces that everybody has to come to drop-off. Everybody. It’s a rule he has just invented, and nobody has the heart to repeal it, so all four of us get in the car.

Margot speaks from the back seat. “You can drop me at the corner.”

“It’s the first day.”

“The corner is fine.”

I look at June. June looks at the road. “The corner it is,” she says. Margot gets out at the corner of her own first day of fourth grade, braced, and doesn’t look back.

At the kindergarten steps, Teddy grips my hand hard enough to matter and pretends he isn’t. June takes my phone out of my other hand. “You’ll want this on yours, not mine,” she says, and gets the picture. Teddy, gap in his grin, dinosaur shirt, September sun.

In the car, the quiet after leaving a kid somewhere new. I pull out slowly, in case he changes his mind and runs for it.

“He didn’t cry,” I say.

“You sound disappointed.”

“I had a whole speech ready.”

“I know. It’s in your jacket pocket. You kept touching it at breakfast.”

I drive a block. “You watch people for a living, or is it a hobby?”

“Four families’ worth of practice,” she says, looking out her window. “Nervous dads aren’t hard to spot.”

I look at that photo of Teddy four times before lunch. I don’t tell anyone that.

He comes home loud. “There are a lot of kids and none of them know anything about dinosaurs,” he reports at dinner. “I’m going to teach them. Actually, some of them don’t even want to know.”

“Actually,” Margot repeats, flatly, to her plate. He’s said it nine times since the meatballs.

“Also at the store I laid down on the floor and yelled,” Teddy says.

“You what?”

“About cereal. I was really loud.” He says it like a kid describing a roller coaster. “June sat down on the floor too. People looked at us.”

I look at June. She keeps eating. “He needed a minute,” she says. “The floor seemed like the best place to have it. We worked it out down there.”

“I got the regular cereal,” Teddy adds, in case I missed the ending.