Page 18 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
I have no idea why Maddie makes my jaw clench when twins, a teenager, two animals, and daily emails from the athletic liaison trying to get their athletes excused from my already very easy labs don’t faze me.
Is it the lipstick? The emerald eyes? The bratty attitude?
“You’ll be back in Mount Astra in six weeks,” I say, scooping up Porcupine. Her bright green throat quivers in silent fury. “Then life will get back to normal.”
“Yeah, butnormalfor you, Bram, still begs for some fun,” Asher says, adding a lifted eyebrow for emphasis. (Asher is one of the few people to keep their brow piercings from the aughts and have it look good on them.) “You know, if the dating pool at Astra is tapped, I’m happy to introduce you to some friends of mine at NOAA. There are a lot more fish in the sea in Kansas City than in Mount Astra. And the commute isn’t so bad! I get through a lot of podcasts.”
The twins crowd around me to check on Porcupine, who is, as a tree frog, currently trying to climb my hand like a tree.
“I haven’t tapped the dating pool,” I explain. “I’m just... not good at it.”
“You barely tried!” protests Sara. “I had a robust postdivorce ho phase. And you went on two dates that didn’t even get to second base and called it quits.”
“Three dates,” I correct without heat. I’d wanted a ho phase too; I’d started dating Sara so young that there hadn’t been a chance to explore my nascent bisexuality, and so after the divorce, I’d planned on spreading my bi wings and making up for lost time. But something about dating felt... perfunctory, I guess.Commercial, even, like I was shopping, and my dates were shopping too, and the actual date was just the part of the shopping trip where you took something off the shelf and glanced at the price tag.
I didn’t want to shop. I didn’t know what I wanted instead, but I knew that much. So I gave up, and now here I am, with an engaged ex-wife and a childcare provider whom I think about in the shower.
“Okay, say goodbye to Mommy and Asher,” I say to the twins as I start walking toward the stairs with a squirming frog in my hand.
“Bye, Mommy! Bye, Asher!” the twins sing, and then fling themselves back onto the floor to give Hester Prynne post-frog therapy.
I hear the sound of the front door swinging open, a sound my body now pornographically responds to.
Maddie is here.
Chapter Six
Bram
Bye, love you!” Sara calls to the girls as I’m walking down the stairs. I see Maddie standing in front of the door looking like a ripe peach in a yellow sundress with her Focus Group Pink lipstick.
“Sara, I’ve got to go. Call tomorrow?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she says, giving me a quick wave before hanging up. I finish descending the stairs and carefully place Porcupine back into her tank. She climbs onto a moss-covered rock and then blinks giant black eyes at me as I swing the lid shut, as if to demonstrate her amphibian innocence.
“Good morning, Ms. Kowalczk,” I say in my bestnothing to see here over at the frog tankvoice.
Maddie doesn’t return the greeting, swinging her golden hair over her shoulder and looking up the stairs. “Are the girls up in their room?”
“For now,” I say, frowning a little. Maddie and I are currently in what could charitably be called an armistice—we avoid each other on campus and keep our communication about childcare as brief as possible—but she’s never been outrightuncivilto me. “If you come with me, I’ll show you where we keep the swimming stuff in case you take them to the pool. It’s the last weekend it’s open, so it might be a good idea to go.”
“Fine,” she sniffs.
Okay, then.
We go out to the garage, where I point out the plastic tote full of pool noodles and goggles and inflatable water wings that the girls don’t technically need anymore but still want to bring. Then I lead her to my office so I can give her the key to my crossover—I figure that’ll be easier than her trying to wedge pool noodles into her sedan—and fish it out of my satchel right as she says, with some layer of meaning I can’t decode, “Was that Sara on the phone?”
“It was.” I hold out the key, and she snatches it away, like she can’t bear to have contact with me for a second longer than possible. But she doesn’t flee the room. She doesn’t turn on her heel and stalk off with that comportment-lesson-straight back. She instead lifts her chin and crosses her arms, her green eyes flashing in the late morning sunlight. She’s looking at me like I owe her money.*
I step back, so that I’m half sitting, half leaning against the edge of my desk, and cross my arms too.
My office is on the ground floor, in the large octagonal turret that sold me on the house the moment I saw it. It was the hardest space to restore—if I never have to strip hardwoods in an eight-sided room again, I’ll die a happy man—but now it’s my favorite place in the whole house. Built-in bookshelves line half the walls, while the other half consists of tall windows trimmed in stained glass. My desk, given to me by Leo and Sloane when I was officially awarded my PhD, faces those windows and my big cottonwood tree outside, which my dendrology friends tell me is older than the house itself.
Botanical prints hang wherever there’s room, books and papers crowd two of the deep window seats, and the other window seat has a basket of Fern’s latest knitting project tucked into the corner. The twins have left a carnage of construction paper scraps and broken crayons near the door to the office closet, which is supposed to be where I keep paper files and old research, but has long since been turned into Letty and Berry’s “apartment.”
If there’s any room in the house that sums up my life, it’s this one. The room where my teen curls up in the window and crafts while I work, the room where the twins scoot around on their knees and crawl into my lap and have me watch their YouTube “videos” that they perform live for me. The room where I grade, where I write, where I quietly sketch plants and mycelium and where I think about hownicelife can be sometimes, how we have beautiful mosses and wafting ferns and clever mushrooms, too many books and funny children and ridiculous friends.
And now, for the first time, Maddie is standing in the middle of it.
