Gary stares at the cucumber in his hand and his face goes slack. “I don’t even know where to start with that sentence.”
“I know, but the important part is that host families will get a tuition credit, which we could really use,” I say, without getting too specific—I keep most of the details of our financial distress from Gary, since they only make him more anxious, which makes me more anxious. Then I close the refrigerator door slowly so I don’t accidentally whack the dog sling with it, and move over to the cutting board with my onion, garlic, and lemon.
“Um, what exactly are People Puppets?”
“What I got from the photo that Mr. Noah held up,” I say, pointing with my knife, “is that they’re some kind of life-size costumed characters.”
“Like Disney World and Chuck E. Cheese?”
“More handmade, and crafty. With bedsheets for bodies and papier-mâché heads.” I wipe my onion tears on my sleeve. “I think.”
Having to comprehend and categorize a new life-size puppet hybrid is clearly making him anxious: he puts the knife down and reaches into his front pocket for a Klonopin, then bites off half. “So they’re not hand puppets.”
“No, they are most definitely not hand puppets.”
“And they’re not large marionette-type puppets with strings?”
“No. They did not appear to have strings. Nor did they appear to be sock puppets. Or Muppets. I think I saw a cow and a horse and maybe a moose, but I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so who knows what was actually in the picture.”
Gary paces with the still-unpeeled cucumber in his hand, waiting for his pill to take effect. “I can’t believe we’re talking about puppets.”
“Yeah, well, this is what we signed on for when we left public school: puppets, and ‘Inhabitancies’”—I hand him the peeler—“which in regular school are just called special ‘units.’”
He stares absently at the cucumber and then at the peeler. “Maybe we should pull him out of there.”
I ignore him. Knowing that we’re behind in tuition—“really really behind,” to quote Grace—and realizing that leaving early might actually be forced on us, and on Teddy, makes me not even want to joke about it. Leaving early is only fun when it’s a choice. And when it doesn’t involve the school that your child likes, even though he won’t admit to liking anything anymore.
“Not to mention an aggressive fluidity with normative surnames,” I add, then explain that when Mr. Noah introduced me to talk about writing, he referred to Teddy as “Teddy Vogel.”
“God.” Annoyed, he starts to loudly chop the cucumber even though it’s just supposed to be sliced. “So did you at least make everyone wear bird merch?” he says, changing the subject.
I tell him that I wore my hat but didn’t bring any T-shirts from the endless stash of giant cardboard boxes in the basement. Then I shrug like I don’t care, even though I care more than I thought I would, more than I want to admit. “Which was a good thing, since there was some kind of emergency in the middle school building and someone came running in to get Mr. Noah at the exact moment I was supposed to start talking.”
“Someone replenished the soy milk but forgot the almond milk?”
I try to laugh, then change the subject to an even tougher one. “I saw Glenn today.”
Despite my halfhearted attempt to sound upbeat, Gary stares at me. “Is she okay?”
“Not really.”
“I thought the chemo was working.”
“I don’t think it is. She looks worse. She looks worse every time I see her.”
He puts the knife and the cucumber down. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”
We have: five years ago with my mother, then three years ago with my father. Each time we’d try to find signs of improvement—however minor, however incremental—that didn’t exist—until the end, which was, sadly, the only improvement.
“Does she know?”
“Of course she knows.” I tell him about our coffee date: the people she scared off, how badly she felt afterward, the way she begged for distraction. Then I tell him about her request that we host the People Puppets. Which feels like a final request. Gary walks over to me, buries both hands inside the sling in the dog’s thick fur, the closest we get now to hugging or touching. “We can’t say no,” I say.
“Of course we can’t. Which she knows. God, she’s such an asshole,” he whispers, because if he didn’t he would start to cry. And I haven’t even told him the part about agreeing to take Lucy. He shakes his head. “I still can’t believe this is happening.”
I paw at the dog now, too. I can’t believe it either.
“How long?” he asks.
I lean my back against the counter and put my hands on my hips, feeling the flesh folding over the top of my jeans, beyond the sling. Normally I’d grab it and curse it, but thinking of Glenn in her bed right now, with all her rapidly dividing cells and her not-long-for-this world eyes, I feel lucky to have it. “Three months—maybe six?” But I’m lying. I’m actually thinking a month, two if we’re lucky. I remember my parents, how they compared at those time markers—their weight, their stamina, their appetite, their will to live—and I sense that she is further along than we think—but I don’t want to upset Gary, so I backtrack: “I’m probably overreacting. She was probably just tired.”
He takes a deep breath, holds it, lets it out slowly—one of the calming exercises he’s learned to control some of the physical symptoms of his anxiety. When he reaches into the sling one last time to pat the dog on the head, he reaches out to pet me on the head, too. Which, like most things about our relationship, is totally weird but somehow not weird at all. It’s at that moment that I notice Teddy lurking just outside the kitchen—he has an uncanny ability to pick up on when we’re having an important conversation; to sense when we’re trying to keep something from him.
“What’s wrong with Glennie?” he asks me, moving into the kitchen from the shadows and staring at the vegetables we’re chopping, knowing he won’t eat them. Glenn is the fun aunt he never officially had, the one who gave him extravagant gifts—huge stuffed animals, paints and easels, giant LEGO sets—and, after my parents were gone, went to every school performance and concert at Morningside Montessori, including the African drumming and improv Inhabitancies, and even the little pre-Thanksgiving and pre-Solstice classroom celebrations.
“She’s sick. But you know that.”
“So why were you talking about her?”
“Because I just saw her. We met for coffee today and I was telling her about going to your school the other day, how my presentation got interrupted, and how they’re looking for families to host People Puppets. She thinks it would be fun for us to host them. Like we’d get some good stories out of it that would be fun for her to hear.” I smile broadly, desperately. “If Daddy agrees.”
“Of course I agree. I’m a brave bear,” Gary says, nodding, taking another deep breath, convincing himself. “And so is Glenn. She’s a very very brave bear.”