My phone buzzes on the table. Does he have a monitoring device on me? A photo from Kent fills my screen. He is wearing a Minnesota Vikings jersey he’s had since college and giving a thumbs-up.
KENT: Guess who has two thumbs and just got first pick?
I self-consciously open the camera app, temporarily stunned by what I see when my face appears onscreen, mostly chins and nostrils. I make my own awkward thumbs-up and snap a photo quickly, hoping that nobody notices.
ME: Guess who has two thumbs and is so proud of you!
Carla is staring at me when I put my phone down. “Is that him?” she asks. “Do you ever get a break? Like, from all of this?” She gestures at the table next to us, where our collection of kids are enjoying a dinner of cheese bread and cheese pizza and breadsticks. The waitress had gotten tired of bringing refills, so she’d left a big plastic pitcher of milk in the middle of the table. Carla’s son, Jaxon, is chanting “Chug! Chug! Chug!” while Dylan drains a glass of 2 percent. Bernard and Clara are watching him with rapt attention, holding their own glasses of milk and waiting for their turn to join the tiny frat party. Jane is studying, her face about two inches from a textbook about plant biology that I’m fairly certain is two grades ahead of where she should be. The twins are quietly dipping their breadsticks in vats of ranch dressing, their chubby little arms covered in grease and sauce.
“Repeat after me.” Carla pauses, then coughs violently into her hands. You’re supposed to do the Dracula cough—even the twins know that!—but at least she wipes her hands on her jeans before she reaches for another breadstick.
“Kent,” she continues.
“Kent,” I repeat.
“Stop being such a whiny little bitch and let me have my own fucking life!” The dining room of Frankie’s Pizza momentarily pauses, unused to the shouting of expletives in a fast casual family restaurant.
“Stop being such a whiny little b and let me have my own fudging life,” I whisper.
“Atta girl,” says Amy, encouragingly.
DYLAN FINISHES HIS GLASS OF MILK, SLAMMING IT UPSIDE down on the table. Jaxon celebrates by lifting Dylan in the air like the two of them have just won the Super Bowl. “Dy-lan! Dy-lan! Dy-lan!” The little kids all join in the chant—does Jaxon know how to speak, or just cheer?—and Amy and I gesture at them to shut their beautiful little mouths before we’re asked to leave. Carla, of course, could not care less that our children are the center of attention.
“Jesus,” Carla says, “I can’t believe that giant came out of me. You know, I’m still not the same down there? It doesn’t matter how many Kegels I do, either. My vagina is like a hospital hallway. It’s like a double-wide trailer. It’s like—”
“Do you think anyone is going to come to the meet the candidate night?” Amy’s giant dark eyes looked . . . scared. Is that insecurity showing? It’s actually criminal for someone who looks like Amy to be insecure. I’m sure if I could find one of her old yearbooks in her house, I’d be able to prove that she was voted Most Popular her senior year. And not popular in the Gwendolyn way, where you’re really just scared she might slit your throat if you don’t follow her on Instagram, but popular in the genuine way, where you just want to be around her because it’s probably how lizards feel when they lie on a sunbaked rock.
“They fucking better,” Carla shoots back, leaning across the table, “or I’m not gonna be so gentle with the wax next time.”
I might have laughed a little too hard, because Jane looks up, startled, and shoots a look our way that clearly indicates she would like to have some quiet study time at this casual family eatery. Amy mimes locking her lips and sighs heavily toward us.
“I’m trying to get Jane to chill the fuck out. Sometimes I think she almost gets it, like she’s almost going to enjoy her life, and then she cries because she wasn’t invited to the gifted and talented camp at some school I’ve never even heard of and I think, What the fuck have I done? Like, do you see any other kids reading next year’s biology textbook at the dinner table? No. No you do not, because it’s bonkers.”
“That’s a good problem,” Carla says, dunking her pizza crust in my milk. “I’m pretty sure that if you gave Jaxon a book, he’d just try to karate-kick through it. Or rip it in half, maybe? Good news is, I’m off the hook for a college savings account. Clearly.”
I think about my own mom, and if she ever wondered about her own mothering capabilities. I doubt it. She delighted in people asking if we were sisters, sometimes calling me “sissy” in public just to try to encourage the question so she could gleefully exclaim, “Kiki, did you hear that? They thought we were sisters!” I hated that, just like I hated my mom asking me to prom. Just like I hated going to prom with her—in matching dresses, of course—just like I hated how she’d “pop in” to the dorms at the University of North Dakota as if she had just been in the neighborhood, and not that she’d driven over four hours with an overnight bag. I hadn’t realized how weird it all was until my roommate and Kent pointed it out to me, but I’d never brought it up to her. How were moms supposed to know if they were doing a good job? Should we be giving our kids comment cards? Having the kinds of check-ins Kent and I have? Or just waiting until they’re grown-ups and it’s too late to do anything about it, and hope that we haven’t raised serial killers or multilevel marketers who are badgering their high school friends to come get rich quick with them while working from their phones?
“The worst part is that she’s just like me,” Amy says as Jane adjusts her glasses and leans even closer to her book. “She wants everything to be perfect all the time, and it makes her insane, and it makes me kind of hate her sometimes? Lucky for Dylan, he turned out just like Mike, and he’s lazy as shit. I found a bottle of pee in his room yesterday, because he’s too lazy to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night.”
My brain crackles with excitement. Amy’s kids are weirdos, too.
“Yesterday,” I confess, “I gave Bernard the wrong kind of juice and he called me an idiot.”
“Jaxon still watches Sesame Street, and I’m not even sure that he gets it, you know what I mean?”
“Dylan failed study hall. Principal Burr said nobody had done it before. Nobody. Ever.”
“Clara took money out of a homeless woman’s cup.”
“I’m only seventy-five percent sure that Jaxon’s dad is his dad.”
“Dylan tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich on a lamp.”
“Clara killed our neighbor’s ferret with her bare hands, and we all said it was an accident but sometimes I think . . . was it?”
“Yesterday, in the shower, I spent ten minutes fantasizing that Mike would take Dylan in the divorce and Jane and I could just spend our days in a house where nobody celebrates their own farts.”
“I left Bernard at the mall on purpose.”
GEEZ LOUISE THIS FEELS GOOD. ALL THOSE THOUGHTS THAT I was certain made me a terrible, awful, no-good mother? They were normal. Or at least normal to these other two psychos. The three of us are laughing. Not the nervous kind of laugh I usually throw in when the silence feels awkward, but a real laugh. My eyes are watering, and my stomach hurts, and every breath I manage to sneak in just turns into a bigger giggle. It’s so consuming, we hardly notice that our kids have stopped destroying the restaurant and are staring at us with a mix of fear and embarrassment. I wipe tears from my eyes and give Bernard a thumbs-up, which he returns with his middle finger. As the high of our giggles subsides, something quieter creeps in.