The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “Ya.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yesss.”

  “We are not the kind of people who believe in spoiling a child. Do you agree, Graham?”

  “Yesss.” He winked at Millie. She snorted.

  “Thank you, Graham. Millie, if you grow up believing everything will be taken care of for you, you will have little incentive to work hard to take care of yourself. Do you understand?”

  Millie looked at her dad. He wrinkled his eyebrows.

  Her mother said, “The money we have is money I…we…earned after years of struggle and personal effort that taught us about our perseverance and resilience. For that reason alone it is highly rewarding and something neither of us takes for granted. We insist that you have that same experience, that you mold your own value. Do you understand?”

  “We never talked about this,” Graham said.

  “Do you disagree?”

  “Well, I don’t agree. I know that. She’s our daughter, Katie.”

  “All right. When you tell me what you want to give up—vacations, the new car, the property you want to buy, or the riding lawn mower to mow our many new acres—we can discuss how much to put into savings for her unearned, and therefore unappreciated, future of leisure.”

  Millie’s dad threw his hands in the air and shrugged with a goofy smile. “Sorry, shrimp. Your mom makes too much sense for me.”

  “Do you understand any of this, Millicent?”

  Millie shook her head.

  “Well, someday you will. And you,” she said, “will be very grateful. Right, Graham?”

  “Sure! What fun is money if it doesn’t hurt to spend? Just think, Millie. One day, when you have a good job and you’re making lots of money and your mom and I are forced off the property to die in an old folks’ home, you can buy it from us and live here just like you always have. Isn’t that nifty?”

  “Can we please save death for another time?”

  “Speaking of death, silly Millie, when’s the last time you fed that parakeet?”

  Millie couldn’t remember, so she went to check on Annabelle.

  He was green and yellow, her favorite color combination. She had loved him since her dad had given him to her after one of their long vacations. She’d named him after fun, happy Annabelle, who worked at Lenny’s dad’s houses and hugged her hello whenever they went to work with him. Lenny had Murphy, big and licking and soft, but Millie thought Annabelle was almost as good. Because he couldn’t show feelings the way dogs did, though, he needed help, sometimes. Millie would hold him in both hands with his whole body covered except for his rough, tickling feet, and when he started flapping around against her fingers, she’d spread her hands just enough for him to try to push out his face to see her. “See, Annabelle? It’s me! Don’t worry, I’m here,” she would say.

  Millie stuck her finger in the seed bucket and swirled it around. She screamed, “He has food!” and ran back down to the living room.

  Her dad was at the front door. Her mother was nowhere.

  “She’s in the car,” her dad said. “You ready?”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  He smiled and picked up her backpack. “What’s all this about? We’re just going away like we always do, silly Millie.”

  “I want to go.”

  “You want to go with us on our vacation?”

  “Ya. Yes.”

  “‘Yes’! Very good. We’ll tell her in the car. Do you have everything?”

  Millie looked around at everything. “No.”

  “What are you missing?”

  She shrugged.

  “Are you sure you don’t know what you’re missing?”

  She shrugged again.

  Her dad looked at his watch, then clapped his hands and smiled brightly. “Great. Let’s get going!” He picked her up and carried her to the door.

  The smell of him made her cry.

  “You know what?” he said. “Someday you’ll be eighteen, and you can go on exciting vacations of your own. Would you like that?”

  “No.”

  When they got to Lenny’s house, Millie held onto her dad’s sleeve. He was smiling when he took her hand off his shirt and pushed her toward Lenny’s dad.

  “She forgot Annabelle, again,” he said. “The spare’s in the mailbox.”

  Her uncle Ernie laughed. “One of these times maybe you could bring the bird, yourself.”

  “C’mon, Ern,” her dad said. “How’s she supposed to learn self-sufficiency?”

  “Ah,” her uncle Ernie said.

  Her dad patted the top of her head. Millie turned at the sensation of his hand leaving her scalp, but he was already jogging to the car when she reached out for a hug. Her mother pulled away after he jumped in, and he didn’t look back or wave out the window.

  But when they came back, Millie had some new thing to play with, just like she did every time her parents showed up at Lenny’s door to take her home.

  TWELVE

  From the day she was born, Lenny had a friend in Murphy, who was a pillow, a blanket, and a playmate. He liked to roll the ball, so they did that a lot, but he also liked hide and seek. Lenny could make him look for hours and hours. She had three floors and all the rooms to hide in (minus her mamma’s office, where Lenny wasn’t allowed to play until after four), so when Murphy finally found her he’d be so tired and happy he’d bark and pant and then fall on his side and just lie there.

  Lenny and her poppy also played intercom hide-and-seek, sometimes, but only after breakfast was done. Her mamma would kiss her on the mouth and hug her and then go upstairs to work, and her poppy would say, “Ready? Go!” After counting to twenty-three, he would yell out crazy places he was looking for her—under the rug, in the sink, on top of the door—to try to make her give herself away by laughing. But only until her mamma would open her office door and sing, “That’s enough,” because she could hear “every delightful word you loves of my life are screaming through the intercom.”

  The intercom game was mostly a rainy-day activity. On nice days, her poppy would start the morning after breakfast with internet time, helping Lenny look up anything she was interested in (animals, but not kangaroos, which scared her, and all the bugs with wings, but not carpenter ants, because they were gross). The research started with pictures of caterpillars when she was three. As she got older, they started reading basic facts, and a little later she learned about things like characteristics and habitats. When internet time was over, if he didn’t have to go to a site and if Millie wasn’t coming over, they walked through the woods around their house and looked for what her poppy said were “local specimens.”

  For a long time, a year at least, Lenny liked to just pick up the bugs (if they were on the ground and if they didn’t jump or fly away), look at them, and put them back down. But she started liking certain ones so much that she wanted to bring them inside, so her poppy helped her research what she should have to take care of a cricket, a grasshopper, a praying mantis, or—if she could ever find one—a giant black ichneumon.

  Her first bug was a grasshopper that lived in a shoe box with grass she kept wet with a misty spray bottle. She only had him for a week, but she cried for three days, anyway, after she found him crinkled up and headless in Murphy’s downstairs bed.

  “I’m sure it was quick and painless,” her mamma said. “That’s the best way it could have happened for…?”

  “I didn’t name him.”

  “Oh, but he should have a name! What do you want to name him?”

  Lenny said, “Beauregard?”

  After burying Beauregard, they all drove to the pet store for a real bug terrarium Lenny could use for almost anything that wasn’t an arachnid.

  She knew her parents didn’t want an arachnid in the house, but Lenny couldn’t resist the bright, colorful beauty of an orange orb weaver that sat in its web outside the front door, up high between the roof and the rain gutter. One night, while her mamma was on a call in her off
ice and her poppy was in the kitchen making dinner, Lenny carried the footstool and a broom outside. She tried to use the soft bristles at the corners to knock the spider to the “veranda,” but the broom stuck to the web and took the spider. She shook it, and then she tapped it over and over again on the ground until the spider bounced off and made for the stairs. Lenny dropped the broom and dove, catching it right before it could sneak over the edge.

  Its legs tickled her palm as she tip-toed past the kitchen and up the stairs to the hallway outside her mamma’s office, where she could watch it race gracefully across the shiny wood floor. She was thinking about what to add to the terrarium for the spider, who she’d named Aranea, when her mamma opened her office door, saw Aranea spidering toward her, and smashed her four times with her thick binder.

  “We all have our unique endings,” her mamma said before the funeral. The whole family, including Murphy, stood in the shade while Lenny dug a hole with a plastic shovel under the dried, orange pine needles at the edge of the woods. “I’m sorry I took her away from you, sweetie. But after a week or two inside, when you finally released her again, she could have been plucked out of her web by a sparrow and swallowed alive. I promise she didn’t feel any pain today.”

  “What your mom’s saying is that she did that little spider a favor by flattening her in the hallway,” her poppy said.

  Lenny didn’t want to laugh, but she accidentally did. A round glob of snot shot out of her nose onto Aranea’s black velvet jewelry box sitting in the hole.

  Her mamma picked up a maple leaf for Lenny’s nose and said her poppy was right. Even better than the quick way it happened, she said, was that Aranea got to have a far more interesting death story than any of her spider friends. “And when it’s the last thing you’ll ever do, it may as well be interesting.”

  Aranea would have been the first to live in the terrarium, but instead it was Orthop, a bright green katydid Lenny found weeks later. (“No more spiders,” her mamma made her promise.) When Millie came over with Annabelle that Saturday for one of her weekends, Lenny dragged her through the foyer and straight to her room. She pointed into the glass. “That’s Orthop.”

  “Oh,” Millie said. “Want to play hide and seek?”

  Lenny didn’t. Playing hide and seek with Millie meant running all over the house and up and down the stairs to find her, every single time. Millie only liked to be found. But Lenny never said no, because whenever she opened the right door, pulled the right curtain, or looked under the right bed, Millie squealed and slapped her hands over her eyes. It made her so happy.

  Lenny said, “Sure.”

  When it was Lenny’s sixth turn in a row as Seeker, she stopped in her bedroom for a quick peek at Orthop, who was nibbling on his antenna at the highest point on a curved branch Lenny had put in the terrarium after learning katydids didn’t like being on the ground. Annabelle clicked and fluttered as Lenny passed the bird cage. She opened the top of the glass case and curled her fingers under Orthop to pull him out, smiling at the sticky feeling of his feet on her skin. She grabbed a lettuce leaf from inside his house and held it in front of his mouth.

  “I can spell eucalyptus.”

  Lenny jerked her hand and Orthop went fluttering. Annabelle hopped sideways on his perch. Millie stood in the doorway, her hands in her front pockets. Murphy shoved by her and lay on the floor.

  “What’s a eucalyptus?” Lenny’s voice perked Murphy’s ears. He got up to walk toward her.

  “Some kind of tree,” Millie said, springing to hold Murphy back. She held his collar with one hand and patted the top of his head with the other.

  “Oh.” Lenny looked at the leaf still in her hand. “This is from the ground.” She picked up Orthop from the bed, set him in his case with the lettuce, and closed the top.

  “But I can spell it. It’s e-u-c-a-l-y-p-t-u-s.”

  “Do you want to see him eat?”

  “I can also spell audience. A-u-d-i-e-n-c-e. And last week I read a book that’s almost three hundred pages.”

  Lenny saw how proud Millie was, so she said, “Wow!” Murphy looked at her, his ears flat, his head bobbing under Millie’s hand. “Let’s go see if we can find another katydid so Orthop can have a friend. Want to?”

  Millie stopped petting Murphy, but didn’t let go. “I want to keep playing.”

  “But we already played six times today.”

  “We didn’t finish. You wanted to play with your bug, instead.”

  Lenny’s mamma always told her that an honest person telling small lies for the right reasons was “performing one of very few truly selfless acts of kindness.” She thought she should maybe lie and say she didn’t like playing with the bug more than she liked playing with Millie, but she couldn’t do it.

  “Don’t you like playing with Annabelle?” she said.

  Millie shrugged. “I guess.”

  Lenny walked over to Annabelle’s cage and stuck her finger inside, under the bird’s belly, nudging gently until he climbed on her finger. Millie let go of Murphy and stomped over to the cage. The bird jumped to its perch. Lenny yanked out her hand and Millie slammed the door closed.

  “I’ll go hide,” Millie said. “Count to fifty and come find me!”

  But Lenny didn’t have to find Millie again, because her poppy called them both to the foyer and put them in the truck with Murphy.

  “Today you’ll learn the exciting job of placing a lumber order,” he said.

  All the way to the store, Millie squeezed Murphy to her, holding him back whenever he moved closer to Lenny. The drive was slow and long because of weekend traffic, and Lenny felt bad that it meant Murphy would have to spend that much more time locked in Millie’s arms. He looked at Lenny so sadly that she turned to the window.

  Most people didn’t have trucks like Lenny’s poppy. They were too expensive. Most had old vans or small cars, and a lot of the small cars were so stuffed with kids the only place left for anyone who could fit was in the sunny spot under the back window. Her poppy had to keep slowing down because cars and vans were swerving into other people’s lanes as arm shadows slapped at backseats from between front seats. Making everyone go even slower was the gray van a few cars up that kept pulling over—but not far enough for people to get by—and stopping to let a dirty, sunburned lady in a bright yellow vest jump out to grab older kids sitting alone on the sidewalk or in front of store doorways. A lot of them got right in, but one boy ran. The lady chased him to the door of a pawn shop, and the kid pulled and pulled, but the door wouldn’t open. The lady dragged him across the sidewalk to the van and shoved him in.

  “Why didn’t he want to go?” Lenny said.

  Her poppy didn’t answer.

  “Poppy, why—”

  “He wasn’t looking for a job, pumpkin.”

  Millie’s parents’ car was already in the driveway when they got back from the store. Millie got out of the truck as soon as it stopped and ran toward the house. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs when her mom came out the front door holding Annabelle’s cage.

  “Hi, Aunt Katie!” Lenny said after getting out with Murphy. She held his collar because he could get happy when people were over.

  “Hello, Mother,” Millie said.

  Millie’s mom carried the cage down the stairs, and Millie jumped and waved when her dad came through the doorway. “Hi, Da—!”

  Murphy yanked out of Lenny’s fingers and ran straight for Millie’s dad, knocking hard against one of Millie’s mom’s legs. She dangled all her balance on one foot and swung the cage in the air. Murphy zoomed up the stairs and slammed his paws on Millie’s dad’s thing, and Millie’s dad jumped back with his butt out and laughed something about “more action than it got all weekend” just as Millie’s mom fell over. The cage went high up in the air, then smashed on their gravel driveway with a clang. The wire door popped open. Millie’s mom was like Aranea going for the cage, but she was too late to grab Annabelle, who flapped away in a yellow-green streak ove
r the roof of the house.

  Millie’s mom hooked her fingers in the cage and threw it away from her, then picked up a handful of gravel and flung it at the ground. Lenny’s poppy yelled at the house, “Hey, Mox? Mox!” Millie’s dad ruffled Murphy’s ears on the veranda and said, “What happened, boy?”

  Lenny’s mamma came out and ran down the stairs while Millie’s mom stuck a cigarette in her mouth.

  “Where’s Annabelle going to go, Poppy?” Lenny said.

  He stood next to her and put his arm on her shoulder. “Annabelle’s going to die, sweetheart,” he said in a way that made it sound like a secret.

  “But, happy.” Lenny’s mamma smiled at Lenny through a cloud of Millie’s mom’s cigarette smoke.

  “That’s right,” Lenny’s poppy said with a quick squeeze. “So don’t be too sad, now, Millie, all right?” he told the sky. “Your bird’s just gone off to do what birds do.”

  Lenny didn’t see Millie, and she hadn’t heard her say anything, so she took a fast look around. She wasn’t on the veranda with Murphy and her uncle Graham, and she wasn’t with her mom and Lenny’s mamma. Lenny peeked over her shoulder, and there she was, standing alone near her parents’ fancy car, the empty, mashed up cage by her feet.

  Lenny asked her parents in the kitchen that night if they could please keep Murphy away from Millie, especially now that Annabelle was gone. The only way Lenny could ever make Millie let go of Murphy was by playing with Annabelle.

  “She’s mean to him,” she said.

  “She’s just a little needy,” her poppy said. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out meat wrapped in brown paper and set it on the island.

  “What he means,” her mamma said, “is that Millie wants love. She likes the kisses Murphy gives you, and she just wants some, too.”

  “But he doesn’t want to,” Lenny said.

  “Dog sense,” her poppy said.

  Her mamma smacked her poppy on the arm and said, “When school starts next month, Murphy will get a nice, long break.”