The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “So what if she tilts her ear?” Her popp—Her dad used a spoon to take vegetables out of a heating sauce.

  “Oh, sweetie, you’re much too concerned with what Millie does.” Her mom fed Murphy one of the scooped out carrots. “You just have to let people be who they are.”

  “If the people she’s listening to don’t like it,” her dad said, “they’ll let her know.”

  Lenny didn’t want her family to be a part of Millie’s notes any more than she wanted to be in them, herself, so when Millie was over after school, Lenny watched the office door where Millie did her typing. If she finished and came out of the room while Lenny’s parents were talking, Lenny took her out to the tomatoes or ran ahead to her parents to stop their conversation. She didn’t want Millie to know about how someone had stabbed her mom’s tires while she was in the pet food store, or that people kept trying to destroy her dad’s houses. Those were what her dad called “private family matters.”

  She got so used to saving her parents’ private matters from Millie’s nosy pen that soon she was hiding around corners or at the top of the stairs to listen to them even when Millie wasn’t over. A lot of times she’d hear her dad helping her mom with problems in her stories. Other times it was boring publishing contract stuff, or boring house building stuff, and sometimes they put on the music and Lenny peeped in on them dancing.

  One night, though, Lenny heard through the end of Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000” that someone had vandalized her dad’s new Grant Street house by spray painting a stick figure dangling over a biting tiger.

  “It was a great tiger,” he said. “I ought to take a picture and show it to Bev. The tattoo could go right here.”

  Her mom laughed, but Lenny didn’t think it was funny, at all, and stomped through the open door.

  Her dad got up from the couch. “What’s up, Pup?”

  She ran to him and threw her arms around his waist. “Why does everybody hate us?”

  “Because we’re so damn wonderful,” he said. He tucked his feet under hers and swirled her around to “The Woodpecker Song.”

  Her mom said, “They don’t hate us, sweetheart. How can they? They don’t even know us.”

  “What do you mean ‘us,’ anyway?” Lenny’s dad tapped her head to make her look up at him. “I thought your mom and I were special. You’re telling me they hate you, too? Who? Who could hate you?”

  “Everyone in the fifth grade hates me. Almost as much as they hate Millie, but Millie’s a brat, and I don’t do anything.”

  “Oh, Lenny, that’s no way to talk about your friend,” her mom said.

  “But it’s true. Nobody likes her because she’s weird. And she’s not my friend. She’s—”

  “Lenore Katherine Mabary,” her mother said with a hand guiding Lenny to sit with her on the couch. Her dad sat at her mom’s swivel chair behind the desk and turned down the music.

  “All right,” her mom said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Millie is weird.”

  “Millie is weird.”

  “Ernie.”

  “Well, Mox.”

  “You’re ten, now,” she said, “which means you’re old enough to keep a secret. Right?”

  Lenny nodded.

  All the way through her mom’s lecture, which felt like it took half an hour, her dad swiveled and rolled around in the desk chair to the faint music coming from the ceiling. Any time Lenny looked over to see what he was doing, he pointed at her mom and mouthed, “Pay attention.” A few minutes later the music would send him into a full spin and he’d hold his arms out like a ballerina, distracting her all over again. When she was paying attention, though (and she mostly was), Lenny learned things about Millie she never knew—that Millie almost wasn’t Millie because she almost wasn’t born, and that once Millie was born, her mom tried to give her to different parents.

  “Like who?” Lenny said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyone,” her dad said.

  “Aunt Kat and Uncle Graham were going to drop Millie?” Lenny said.

  “Aunt Kat did drop Millie, sweetie,” her mom said. “But she went back for her.”

  Lenny said, “Why?”

  “Ernie,” her mom snapped, “don’t you dare say any—”

  “I wasn’t going to say a word.” But he did ask Lenny how she knew about drops.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Everyone knows.”

  Everyone did know, but no one talked about drops unless they happened to people outside of school. If someone in school was a shelter drop or an adopted drop or had a dropped brother or sister, it was one of the things no one teased about. It was like if a kid came to class with burn marks or something broken. Everyone knew what it was, but even the meanest kids went by the rule that it was something you didn’t ask about no matter how fake the stories sounded.

  “Millie doesn’t know what happened,” her mom said. “And she never will, Lenore. But it’s possible that on some level she senses it. Or that she senses something, at least.”

  “What you call weird, we adults call damaged,” her dad said.

  They made Lenny promise with both hands on her heart to never tell Millie what she knew, and then they reminded her (again) that it was all thanks to Millie’s mom that Lenny was alive (because of “so, so much snow,” and Lenny’s “nonconformist entrance into the world,” and on and on…). The very least they could do as a family, her mom said, was to always be kind—“and loyal, Lenore”—to her aunt Kat’s daughter in return.

  “There are reasons people are the way they are,” her mom said. “That goes for every one of your classmates you say is rude to you. Get to know them, and you’ll see.”

  Lenny did what her mom said. She started small, by taking back her desk rights on the days she fell on the rotation. After that, she practiced looking people in the eye. By sixth grade, she could smile at some of them. The first one to smile back was Louise Berg, so when Louise said her sister was abducted by aliens and everyone else got quiet, Lenny felt strong enough to be kind. She told Louise that so many people talked about alien abductions it must mean they happened more than anyone thought, and she asked if Louise had seen any bright lights. (Millie tilted her ear at them and wrote in her notebook.)

  By seventh grade, instead of listening to conversations in secret the way Millie did, Lenny chose spots on the floor right next to the kids who scared her the most. All she said to start was, “Hi, how are you,” but her interest caught one boy so off guard that a sputtering sob flew out of him before he could catch it. He called Lenny a stupid taint-berry and bolted out of the room.

  A lot of her other classmates said things like, “Fine, freak,” or, “What do you care,” but she learned that year after slowly getting them to talk that almost half of her classmates really were fine, and the rest didn’t want to know why she cared. They were just glad she did.

  When summer vacation between seventh and eighth came, she left school for the first time feeling good about coming back the next year.

  FIFTEEN

  The more she thought about it that summer, the more Millie knew her dad would make a perfect story. When he wasn’t at home, he was at work, he said. By itself, that wasn’t something her mother would call interesting, but Millie didn’t know exactly what he did there, so it would be new information to her. And since her mother had said “I don’t know” more than once when Millie had asked what was taking so long for him to come home, there was new information to give her mother, too.

  She decided to collect her notes in secret the way she did at school. Her dad probably would have let her follow him around if she asked, but she noticed at school that when people caught her watching or listening they stopped doing what they were doing, or they did what they were doing in a different way. Millie wanted to see her dad—observe her dad—just being himself.

  Her chance came one late June night after dinner when he ran upstairs for his shoes.

  “Can you
believe I forgot to set the alarm again?” he said, huffing out of sight.

  Millie slipped outside while her mother stared up the stairway. She climbed into the trunk of his car and double-checked her pockets for her reporter’s notebook and favorite ballpoint. She had everything.

  The car bounced when her dad hopped in, and her elbow banged the back seat when he zipped into reverse. The ride was sweaty and bumpy and long, and her notes were sloppy and smudged, but the story she got was one she believed her mother would like.

  Appreciate.

  Millie wrote the majority of the piece the next day on her uncle Ernie’s computer while he and Lenny were out…gawking…at the tomato patch and her aunt Margaret was writing in her own office. She finished and printed the story at home that night on her bedroom computer, excited that both her parents were home to hear it. And she knew for a fact her dad would be staying home, because a reporter from the Daily Fact was coming at seven to interview her mother about her fourth store. He was so excited he’d closed the new store early.

  Millie grabbed the article when the print finished and went downstairs to get the Daily Fact reading out of the way. The shortest story she could find was a brief about a 25-year-old activist named Frankie Justice…

  …arrested today outside of the This Morning studios. Justice leaped over the barriers during the meet-the-audience portion of the program’s outdoor segment and pushed aside host Delia Buckworth before demanding into the camera that lawmakers increase the penalty for “dropping,” or abandoning, children. Members of the studio’s security team promptly seized Justice and confirmed Buckworth was unharmed. Justice has been a familiar face to law enforcement since his first known forced press conference, incidentally outside the same studio, when as a fifteen-year-old he pleaded with authorities to find his two-and-a-half-year-old brother. Justice claimed, and to this day maintains, that sex traffickers seized his brother from his arms while the two waited in line for kettle corn at the Windbury farmers market.

  Her mother absently reached out to take back the paper when Millie finished, and Mille picked up her own typed, formatted, and printed article. She read quickly, because it was almost seven:

  “Newchester resident Graham Harrison, forty-one, is a good Samaritan in disguise. By—”

  “Slow down, Millicent.” Her mother smiled, but at him. “A good Samaritan, Graham?”

  “Yes,” Millie said. “A good Samaritan in disguise. By day, the Oxford Spirits co-owner—”

  “President,” her mother corrected.

  “I’m really more of a CEO,” her dad winked.

  “President,” her mother repeated. “If you like, COO. Always check your facts, Millicent.”

  “Yes, Mother. By day, the Oxford Spirits COO juggles many jobs—ugh! tasks—such as watching the front counter and listening to customer complaints. His job doesn’t end there, though. I mean, however. When the work day is done, Mr. Harrison—”

  “Do you know, Millicent, I think you should avoid honorifics.”

  “When the work day is done,” Millie said, “Harrison gets into his car to make deliveries to customers who can’t leave home. One night after eating his dinner, Harrison drove ten miles—I guessed because I really don’t know and I didn’t want to ask because I wanted to surprise you—and then got out of his car with a bottle of…vodka, Dad? It looked like that one bottle, but it was hard to get out of the trunk in time to see for sure. You were already going up the walk.”

  Her dad cleared his throat and nodded. Her mother took her hand off her dad’s knee.

  “A bottle of vodka. When he came out of the building—”

  “Emerged.”

  “Huh?”

  Her mother spoke louder. “Emerged. You can replace three words with two if you use ‘emerged from’ rather than ‘came out of.’”

  “Oh. Oh!” Millie ran to the kitchen for a pen and raced back into the living room, dropping to her knees at the coffee table to make the note on her page. She stood again. “When he emerged from the building about thirty minutes later, Harrison didn’t have the bottle, anymore, and he looked messy and wrinkled, leading this reporter to…decide?”

  “Conclude,” her mother whispered.

  “To conclude that after making the delivery he helped someone do work around the house.”

  Millie looked over for approval at the precise moment the vomit sprayed out of her mother’s mouth. It splattered on the coffee table, covering Millie’s pen and the Daily Fact. Her dad jumped off the couch.

  “I’ll get a towel,” he said. “Millie, get your mother—”

  “Get me nothing, Millicent. Thank you.”

  “I can help,” Millie said.

  Her mother wiped her chin with her sleeve. She used her free hand to hold onto the couch.

  Millie dropped her article on the floor and ran to the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll get you a warm washcloth and a cranberry muffin! Okay? Don’t go anywhere, okay?” She found a clean dish rag in the drawer by the stove and ran it under warm water. There were no muffins left in the bread box, so she pulled out a slice of marbled rye. She hurried with it and the warm dish rag to the living room, but her mother was already gone. There was only her dad, gagging and turning away from the table he swept and scooped at with Millie’s favorite orange beach towel.

  Millie rushed past him, jumped over her article, and went upstairs to her parents’ bedroom. The door was closed.

  She tapped on the center wood panel. She tapped again. “Mother?” She held her breath, closed her eyes, and rested her hand on the cool glass doorknob until it warmed in her palm and the bread flattened between her fingers and the dish rag hanging over her wrist turned cold. She puffed her cheeks with air, held onto it, and released it in a slow stream as she turned the handle. It caught abruptly after a fraction of a twist. Locked.

  “Mother?”

  The bed creaked.

  “I have some bread and a dish r—and a…and a washcloth. I can warm it up again.”

  “No, thank you, Millicent.”

  “Are you sick?”

  After a moment, she said, “Something like that.”

  “I’m sorry.” Millie molded the dish rag to her forehead. It was cold and damp and felt good. “Is it because of my story?”

  “Millicent, please put on something nice for when the reporter comes. I want you to sit downstairs with us and listen carefully to her questions. Do you ever speak to the subjects of your stories? Do you ever ask them direct questions?”

  “No.”

  “You should be doing that by now.”

  “Okay.” Millie’s stomach rolled at the words before she pushed them out: “I love you, Mother.”

  The only reply was the sound of the bed creaking again. Millie imagined her mother turning away from the sound of her voice.

  Lenny’s mom would have told Lenny to come in.

  On her way down the stairs, Millie saw her dad lying on the couch with an arm folded over his eyes. The coffee table was clean and bare. She returned the bread to the bread box and draped the rag over the kitchen faucet to dry, then went out to the living room and lay on top of her warm dad with her head on his chest.

  “Bad timing, Millie girl. I was just about to get up.”

  Millie lifted her head to look at him. His eyes were still hidden under his arm. She said, “Does she love me?”

  “Sure she does! Does who love you?”

  “Mother.”

  “Oh! Well, she’s your mother, isn’t she?”

  “Did you like my story?”

  He peeked at her from under his elbow. “Highly impactful.” He smiled. “But you know your mother is a much better judge of that kind of thing. Now, roll on off, silly Millie. I need to wait for the doorbell.”

  “Millicent,” her mother’s voice said from the top of the stairs. “Clothes, please.”

  Millie ran up the stairs. She chose something black and white and was pulling on her pants when the doorbell ra
ng. She hurried back down to find her mother and the reporter sitting on one couch, her dad on the other. Lemon wedges floated in the water glass each woman held in her lap. Millie sat next to her dad and smiled at the reporter, who smiled back.

  “Nellie, this is Millicent. Millicent, Nellie.”

  Nellie was twenty-three, at Millie’s best guess. She wore black and white, too, and sat with a straight back. Millie straightened her own back. Nellie had long hair that she tucked behind her ears. Millie unconsciously tucked her own frizzy hair behind her ears. The reporter’s name was Nellie. Millie’s name was Millie. Nellie and Millie.

  “Okay to begin?” Nellie said.

  “One moment, please. Millicent, where’s your notebook?”

  When Millie returned from her bedroom, flushed from all the stairs and gripping her notebook and ballpoint, the interview began. After talking about how Millie’s mother got into the liquor business (“With trepidation, initially, but counting on humanity’s reliable affection for mind altering substances in times of difficulty. The overturn was all but decided when I rented my first storefront, you see.”) and Millie’s dad’s role at the store (“In flux.”), the reporter looked at her notebook and said, “What can you tell me about your security system?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Your fourth store is located in a…well, a troubled neighborhood, and—”

  “Every neighborhood is troubled.”

  Nellie tilted her head. “How so?”