Little Wonders

by Kate Rorick

  “I can still read a law journal,” Shanna replied, smoothly. “And I chose to stay at home—just like so many other parents here.” Several people nodded enthusiastically. “What I didn’t choose was to have my Parent Association president losing her mind on my Facebook page.”

  “I didn’t choose that either, Shanna,” Quinn said. “Which is why I mentioned the police and the law. Which, if you were still practicing, Shanna, you might know.”

  Everyone in the room sucked in their breath.

  “Um, actually, I’m a lawyer, too,” Elia’s dad said tentatively, from three rows from the back.

  “Maritime law,” Quinn scoffed, almost to herself. But nothing was to yourself when you were on a stage.

  Elia’s dad scrambled to his feet. “And at the very least, whether or not you knew, it’s a legal gray area. But I’d be more inclined to side with Shanna’s argument. There’s no expectation of privacy.”

  A couple of other lawyer types in the crowd (Jesus, was everyone who lived in Needleton a lawyer? Daisy wondered) started nodding and murmuring in agreement.

  “Oh, shut up, Thomas—” Ah, thought Daisy, that was Elia’s dad’s name, “if you had some clue as to how to set up a pop-up tent we wouldn’t even be here.”

  Elia’s dad (Thomas) jerked back, equal parts struck and confused. As was the rest of the room.

  “Um, can you guys slow down?” Suzy Breakman-Kang said, pausing in her finger clacking, which had been underscoring the entire conversation to that point, only to be noticed once it stopped. “I’m only as far as ‘who I called when I saw my Parent Association president having a mental breakdown on Facebook.’”

  “You’re not seriously recording all of this!” Quinn said, aghast.

  “It’s my job, Quinn,” Suzy replied. “And maybe . . . maybe you should back off. Leveling accusations and making snide remarks about everyone is not a good look.”

  “I don’t care how it looks,” Quinn said, enraged.

  “You should. This meeting is public. And recorded,” Suzy said, indicating her small dictation device, no doubt running out of digital space. She smothered a smirk. “With your consent.”

  “You want to dictate the meeting’s agenda, Suzy?” Quinn said. “You want to do actual work instead of taking notes? Take on all the hard parts, the organizing, the calling parents and trying to cajole them into volunteering? Calling all the local businesses, begging for donations? Working with the city council for permissions and making all of it fucking fun? You want that, Suzy? Here,” she held out the gavel. “Take it.”

  “I . . . don’t want it,” Suzy replied.

  “Quinn,” piped up Vice President Jonah’s Dad, who had been so very very quiet while the most epically insane of all preschool parent meetings occurred, “Maybe you should adjourn the meeting—”

  “Why, Jay? So you can silently do nothing, conveniently at home? According to Bronwyn, that’s your forte.”

  Gasps shook the room. Followed by quick titters.

  Apparently, when Quinn Barrett lost her filter, she really lost it.

  “Quinn, that is uncalled for,” the VP said, turning Pepto pink. “And unbecoming to your role.”

  “Then take my role, Jay,” Quinn said. This time she held out the gavel to him. “Want it? All the work and absolutely no glory? No? What about you, Therese?” she said to the treasurer. Who was smart enough to remain silent.

  “What about all the committee heads, all the room parents out there?” Quinn said to the audience. “Who’ll take on this job? No one, right? Because everyone wants the perfect fucking experience for our kids, but no one is actually willing to do the work to make it happen.”

  The room held its breath. And suddenly, Daisy’s eyes found Shanna.

  Shanna, who had been standing there, silent, letting the argument play out in front of her.

  Shanna winked at Daisy.

  And suddenly Daisy realized Shanna had been waiting for this moment and had been all along. “I will.”

  Chapter Five

  In hindsight, Quinn knew what she should have done. She’d walked into that room believing that she had a plan. But that travesty of a Parent Association meeting wasn’t it.

  She would put the discussion at the very end of the meeting, so she could showcase all the hard work the Parent Association was doing . . . and when the moment came, she would be charming. Self-effacing. Up on that stage she would have been the bloody parenting Oprah, opening herself up just enough, throwing in a joke here and there about how her stiletto boots make great hammers in a pinch and that she and Ham pretended the spaceship got hit by a meteor. She would have turned on the charm, won them over—and the whole thing would eventually ebb away into nothingness.

  But when she looked out at the sea of faces—and all she saw were people greedy for juicy gossip, people who wanted nothing more than drama, any one of whom could have been the video taker—she couldn’t give them the satisfaction.

  And the only thought that went through her head was . . . How dare they?

  She was Quinn Barrett—and she ran the hell out of the Parent Association, to make Little Wonders and their kids’ (not just Ham’s!) experience the best it could possibly be.

  The idea that they could be so gleeful about her trauma . . . it set something off in her brain. Something primal. And something, apparently, pissed off.

  She turned into a raging bitch in heels.

  No, not a bitch, she thought, long after the fact and three glasses of chardonnay in. An asshole.

  Because bitches were women in society getting shit done. But an asshole? An asshole just lashed out.

  And that’s what she had done.

  How dare people turn on her?

  No, not people. Quinn’s teeth ground and she took another swig of wine.

  Shanna Freaking Stone.

  Quinn remembered with scary accuracy the moment Shanna spoke her infamous words. The way her mouth moved. Her serenity, like she was the freaking Virgin Mary.

  “I will.”

  She had been up on that stage, holding out the gavel like it was the queen’s scepter. Daring people to take it. And nothing could have shocked her more than hearing someone take her up on it.

  “You’re obviously going through some things,” Shanna had said, her voice demure, as if she was sparing the audience from the unseemly. “And this has become too much of a burden for you.”

  “A burden,” she said, nearly choking on the words. “A burden.”

  “And you have Hamilton, who is . . . three, and comes with those challenges.”

  “What challenges?” Quinn shot out. “What are you implying about my son? Hamilton is perfectly fine. This is not about him.”

  “But it is. Because, do you think you’re the best mom you can be to Hamilton right now?” Shanna stepped forward, her gaze zoned in on Quinn.

  The fact that this conversation . . . no, this interrogation, was taking place in public was horrifying enough. And Quinn could have challenged her. She could have guffawed and reiterated all of the work that she did to make the Parent Association function. But instead . . . she was just too tired.

  God, she was tired.

  Because the truth was . . . she had seen the video, too. And she had seen her son so afraid of his mother that he pissed himself.

  All of her fight had completely vanished. The past five days had been hellish, online and off. This meeting, which she had planned and prepared for, had gone so far off the rails she didn’t recognize the room, the people, herself anymore. In the beginning, the important thing—the only thing—she wanted to accomplish was to reassert who she was, smooth everything over, and get everything back to normal.

  And now, she was too tired to care.

  So she did the only thing she could do.

  She stepped off the stage.

  Shanna seemed surprised by this. Her eyes flicked to the woman she’d been sitting next to—her little blue-haired minion Daisy—as Quinn approached.
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  Quinn came to stand directly in front of Shanna. In her heels she was taller than Shanna, but not by much. And it gave her absolutely no psychological advantage over the soft serenity her adversary displayed.

  Slowly, she flipped the gavel over in her hand. And held it out to Shanna.

  “Take it. Have fun organizing the Thanksgiving play, and the Snowflake Breakfast, the goddamn raffle baskets—I’m sure with the support the parents of this school are famous for, you will do just swimmingly.”

  Shanna reached out, took the gavel. Then she leaned forward and whispered in Quinn’s ear.

  “Get some rest.”

  The bitchiest of bitchy things that anyone could say.

  The only triumph Quinn could claim, as she stalked out of there, was that she held back from slapping Shanna across her smug faux-concerned face.

  She collected Ham from Miss Rosie and the other teachers—they were having a mini dance party that Ham was loath to leave—and they got out of there.

  There would have been a formal vote, no doubt. Someone—Suzy Breakman-Kang probably (the little instigator) who would’ve formally nominated Shanna for the position. Jay no doubt would have seconded—anything to avoid taking on actual responsibility. The board would vote, the whole coup would’ve been over in minutes and relatively bloodless.

  She wasn’t there to see it though. By the time the room flooded with congratulatory applause for their new dear leader, she and Ham were on their way home.

  Which was where Quinn stayed for the next four days, licking her wounds, considering her options, and reliving every moment of the parent meeting’s humiliation.

  The video, and now the parent meeting—turned out she was getting used to humiliation.

  If Stuart had been at the meeting, she decided, she could have managed. He would have smiled at her, steered the conversation, pivoted her into showing off her softer side, the way he did when she showed him off to clients. But Stuart wasn’t there. He was in surgery. And it was very very hard to argue for him to stop saving a child’s life to come to a preschool Parent Association meeting.

  Even if his wife was under fire.

  Of course, by then Stuart was aware of the video.

  She had told him as soon as he texted her back on Monday—which, due to his being in surgery, was several hours later. Quinn was on the phone with her own lawyer (Grayson & Grayson was one of the best and oldest firms in Boston—only the very best for the Barrett family) when Stuart emerged from a victory lap with a recovering surgical patient’s grateful parents, thus in one of his best moods.

  That good mood didn’t last.

  Honestly, his reaction had not been what Quinn had expected. She thought . . . she thought he’d at least flinch as he watched the video. After all, that was his wife embarrassing herself and his son who was getting the brunt of her temper.

  “Okay,” he’d said. They’d met for lunch. In a dive diner they both secretly loved and where no one they knew would be. Still, she didn’t take off her sunglasses as she queued up the video and let him watch it.

  “. . . Okay?”

  “Okay.” He shrugged and returned to his bunless garden burger—even in a diner he insisted on keeping his meal as healthy as he could. Ever since he’d taken up spinning, he referred to food only as “fuel.” Usually, she admired his sense of control—her lunchtime Pilates classes weren’t for nothing. But right then, Quinn would have taken him being a little out of control. A doughnut with chocolate sprinkles would have gone a long way to showing her that he was as upset over this as she was.

  “I see a lot of parents, and all of them are stressed out, and sometimes they lose control. I’ve learned the best thing I can do is step back and say ‘Okay.’”

  “Okay . . .” Quinn tried to understand. “And that’s what you think is happening here?”

  He was stepping back? When it was his own kid? His own wife?

  “Obviously not to the same level as a parent of a child undergoing a lumpectomy or spinal reconstruction,” he replied. “And to be honest, I’ve never seen you quite so . . . out of control.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry—” she began. Finally, something she was ready for—censure. That, she could parry. But he cut her off.

  “But I know you’ll fix it.”

  “You . . . you do.”

  “Quinn.” He shot her that smile. The one that made her heart skip beats and inspired some truly impressive drunken karaoke. “That’s what you do. It’s what I love about you. You fix things. You wanted to become a designer, you did. You wanted to marry me, you made it happen, from the flowers to the honeymoon.” He smirked at her. “You wanted to have Hamilton—I thought it would disrupt everything, but you make it work. And you’ll fix this. You’ll make it perfect.” He turned his attention back to his burger. “I assume you already spoke to Grayson & Grayson.”

  She’d nodded, filled him in on the little they had said. He nodded and chewed. He didn’t rail at her, or at the video taker—he wasn’t mad on her behalf, on Ham’s behalf, on his own behalf. Instead, he trusted her to take care of the situation.

  On the one hand, it was perplexing. Here she was, living through the worst moment of her life, and he was . . . eerily calm about it. On the other—it was reassuring. He had complete confidence in her abilities to deal with it.

  “There are worse things that happen to people every day. I know, I’m the one telling parents about them.” He raised his hand for the check. Then, he turned his gaze to her, held out his other hand. She put hers in it—he squeezed. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes. I’m just surprised you’re not more upset.”

  “Oh,” he said, raising her hand to his lips. “I am upset for you.”

  “For you, I mean,” she replied.

  “Why would I be upset for me?” he said, cocking his head to one side.

  “Because . . . people know it’s me, and I’m your wife. Our families, your parents . . . my work, your work . . . it’s going to be affected. At the very least, it’s going to get mentioned.”

  He took a moment. His eyes turned hard, his romance novel look nowhere to be seen. He worked his jaw, as if there was a last bit of garden burger stuck in his teeth. Then, the check came back, and he swiftly removed his hand from hers. “Then,” he’d said, as he ruthlessly signed the receipt, “I suggest you start fixing it.”

  Maybe that was why she had gone so hard at the Parent Association meeting on Wednesday. Maintaining her position there was the first step in “fixing it.”

  And . . . well, no point in rehashing how well that went.

  The day after the Parent Association meeting, she forced Stuart to do drop-off at Little Wonders (he only grumbled a little, since he knew he was in deficit as he’d missed the meeting) and she called in sick to the office. Not that they expected her, anyway: Jeremy told her that Sutton was covering her appointments, and he was overseeing the miniscule final details of the Beacon Hill house himself. Thus, she “should do what she needed to do.”

  She also had to shut down her Instagram and Facebook, as all of her posts with pictures of Ham were loaded with the cruelest comments imaginable about her parenting.

  Meanwhile, she watched the view count on the video go up and up and up. Slower and slower, but still dauntingly high.

  Her lawyers had sent out cease-and-desist notices, but when the video had been copied and copied again, they didn’t have much effect. One or two of the first posted videos disappeared, but her lawyers were right—getting them all down was going to be like playing whack-a-mole. And, annoyingly, her lawyers also agreed with Shanna—that the question of whether or not the recording was unknown was up for debate.

  “We could take this to the state supreme court!” one of the younger ones said on the phone, a bit too eager to put Quinn’s life on display (and bill her hours). Spotlighting the video with a costly and cynical legal battle did not seem like the best way to “fix it.” She didn’t want the Streisand Effect ren
amed the Halloween Mom Effect.

  What she needed was to bury this.

  Friday, wearing her biggest pair of sunglasses and braving drop-off, Quinn again called in sick.

  She could continue to endure drop-off and pickup, she decided, at least until Alba returned. She could never take Ham out of Little Wonders. He loved it there.

  Although a phone call from Alba that morning put the kibosh on that plan of having Alba start drop-off duty again.

  “My daughter is having a baby!” Alba said via the spotty connection. “I’m going to be a grandmamma!”

  “Congratulations, Alba,” Quinn had said, biting her lip. “I’m so glad you got to spend this, er, unplanned week with your family . . . you’ll be back on Monday?”

  “Actually, Miss Quinn . . . my daughter, she’s due sooner than we might have told the priest. I need to be here for her.”

  “For how long?”

  “. . . It’s my first grandchild, Miss Quinn.” Quinn could practically hear Alba shrug.

  And that’s all there was to it. Alba might be back in a few months—or she might not. It might have been because of the video—or it might have been solely because of Alba’s daughter’s lack of birth control. Either way, Quinn would need to find another nanny/housekeeper/all around lifesaver.

  Ham was going to be devastated.

  Yes, there was absolutely no way she could remove him from Little Wonders now.

  So, Friday afternoon, she managed to corner the principal, Ms. Anna (picking up Hamilton at the absolute latest possible hour, avoiding as many parents as she could), seeking reassurance about his place in the school.

  And for the first time in a week, she got a glimmer of understanding, and, dare she say it . . . hope.

  “Mrs. Barrett, Hamilton is part of our family. We look forward to continuing with his education. Regardless of the recent incident.”

  “Really?” Quinn couldn’t help but exclaim. Relief practically had her knees buckling.

  “I realize that this has not cast the best light on you—or on the school, and I have fielded some phone calls to that effect,” Ms. Anna said, and Quinn’s stomach dropped again. “But the school’s legal representatives have assured me nothing in the video threatens our charter. And any bad light on the school will soon blow over.”