Little Wonders

by Kate Rorick

  “How do you get her to do that?” Daisy asked with a grin. But Ms. Rosie didn’t return the grin.

  “Actually, I wanted to speak with you about this. Carrie is taking off her glasses every chance she gets. It frustrates her to not see during reading time, art time—but still she fights wearing them.”

  “It’s so strange,” Daisy said, shaking her head, “she’s had them for over a year, and when she first got them, she was ecstatic to be able to see clearly. She’d wear them to sleep.”

  “Kids go through changes; the important thing is to be consistent in the messages she is receiving, about how her glasses are good for her,” Ms. Rosie said. “Is there any change that has happened recently, anything that has made her uncomfortable wearing them?”

  “Well—the move . . . ,” she began, but stopped. The move was months ago now. Carrie hardly ever mentioned their old apartment, or the dog that used to live below them, or going to Disneyland. That wasn’t a part of her world anymore.

  Her world was Grandpa Bob’s house, Little Wonders, her cousin Jordan, and . . .

  And that’s when Daisy saw it. Carrie had wandered over to where Jordan was holding court, among the dolls and the wooden train tracks. Jordan was holding two dolls. She leveled a look at Carrie.

  Carrie took off her glasses.

  And then Jordan magnanimously handed her a doll.

  It was one of those cinematic moments, a rack focus that brought everything smack in front of Daisy’s face.

  Thanksgiving. Jordan made fun of Carrie’s glasses.

  After Christmas. Carrie clinging like a barnacle to Daisy every day at drop-off, not wanting to go to school. To navigate the ups and downs of the preschool social structure.

  When Jamie came over to help Rob in the basement, Carrie was a wire of tension until she learned whether Jordan was coming or not. Daisy consoled her child when she learned that Jordan wasn’t coming.

  But she hadn’t needed consolation. She’d been relieved.

  It took everything she had to not rush over to Jordan right now and smack the doll out of her hands and put the fear of god into the girl’s heart, before making her sit down and learn the entirety of Dorothy Parker’s body of work.

  But she couldn’t do that. Ms. Rosie was on it—she had moved to the girls and was whispering to Jordan. If she did intervene, Carrie would cling to her for another half an hour before she could be extracted, and she had to open the store. The only thing Daisy could do in that moment was leave her daughter in Ms. Rosie’s care, and leave the room.

  Shanna was gone by the time she emerged from the room, her car no longer in the lot. Daisy couldn’t focus on the Fear Initiative podcast (a horror-based RPG that was delightfully filling her commute), not with her head trying to make sense of her daughter—her fearless, loud, amazing daughter—and what she was going through.

  Did kids do this? At three? Judge each other, exclude each other? Or was Jordan just a mean-girl potential prodigy?

  And from whom did she learn that?

  It wasn’t hard to trace this particular apple’s nearby tree. Daisy thought back to every single interaction that she’d had with Shanna. Shanna leading her through the halls, telling the administration that Daisy’s daughter was going to go to school there. The Halloween parade, ordering her around. Heck, ordering her around at every single Parent Association meeting. Putting her into sous-chef mode at Thanksgiving.

  Even with the Halloween video—she’d taken over, and made Daisy her coconspirator.

  And Daisy was tired of it.

  But she had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

  Her phone dinged. She checked it at a stoplight.

  Quinn: I need coffee. You?

  Daisy was dialing the number before she knew what she was doing.

  “Hey,” Quinn said, picking up on one ring. “I have no job and my son is at school, wanna get a latte with me? I’ve been thinking about the layout in your grandpa-basement suite, and I know this is your husband’s project but I—”

  “I have to open the shop this morning,” Daisy said.

  Her tone must have given her away, because Quinn immediately jumped in. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  Daisy gave a little hysterical sigh. “I’m pretty sure my daughter is being mean-girled by her cousin and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  She gave Quinn a quick rundown of everything she had seen that morning, and seen since Thanksgiving. Okay, it wasn’t that quick, but Quinn listened to it all.

  “Man, I’m glad I have a boy,” she said once Daisy ran out of breath.

  “What do I do?” Daisy replied. “How do I tell my daughter that she needs to wear her glasses? That it’s important that she does? No matter what anyone else says?”

  “You don’t do that,” Quinn said. “That’s just gonna have her throwing them out the window.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know . . . ,” she sighed through the phone. “Ham fought me on underwear for the longest time. Alba—my old nanny—she told me that to get Hamilton potty trained I needed to get him Superman underwear.”

  “Okay . . . sure, why not?” Daisy said, completely lost as to where this was going.

  “You have to understand, I was adamant that I would raise my son without branding. He didn’t have any toys with Thomas the Tank Engine on them, no shirts with Mickey Mouse.”

  “Okay, I’m more of a Marvel girl than DC myself, but . . . it’s underwear,” Daisy said.

  “Yeah, and Ham loved them. They made him feel powerful. So any mortification I felt when my mother-in-law saw them peeking out of his waistband had to be swallowed. And yeah, he’s still got his off days—but every day he’s Superman because of that underwear.”

  “And how does that translate to my daughter?” Daisy asked.

  “You have to figure out a way for her glasses to make her feel powerful. To make it okay—to make it the best thing ever—for her to wear them.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said on a laugh. “That’s more prudent parenting advice than anyone has ever asked of me before.”

  Daisy hung up after a thank you, a promise to meet up tomorrow for coffee. And sat in her car, thinking.

  How could she make her daughter love her glasses again? They were so much a part of Carrie, a part of who she was.

  How did she convince her daughter it was okay to be herself?

  A horn honked behind her—the light had changed. She jumped, decided to pull over. She turned into a strip mall—snow piles melted in the lot, edging a nail salon, a Chinese food place, and a chain drugstore.

  And then, she caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror.

  Cosplay Daisy. Dressed up to pretend to be someone else.

  How long could she pretend that she wasn’t becoming that other person?

  And how could she teach her daughter to love being herself if she didn’t show her how?

  Daisy hauled herself out of the car before she knew what she was doing. She waded into the snowbanks, heading directly for the drugstore.

  Somewhere inside, there was a box of electric blue hair dye with her name on it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Oh shit, kid, don’t make me do this. Not to Percy. You love Percy.

  The evening had started so well. Quinn had picked up Ham from school—there had been enough of a melt lately to go play outside. They’d run around together in the balmy forty degrees of the falling evening, and gotten good and muddy.

  Yes, Quinn Barrett was muddy. It was a glorious feeling. But it didn’t last when they came in and Gina had dinner on the table.

  A dinner that a muddy Hamilton had promptly ignored, and run right to his recently acquired Percy the green engine toy, and was now playing with in the playroom. The cream-carpeted playroom.

  That, she decided, she was fine with.

  One of her first steps in becoming a less perfect parent was giving into her son’s
desire for a specific branded toy. A toy that seemed innocuous. A toy that seemed possibly good—one that was mechanical and worked with the wooden train track he already owned. And Percy, as Thomas’s best friend, was not the lead of the show, and she was actually proud that Hamilton wasn’t blown away by star power. He was, instead, blown away by the color green.

  So, when he had managed an entire two weeks without a potty accident, Percy came into their lives. And while Quinn had been blissfully redecorating Hamilton’s room in her mind, pulling together a sage and forest palate and bunk beds replacing his toddler bed, instead Percy had been insidiously taking over Hamilton’s mind.

  It was as if Chucky were a naive green train.

  This had been going on for the last two weeks, and inevitably it fed directly into what Quinn called the Dinnertime Fight.

  It was his new thing. His new way of pushing back.

  Here’s how it went.

  Gina would spend the better part of the afternoon putting together a healthy, organic meal.

  Hamilton would deny its existence.

  Quinn would make a really big deal about the meal.

  Hamilton would play with Percy.

  Quinn would bribe Hamilton to come to dinner with promises of a delicious, less than healthy but still organic dessert.

  Usually by now, Hamilton would abandon Percy, dutifully come to the table, take three bites of whatever was presented and demand dessert, and go back to Percy until it was pajama time.

  But not tonight.

  “Percy wants mac and cheese!”

  “Dinner is pork chops and brussels sprouts,” Quinn tried one last time. “Now come to the table.”

  “Mac and cheeseeeeeeeeee Percy!”

  “Hamilton Franklin Barrett,” Quinn tried one last time. “Come to dinner. And leave Percy.”

  And then . . . then the screaming began.

  “NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!” Hamilton was screaming. “NOOOOO! You, you . . . POOPYBUTT!”

  Given her son’s behavior, embracing imperfection had not been the cure-all she’d hoped it would be.

  Poopybutt no longer felt like a slap in the face—not after the past week of being called a poopybutt at every “no” she uttered. No, now it was just the continual turning of the knife already in her gut.

  Well, aren’t you a horrible mom, it said, with each creaky wrist turn. You can’t even get your child to eat dinner. You’re the worst parent ever.

  Maybe they had been playing outside too long. Maybe Ham was tired. Maybe she was tired. She looked over at Gina in the kitchen, quietly cleaning up the meal she had slaved over, her posture adamantly not listening to Quinn and Ham. Gina stepped away.

  If Alba was here, she would have cajoled Ham to the table.

  If Stuart was here, his very presence would have been such a big deal that Ham would have been ready to eat ten minutes ago—after he showed off Percy for the umpteenth time.

  But it was just Quinn and her son, facing off in what had become a massive struggle of wills between them since the beginning of the year.

  So much for Quinn Barrett, the Get-Shit-Done mom.

  “If you don’t come to dinner, Hamilton, Percy has to go on the shelf.”

  Don’t make me do this. Not to Percy.

  The shelf was time-out for Hamilton’s toys. Too high up for him to reach, but within view. Usually toys went up there for only a few minutes—if at all. The mere threat of the shelf was enough to send Ham scrambling.

  Not today.

  Hamilton’s “NOOOOOOO!!!!!!” was followed by a guttural cry of many vowels and clutching at the little plastic Percy.

  “Hamilton. HAMILTON!” Quinn cried, grabbing his arm. “Come on, we have to—”

  WUMPH!

  Hamilton, slippery little eel, wriggled out of her grasp, and they both ended up on the floor. Ham on his pillow pile. Quinn with a wooden train track up her butt.

  Quinn lay there, staring at the ceiling, more surprised than she was sore (and her butt was stinging something fierce). Wondering how the hell she was allowed to have a kid. How the hell she had fallen this low, and how she was going to get through spring break next week, where Ham would be home with her every day . . . and Gina had requested the time off.

  She was so lost in her own reeling thoughts, it took her a minute to realize that the buzzing at her side was not from the wooden train track, but was actually her phone.

  Daisy: I never saw Ham grin so hard as when he saw you at pickup today.

  Quinn felt the smile spread across her face. The same time that a suspicious stinging began in her nose and a tear leaked out of the corner of her eye.

  Somehow, Daisy knew what she needed to hear, and that she needed to hear it at that exact minute.

  Oh, all right, the fact that it came at that moment was more than likely a coincidence. But Daisy had been the one to hear about all her efforts toward imperfection, the one to listen while she talked about the latest needle she had to thread with Hamilton’s behavior.

  Being without Stuart was so much easier and so much harder than she had expected. To be the one in charge of the schedule, to no longer be deferential to his needs . . . that was both freeing and frightening. It upended Hamilton’s life as little as possible. Stuart spent a weekend or two stopping by the house to spend time with Ham, but never more than an afternoon. And after that afternoon it was always . . . challenging.

  I never saw Ham grin so hard as when he saw you at pickup today.

  Quinn just had to think about that moment. How he’d lit up and run to her.

  Quinn began to chuckle. And then it became a full-on laugh. Loud and long.

  Hamilton, who had been sitting in shock on his pillow pile, began to giggle, too. Then, he came over and pig-piled Quinn, both of them giggling madly, like broken Tickle Me Elmos.

  They stayed like that until Gina tiptoed over to the playroom door. “Uh, Ms. Quinn?” she said, looking at them like they were utterly loony—which they no doubt looked. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Quinn said. “Everything okay with you, Hammy?”

  Hamilton suddenly jumped to his feet. “I have to go potty.”

  And he took off like a shot, holding his butt.

  “He has to go potty,” Quinn said, hauling herself up off the floor.

  “He’s been doing well with that,” Gina said.

  “Yes, he has,” Quinn said, musing. In fact, Ham hadn’t had an accident in . . . how long? Quinn opened up her phone, checked her calendar. She had given him Percy after two weeks of no potty accidents, but that was a couple of weeks after New Year’s. Awhile ago now.

  In fact, according to the log she’d kept on her calendar, Ham hadn’t had a potty accident since the beginning of the year.

  “Holy shit,” she murmured. Then, catching Gina’s surprised look, “Er, proverbially speaking. But holy shit!”

  He’d been accident free since the first week of January. He’d gone both number one and number two in the potty every time! No naptime or overnight accidents! Today, he’d even run in to use the potty while they were playing outside!

  Nothing was perfect. Absolutely nothing was perfect, except . . . this one thing was actually, maybe, finally solved.

  A flush was heard from afar, followed by the thumping of small running feet. Ham appeared, pulling up his pants.

  “Ham!” Quinn rushed over and swept him up into her arms. “You did it!”

  “Did what?” he asked, confused.

  “You went potty! Yay!”

  “Oh, okay,” he said, going along with it. “Yay!”

  “Yay! And you deserve a great big present,” Quinn said. “What do you want? Anything!”

  “Mac and cheese?!”

  “Um, I was actually thinking something bigger than that, but okay,” Quinn said, and turned to Gina. “There’s a box of organic mac and cheese somewhere in the back . . .”

  “I got it,” Gina said. “And I’ll put the pork chops and brussels sp
routs in the oven to keep them warm?”

  “Thanks,” Quinn said. Then, “But you can box those up and take them home if you want. Mac and cheese sounds good to me, too.”

  Gina nodded and moved off.

  “What else would you like?”

  “Dessert?”

  “Think bigger.”

  “Disney World?”

  Quinn blinked; trust her son to go from dessert to Disney in one swing. She was about to negotiate him back down to earth, but then she thought . . . why not? The coming week was spring break. She didn’t have any work to report to. And Grandma had a condo in Orlando.

  Besides, she deserved to spend some of Stuart’s money.

  It was utter madness. It was probably, according to the books, really bad parenting. No doubt he would think that if he washed his hands after using the potty he’d get a trip to the moon, but the only words that she found coming out of her mouth were . . .

  “Why not, buddy? Why not!”

  * * *

  One week later, Quinn and Hamilton were on their way back from Logan airport, hurtling along in freshly fallen snow, incongruously tan and wearing oversize Mickey Mouse apparel. Quinn even had a row of braids with beads on the side of her head, her sad attempt at a Bo Derek impression. Hamilton loved them—almost as much as he loved the Goofy baseball cap that he refused to take off.

  After a three-hour (and fifteen-minute) flight, they were tired. They were horrifically tacky. They were on their millionth replaying of “It’s a Small World.”

  But even in the midst of all that, they were happy.

  The trip had been amazing. True, it hadn’t been without the regular difficulties that come with the air travel and toddler combo. Quinn had tried to adhere to her parenting rules on the flight down (limit screen time, only educational games), but by the time they landed, Hamilton was watching “Baby Shark” for the umpteenth time and the people behind them were ready to destroy her.

  The rest of the trip . . . all the rules went out the window. Oh, mealtimes and bedtimes were held to, but only kinda. Mostly, if they wanted to do something, they did it. Dinner of corn dogs? On it. Stay up late to watch the light show? Absolutely. Ride It’s a Small World seventeen times in a row? Why the hell not, Quinn had headphones and an audiobook.