(During this move I’ve uncovered a lot of snippets of writing that I never finished or did anything with. Notes, the beginnings of things, poems, weird little drawings. This is one of those things. More when we start to unpack.)
****

Like a lot of guys, Dan was driving the first time he noticed. Traffic was bad. Some lady in a Land Cruiser was pretending not to see him so she wouldn’t have to let him over. He thought the word whore and wrapped his hands tighter around the steering wheel. When he squeezed the leather wheel, for just the smallest second it felt like there was some kind of bump under the skin of his left palm. Like a callous or a — what? A bump.

He pushed the nose of his Camry into the tiny gap. Ha. Bitch had to let him in now. The car ahead scooted forward, Dan edged his car solidly into the lane. He grinned up at the Cruiser Lady’s cranky face in his rearview mirror. “Thank you, nice lady…” He waved and laughed. What is the matter with people?

The light turned, everyone hit the gas. Dan turned up the radio traffic report. He didn’t think about his hand again for — gosh, days.
**

I’m sure you’ve had overslept mornings before, and you know that hurried revision of the getting-ready routine. Do I really need to shave? Yeah, shit. Have to brush teeth. Do I have to… oh. Yeah, definitely need to shower.

So his hands were full of wet shampoo and slippery hair when he noticed it again. It didn’t hurt at all, just felt odd. Thicker maybe? He forced his soapy eyes open, then rinsed his hands and held them up side by side under the water. In the morning light, they looked identical. Fingers, palms, wrinkles, joints. He ran his right-hand fingers across the other palm. Was there anything? Now he couldn’t find it. He felt his right hand for comparison. It had bones and lumpy imperfections too. So this was nothing. Ah, good. He reached for a towel and stepped out before remembering. Shit. Rinse hair.

***

Still running late, sitting in traffic again. He squeezed the wheel this time, just to see — yes. No. Damn it, there was definitely something there.
Jesus Christ.

Meetings and paperwork and emails seem intrusive and insane when you are freaking out. By 11:30 he couldn’t take it. He shut everything down and left for an early lunch.

At the drugstore he tried to look cool. Relaxed. Not at all like a guy in a suit with a scary growth hardening his palm. What if it grew and grew until he couldn’t even close his fist? What if it distorted his skin until he couldn’t type or grip a golf club or… he imagined himself driving with a softball-sized hardened thing growing out of his hand. He felt queasy.

Now where in the hell… because fuck me if I’m going to ask for help on this stupid thing, and have them looking at me like I’m some kind of, of… whatever kind of dumb person has embarrassing guy problems like this on his lunch break.

He found the aisle. Men’s needs.

Okay, hemmoroid cream. Ass itch. Jock itch. Toe crud. Wart removal? Hey… no. Nothing for…?

He turned and saw the locked glass cabinet. Oh. Right.

“Can I help you with something?” He wanted to die. The pharmacy girl was way too pretty to be asking men about things they might need that were awful enough to be locked behind the cabinet. Do you see why we steal this shit? THIS IS WHY.

“Yeah.” He said, looking down to avoid her eyes. “I need. You know. One of them.”

She glanced at his hands and smiled. “Okay. Which one did you want.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Well we have this one, it’s painless and works really fast. Then we have the generic, which is a little less but I don’t know how accurate… then there’s the more idiot proof one, and it comes with an extra kit.”

Whatever. “Just give me the nine dollar one.”

He paid and headed towards the automatic doors — then thought. How am I going to do this in my car? He turned back to the cashier… “Hey. Can I use your restroom?”

The instructions were clear enough. Best if test is performed after a full meal or vigorous exercise.”

No. Fuck that.

Press pronged tip on your thumb or forefinger. Depress button until it clicks. A small amount of blood will be painlessly collected into the testing vial.

He did it. It didn’t hurt. Now all he had to do was wait a few minutes and. Oh. Or ten seconds.

The back of his neck felt cold as the result window appeared, like the swirling, oblivious words on a magic 8 ball.
Pregnant.

***
His brother in law had two kids, so Dan already knew about the puking and the swelling, and the slimy sludge that would endlessly ooze out from under his cuticles in a couple of months. He knew that some guys put their arm in a sling with a little modestly glove at the end. Some people flaunt it, the gorgeous and godlike round lump — because you get special treatment when you’re carrying a baby. No one expects you to do any heavy lifting with that hand, and you can eat whatever you want.

Dan felt sick. But the strangest — was this affection? For something that resembled a wart at this point? Craziness. No. Other than his nephew, Dan didn’t even like kids that much.

And. When would the guys at work notice? How was he going to tell Meghan? Would she freak out? Would she know what to do? Would she be willing to even touch him after this? A lot of girls get all weird and creeped out and… not that this was even something she would want. Not that it was up to her, but still. God. A baby. A real live baby living in his house. Much louder and needier than the damned old orange cat.
But maybe much more interesting.

He coasted through a green light. Everything felt out of focus for a long minute. Maybe two. He didn’t go back to the office. He went home. Too much to think about. Too much to Google.

We are at that last stage of house abandonment. The one where you keep thinking you’re almost done except – oh shit, what about the stuff in this drawer? And what about that spot where we wanted to touch up the paint? And what about OH MY GOD a whole eight or nice more hours of shit to do. This really could go on forever and ever until we die from being old and tired. It’s a wonder that anyone ever moves anywhere and ever sells any house… all I can figure is that other people must have a lot more energy than we do. And/or a lot fewer art supplies. Because in the process of cataloging all of our shit I’ve noticed that about 25% by volume of everything we own is art related. That’s like having an extra whole house of furniture, chopped up and stuffed into small boxes.

The remaining 75% of our stuff is almost all little metal toy cars.

So yeah. We are leaving town tomorrow. We are tired. Our boys are cute. If I have the energy tonight I will post a few pictures to prove it to you about the cute.

This post is me stalling. I need to touch up paint and put mulch in the flower beds and load my car. And take stuff to the thrift shop. And take back Kevin’s library book and go pick up the boys’ medical records and mail off our taxes. And take some photos of our house because I’m going to miss you, little house. There’s a lot of love in this house. Love, and also dead doodle bugs.

Back to it.

I stood there studying the box for a full minute. I’d easily fit, thanks to me being stupid and ordering a lot more huge boxes than we needed and not enough middle-sized boxes and way way not enough little boxes. Most of our stuff is little. I guess I was thinking… I. Well I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I was thinking that Uline’s website was stressing me out with their many options until I finally closed my eyes and clicked on boxes and gave them my credit card number and hoped for the best. So we have plenty of boxes that are big enough for me to sit in.

It took me another ten minutes to find the tape even though oh my god I seriously just had it. I looked on the couch — nope. I looked on the table. I looked on top of the boys’ dresser. Then I looked on the couch again, and there it was. Is the tape dispenser screwing with me?

Have you ever watched haunted house movies and thought why in living fuck are those crazy idiots still in that heebie-jeebie house? Because I’ve always thought that the first time that creepy crap started at my house, I’d run out the door without stopping to put my shoes on even. The rest of the movie would just be me at the nearest Motel 6 paying a realtor to go over there and fucking handle it.

But now I get it! The people are too tired to think clearly. Tape dispenser hiding and taunting me and jumping out and laughing? And then hiding again? Whatever. Wake me up when there’s blood running down the walls, so I can let the painter guy know that he’ll need to prime them afterall.

So anyway, I found the tape. I climbed in. Perfect.

Then I realized, crap. This won’t work. How am I going to tape up the box from the inside? Unless! I take the tape thingy in there with me, but then Kevin wouldn’t be able to finish packing because he wouldn’t have it. Oooh I know. Scissors. Yes! Okay. Get in the box. Tape it up from the inside. Now use the scissors to cut a hole in the side of the box. Push the scissors and tape out through the hole.
Done!

Shit. I forgot to label it. Shit shit shit — do you see the kind of week I’m having? All of the boxes have to be labeled. Because of insane.

Reach out through the hole, feel around for a Sharpie. Feel guilty because not only do I find one right there on the floor where the baby could have gotten to it, but now that I think of it, I sort of just put scissors and a tape dispenser on the floor too.

Oh well. Kevin’s problem now.

I leaned my arm out through the hole and bent it back to write:
master bedroom MISC.
FRAGILE, do not crush.

I peeked out to see my handiwork and was bummed to see that the boys had already scribbled all over the side of the box. Or maybe my writing really is that bad. Either way, it’s hard to read the very important last line. Not sure what to do about that. If you see Kevin, please tell him to just be careful not to throw or crush any of the larger boxes. Not that he would — he’s an excellent Pod packing careful person — but it wouldn’t hurt. To mention.

Now I’m just sitting in here with my laptop, waiting for Kevin to load the box into the pod. In the meantime I’m very glad that I packed pillows all around me to insulate myself from the household’s many irritating toddlerish wails and grumps and whines, although now I am realizing that most of those sounds were coming from me.

I’m sleepy enough that this post might be disjointed and/or boring. So I’ll punctuate it with pictures of cute to keep you going. Think how many more people would finish classic novels if there were photos like this scattered throughout them:

Me and Graham at the Dallas Aquarium.

Have you ever spent any time on Starfall.com? If you don’t have kids or teach kids, that answer should be no. Or something bad is wrong with you. But if you DO have kids, it’s a fantastic educational resource/way to put off getting out of bed for an extra thirty minutes.

“O! E! B! A! MOOOON!” Graham will say, and then he’ll pull his shoulders back all proud because dude, check it. I can read. My kids are very advanced bullshitters.

Nicolaus likes Starfall because he can click through the site and learn about reading under the grownuppish guise of teaching a baby. He says that he is going to someday open a college for babies, so this is good practice. In just two days he’s made huge leaps in reading, even though he still doesn’t want to discuss the damned alphabet.

Nicolaus listening to my dad explain all of the sounds that the jet engines are about to make. Incidentally, if you haven’t read my dad’s play by play of their plane ride you totally should.

Anyway. Watching Nicolaus click through the site, I’m realizing part of why letters don’t totally make sense for this kid: Because the way that letters work doesn’t make any fucking sense. “O” says Oh except when it says Ah. “A” says Ah except when it says Ay or Aeh. E says Eee except when it says Eh. Oh! and I and Y can both say Eee as well, and sometimes E says nothing. It’s silent.

He says that in HIS language there are invisible letters at the end of some words. Why the hell not? And at bedtime he curled himself up and told me that he was going to try and be a silent E. Which was bullshit because he then talked for another hour and a half, but it was still cute.

The other night he clicked on the activity page for the letter T and they had this little animated train drive across the screen. “Ha!” He laughed, “That’s really funny. Why do they have a train for the letter T?”

“Well, what sound does train start with?” I’m being all leading and clever and didactic with my question.

“Chuh.”

“Chuh?”

“Yeah. Chrain. Chuh.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess it kind of does sound like chrain.”

I tried to pronounce it Train and it sounds wrong. It’s like I’m back in the linguistics class that I incidentally dropped because of being so pregnant with little Chomsky here.

Graham in his Easter outfit. Those little tractors have great spiritual significance, believe me.

Speaking of linguistics, the other night in the car Nicolaus started telling me about rhyming letters — meaning that there are different letters that sound similar. He says that B and D and L all sound the same. But F and Ch and H and K are another kind. And MMmm and Nnnn and Ooooo and Vvvvv are in another group – because they go on and on for like a minute.

I am almost totally sure this was all covered in that class but I was too busy writing lists of possible baby girl names to pay attention, so I don’t remember. Voiced letters? That’s all I remember. And the word Fricative. Maybe I would have done better in that class if the guy had just said that they all rhyme together in all different ways.

Nicolaus at White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

We’re all doing better on the Mouse front. Kevin and I feel better every time Amy sends us an update. We’re loving the open adoption aspect. Makes it much easier to know that he’s happy and warm and safe and thrilled to be allowed on the furniture.

What else? Not much else to report. The days are long lately, and Kevin and I are exhausted all the time. Nicolaus is running wide open with excitement/nervousness/fourness. But Graham seems unphased by the upheaval. He’s talking like mad, little bitty sentences even. “Call Amy onna phone.” “See da waTER derr.” “Boy. Dam. Box. Inderr!”

Decorating Easter eggs.

We’re packing and packing and packing, and there is just as much stuff in here as there was before we started packing. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. But I haven’t given up on my dream of packing like grownups, meaning that less than 5% of our boxes will be labeled “Misc”. So far, it’s all very organized and cataloged and for the first time ever we know what we own… except there’s a ton of crap left everywhere and less than a week to go. Lord lord.

In between packing and being sad about Mouse, we’ve been dragging the boys all over town trying to visit with people we will miss and trying to burn ourselves out on all of our favorite restaurants. It would help a lot if my parents would be really obnoxious over the next few days so we could be all like Whew! Glad to be driving away from them. But instead they’re being awesome and fun and sweet like selfish assholes. I’m going to miss them horribly.

Oooh and one final random thought before bed. We’re looking for places to live. When you search for apartments and townhouses and things to rent, you start to hate the word “nestled.” It’s even worse when a condo is nestled in the heart of something. Gross, right? They should really offer a discount on your rent for that.

As a former robot girl — damn Kevin and Zoloft both to hell for encouraging me to experience a full range of emotions — I was relieved when the boys didn’t seem to notice that a family member was missing. Those Bob Sagot end-of-episode talks can be messy when they aren’t scripted by some fancy hollywood writer, and we let our teleprompter lease go dead last fall. Not to mention we don’t have the helpful, uplifting home audio iSoundtrack and iStudioAudience systems that everyone’s getting nowadays so our heartfelt talks are punctuated with awkward long pauses that usually end with Nicolaus going, “Yeah but that doesn’t make sense. WHY?”
I don’t remember Steph and Deej ever pulling that kind of crap.

I said something to Kevin about my relief. We were sitting in the cold wind, drinking Cokes at a picnic table while we watched our kids flail their arms and legs at each other on the swings at the little park near our house. Something like “The boys don’t seem to miss him that much.” I said it sort of hopeful… like maybe the dog bothered them, and maybe if they don’t care that he is gone then we super obviously did the right thing, definitely, for real because oh my god it sucks so much I need all the reassurance I can find.

It’s true though, they haven’t seemed to really miss him. Nicolaus dotes on the gecko all day, making valentines and setting up books in front of the little clear plastic box. Graham has said more about Amy than Mouse since we waved goodbye to them both at the airport.

Kevin wasn’t relieved. He was bothered by their robot boy reaction. “It’s like we’ve done something wrong in raising them.”

Oh. Right. I keep forgetting that we’re trying to raise members of a society here. Like how I forgot to teach Nicolaus the concept of high-fiving until he was almost three. It seems like a small thing, but if your kid looks nauseous because he doesn’t know what to do when an adult walks up to them and says, “Hey buddy. High five!” you feel like an asshole.

This morning though, Graham saw me high-five Nicolaus and he instantly caught on to the power and societal importance of this gesture. He high-fived me a thousand times over the course of the day. It was hard to get any packing done at all with the constant high-fiving, but I felt good knowing that my son would be ready to handle almost any social situation involving normal people.

But still. Once Kevin pointed it out, it was kind of disconcerting that neither boy had mentioned the dog. This isn’t like one of those boring old dogs that sleeps in another room all day, or hangs out in the backyard away from the kids. Mouse has been right in the middle of almost everything they’ve done for… well, for their entire lives. Unnerving that they weren’t missing him, now that I thought about it.

So I was relieved again tonight when Graham brought it up. He came across a stick that he has been giving to Mouse constantly for the last couple of weeks. Mouse had no interest in it, but toddlers are weird so he was sure that the dog needed that stick. “Bous? Wer? WER?” He looked around for a few minutes, and when he couldn’t find Mouse he brought me the next best thing: the literary classic Go dog go. We read the book and Graham laughed, “Up-tree! Up-tree! Puppy! HAT.” which I’m sure was his way of shielding himself from his complex inner emotions.

Nicolaus was awful at bedtime. Awful. And once in bed it took him almost three hours to fall asleep. I kept sneaking in there to check on him thinking for sure he’d be asleep, but no. He was lying there, huge brown eyes wide open in the darkness.

Finally I layed down next to him and hugged him against me. “Do you miss Mouse?”

He nodded.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Well I miss him. I miss him SO so much.”

“I miss him more than you do.”

“I miss him so much I just feel like crying.” And it was true. I was crying. I’m going to sue the shit out of Pfeizer.

“Things were just so much better when Mouse was around. Everything was better.”

“Awww. Well it’s okay to be sad and miss him. You know that, right?”

“Does Wishbone like Mouse?”

“Oh yes. She likes him very much.”

“Does she LOVE him?”

“I think she does.”

“Is she like… is she his favorite lady dog now?” Favorite lady or favorite man is our term for honey. Main squeeze. You know.

“Yeah, they love each other very much.” Now we were into territory where I was just outright bullshitting, but whatever. That’s what good parenting is all about sometimes.

“Are they going to get married?”

“They might.”

“I think they will. Is she an Italian greyhound too?”

“No. She’s a dalmation.” (tangent about dalmations and why do firemen need dalmations and what job do they do for fire stations and are their spots for camoflauge somehow? and so forth)

We came back around to Mouse being married, and maybe not coming back to us. And we talked about how it’s okay to be happy for him and sad for us at the same time. And it’s okay to be sad enough to cry. I’m pretty sure that was a direct Bob Sagot quote there, only I replaced “when mommy dies” with “when your dog gets married and moves away.”

So we both cried a little and hugged, and he asked if I could get that nice lady to send pictures of Mouse and her other dog together, and of their kitty. He wants to send them some treats and books and things. A gravy boat maybe? I need to see if they’re registered somewhere I guess.

Finally, he fell asleep. And now it’s 1:30 and here I am awake and thinking that Kevin was right, it does feel better knowing that our kids aren’t impervious to that kind of sadness. Even though it sucks to see them sad. Who knew that parenting was going to be so damned complicated? Other than the executive producers of Full House I mean.