Heart of the Matter - Emily Giffin [8]
As I start to reply to Cate, Ruby unleashes a bloodcurdling scream: “Nooooo! Mommy! I saaa-iiiid whole!”
I freeze with the knife in midair, realizing that I’ve just made the fatal mistake of four horizontal cuts. Shit, I think as Ruby demands that I glue the bread back together, even making a melodramatic run for the cabinet where our art supplies are housed. She retrieves a bottle of Elmer’s, defiantly shoving it my way as I consider calling her bluff and drizzling the glue over her toast—“in a cursive R like Daddy does.”
Instead, I say with all the calmness I can muster, “Now, Ruby. You know we can’t glue food.”
She stares at me as if I’m speaking Swahili, prompting me to translate for her: “You’ll have to make do with pieces.”
Hearing this bit of tough love, she proceeds to grieve the toast that might have been. It occurs to me that a pretty easy fix would be to eat the French toast myself and make a fresh piece for Ruby, but there is something so thoroughly maddening about her expression that I find myself silently reciting the advice of my pediatrician, several how-to books, and my stay-at-home-mother friends: do not surrender to her demands. A philosophy that runs in marked contrast to the parenting adage I normally subscribe to: choose your battles—which I confess is secret code for hold your ground only if it’s convenient; otherwise, appease the subject in order to make your life easier. Besides, I think, as I prepare for an ugly gridlock, I am trying to avoid carbs, starting this morning.
So, my cellulite settling the matter, I purposefully set Ruby’s plate on the table before her and announce, “It’s this or nothing.”
“Nothing then!” Ruby says.
I bite my lip and shrug, as if to say, Bring on the hunger strike, then exit to the family room where Frank is quietly eating dry Apple Jacks—one at a time—the only thing he’ll touch for breakfast. Running my hand through his soft hair, I sigh into the phone and say, “Sorry. Where were we?”
“Your anniversary,” she says expectantly, hungry for me to describe the perfect romantic evening, the fairy tale she clings to, aspires to.
On most days I might hate to disappoint her. But as I listen to my daughter’s escalating sobs, and watch her attempt to roll her toast into a Play Doh-like ball in order to prove that I am wrong, and that food can indeed be reassembled, I delight in telling Cate that Nick got paged in the middle of dinner.
“He didn’t switch his call?” she says, crestfallen.
“Nope. He forgot.”
“Wow. That sucks,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“So you didn’t exchange gifts? Not even when he got home?”
“No,” I say. “We agreed not to do presents this year . . . Things are kind of tight these days.”
“Yeah, right,” Cate says, refusing to believe something else I tell her about my life—that plastic surgeons aren’t loaded, at least the ones who work at academic hospitals helping children rather than in private practice enhancing breasts.
“It’s true,” I say. “We gave up one income, remember?”
“What time did he get home?” she asks.
“Late. Too late for s-e-x ...” I say, thinking that it would be just my luck for my gifted daughter to memorize the three letters and spout them off to, say, Nick’s mother, Connie, who recently hinted that she thinks the kids watch too much television.
“So what about you?” I ask, remembering that she had a date last night. “Any action?”
“Nope. The drought continues,” she says.
I laugh. “What? The five-day drought?”
“Try five weeks,” she says. “And sex wasn’t even an issue . . . I got stood