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I cringe.
Because I know the other parents at this park smell my weakness.
You may have a seven-thousand-dollar stroller, but that doesn’t make you a father, their stares say.
She kicks her legs as her face goes red. I park her under a sycamore and fight my way through the maze of straps and buckles to pull her out of the stroller. But she still doesn’t stop crying.
Polina offered to come with us, but I told her I could handle my own daughter.
Ha. Joke’s on me.
“What’s wrong, little one?” I murmur as she swats at me with balled fists.
I run through the emergency checklist: diaper, bottle, the bouncing walk that makes me feel like a fool but usually does the trick.
None of it works.
Two mothers across the park are sitting on a bench while their kids play happily in the sandbox, and I feel their pitying looks.
Poor girl, stuck with a father like that. God help her.
I’m juggling a squirming Nina when a woman with dreadlocks parks her stroller next to me. She points to the bench. “You mind?”
She probably wants a front row seat to this trainwreck. I can’t even blame her. It must be appointment TV.
“Go ahead.” Then I turn my attention back to my furious daughter. “We do so well at home,malyshka.What’s the issue now?”
Nina just squints her eyes at me as if to say,I don’t trust you.
Her mother has rubbed off on her, I see.
“How old is she?” the woman asks. Her son is sitting up in his stroller, looking curiously at Nina and me.
“Six months.”
“Callum is seven.” She smiles at her baby and then turns back to me. “I’m Marion.”
“Arsen.” I point to myself and then to the screeching thing in my arms. “This is Nina.”
Marion beams at Nina like she isn’t a banshee right now. “Look at all that drool! Are you teething, little one?”
I frown. “Would that make her cry?”
To her credit, Marion doesn’t laugh. “Is she your first?”
“Is it that obvious?”
Instead of answering, Marion points to the soft, plastic ring hanging from the side pocket of Nina’s diaper bag. “Try giving her that.”
“What will it do?”
“Pop it in her mouth and find out.”
I can’t imagine Laila would pack anything poisonous in Nina’s diaper bag, and since the bouncing walk didn’t work, I’m all out of tricks. So I pop the pink ring into Nina’s mouth.
The moment she latches on…
Sweet, blissful silence.
