Page 17 of Lose You Twice

“It’s not,” Lily says. “We have worksheets.”

Their teacher waves from the pickup line with the expression of a woman who has seen too much before three in the afternoon. I wave back with the expression of a woman who will be seeing too much until bedtime.

“How was school?” I ask as we walk to the car.

Daisy begins talking immediately. “Mason, he’s in our class, ate glue.”

Lily sighs. “He didn’t eat it; he said he tasted it.”

“He licked the glue stick.”

“Exactly. He tasted it.”

“Ladies,” I say, unlocking the car, “as fascinating as Mason’s culinary journey sounds, please get in and buckle before I age another decade.”

They climb into the backseat, still arguing about whether glue counts as food if someone says it’s not food while eating it.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

2:47 — SNACKS. WATER. BREATHE, POSSIBLY.

I silence it and open the driver’s door before getting in.

“Can we get fries?” Daisy asks.

“No.” The non-stop questioning from the two little humans is enough to drive me insane, but at least they’re cute. And more than likely, they’ll wear me down by the time we get home, and we absolutely will have something Present Me vetoes. I wonder if they know this, and that’s why they gang up on me.

“Chicken nuggets?”

“No.”

“A milkshake?”

“Also no.”

Lily buckles herself in. “Do we have snacks at home?”

“Yes.”

“Good snacks?”

“Define good.”

“Not raisins.”

I shrug. “Then maybe.”

Daisy gasps. “Raisins are grandma grapes.”

That description is both accurate and quite unsettling.

The drive home takes twenty-four minutes because Pacific Coast traffic has one hobby, and it is ruining lives. The twins narrate their day in overlapping bursts. Daisy tells me about Mason and the glue three more times. Lily informs me that her table group lost two points because Emma talked during quiet reading, which is apparently an unforgivable betrayal in her book, and Emma has been demoted from BFFFF to BFF.

I make the right sounds in the right places.

My body does the driving while my mouth does the sistering.

But my brain is still in the financial assistance hallway, feeling like one of the last pieces of my life that I had under control just served me an Uno reverse.