Page 10 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“What did you two talk about? On the floor.”

“Private,” Teddy says. June keeps eating and offers nothing, and that, apparently, is that.

“And swim’s moved,” June says, nudging the evening along, “so Thursdays we’ll—”

“It moved to Wednesdays.” Margot sets her fork down. “The email came Monday.”

The table goes quiet a second. She’s right — she’s always right, that’s the thing about Margot, she’s right and she deploys it — but it’s the tone. It’s the tone she uses on people she expects to leave.

“Wednesdays, then,” June says, easy, and writes it on her hand with the pen from her pocket. “Thanks. I’d have had him at the wrong pool.”

“May I be excused?” Margot says, and is gone before the answer.

I find June at the sink after, and start apologizing for Margot’s tone at dinner. She doesn’t let me get through the first sentence.

“She’s not wrong, though. It was Wednesdays.” She hands me a wet pan. “Her mother died, and three years later there’s a stranger with keys to her house making her brother laugh at dinner. She’s doing everything right, if you think about it from inside her.”

I stand there holding the pan. Three candidates, two grief books, one school counselor. The first person to say something about my daughter that feels true is the nanny, on a school night, in dish gloves.

“The counselor says she’ll come around,” I say, mostly to see what June does with it.

“Maybe. But I’m not going to sit around waiting for her to change.” She pulls the drain plug. “She’d feel me waiting. That’s just more pressure on a kid who’s already carrying plenty.”

“Where’d you learn all this? The patience. The sitting on floors.”

“Four families.” She peels the gloves off, one finger at a time. “Kids are the same everywhere. They want to know two things — who’s in charge, and who’s going to leave them. Everything else is snacks.”

I laugh, which surprises both of us this late in the evening. She hangs the gloves over the faucet and says goodnight. I stay in the kitchen a while after she’s gone.

The first week of school, June tucked a joke on a sticky note into Margot’s lunch. The notes came back — not crumpled, returned, flat in the front pocket of the lunch bag, no comment. Nothing to call her out on. That’s how Margot does it. June never said a word. She just stopped sending notes and started drawing a small picture on the napkin instead. A raccoon. A volcano. The napkins don’t come back.

Then, a few days ago, I came down the back stairs and heard the two of them in the mudroom. I stopped where I was, which I’m not proud of and would do again.

“You don’t have to like me,” June was saying. Even, no wound in it. “I’d just like to know which one we’re doing, so I can plan.”

A silence with thinking in it. Then Margot: “The one where you drive me to school.”

“I can do that one.”

That was the whole negotiation. Nobody hugged. My daughter offered the coldest arrangement she had, and June took it without flinching. I stood on the back stairs a while after they’d gone. Nobody has gotten that close to Margot in a year. It took the one person she’s been keeping at arm’s length.

The drives are going fine, apparently. I asked Margot about them once.

“We listen to a podcast.”

“Which podcast?”

“Volcanoes.” A beat, and then, because accuracy matters more to her than the war does: “June found it. It’s not bad.”

Later I checked whether she was set for the morning. “Backpack’s by the door?”

“Correct,” she said, and went up.

Correct. She’s been saying it for weeks — to me, to her teacher, to the pediatrician. Somewhere in the last year my daughter stopped saying yes. I can’t find the day it happened, and there’s no one alive I can ask.

Some nights it’s June’s turn to read to Teddy, and I find reasons to be slow in the upstairs hall. She does all the voices. My son howls. I stand just outside the light from his doorway and listen. Then I go down and don’t mention it to anyone.

And Saturdays I still make the pancakes. They’re still burnt. Teddy has opened negotiations to get June to take over, at the table, while I’m standing right there with the spatula.