Page 14 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

I read it four times. It’s a good text. Professional, clean, gives notice, protects the family. Deanna would call in the morning and be kind about it. In a month there’d be a new person driving Margot to school, learning where the cups are.

My thumb is over the send arrow when small feet cross the upstairs hall.

By the time I get up there, Teddy is standing outside my door with his hair stuck up on one side, holding the stuffed triceratops by a horn.

“I had a dream,” he says.

“Okay.” I put the phone in my pocket, screen down against my leg. “Bad one?”

He nods. He isn’t crying, which is worse — he’s got the wide-awake, careful look of a kid holding something too big to put down. I don’t ask what it was. I’ve learned that with Teddy you don’t ask — you just make it easy to tell.

“Come on. Back to your room. I’ll sit.”

His room is dinosaur-dark, night-light in the corner. He gets under the covers and arranges the triceratops and doesn’t lie down.

“In my dream Mom was calling me,” he says. “But there wasn’t any sound. Her mouth was going and no sound came out.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed. “That’s a scary one.”

“I tried to hear her.” He picks at the horn. “June. I don’t know what her voice sounds like anymore. I tried and I can’t.”

There it is. Too big to put down, so he handed it to me, in the middle of the night, in a room with a plastic triceratops. I hold very still so I don’t drop it.

“You were two,” I say. “Almost three. Nobody keeps sounds from being two. That’s not you forgetting her. That’s just how being two works.”

“Margot remembers her voice.”

“Margot was six when it happened. Six-year-olds get to remember more. That’s the only difference.” I straighten the blanket over his legs, just to be doing something. “You know what I bet? I bet there are videos. Your mom, talking, singing you something, telling your dad to stop filming. We can ask him tomorrow.”

He thinks about it. “What if I hear it and I still don’t remember?”

“Then you’ll know it anyway. Knowing works fine. Half of what I know about my mom comes from pictures and other people. I love her the same.”

“Is your mom dead too?”

“Yes.”

“Did you forget her voice?”

“No,” I say, because I don’t lie to kids about the big ones. “But I was grown up when she died. It’s different. You got the harder job, bud.”

He nods, like that’s fair. Like somebody finally admitted it. He lies down. I stay on the edge of the bed with my hand on his back. His breathing slows until I’m sure he’s asleep. Then he says, into the pillow:

“Are you still going to be here when I wake up?”

“Yes.”

“And the wake-up after that?”

“Yes.”

“For all the wake-ups?”

Send it, and Deanna calls in the morning. I’m gone in a month. And this exact kid learns one more time that the people in his kitchen are temporary. I came up here tonight ready to do that to him, professionally, cleanly, with two weeks’ notice.

“For a lot of them,” I say. “A really lot.”

“Okay.” He pulls the triceratops closer. Then, almost asleep, running the check he runs: “Is yours still Maiasaura?”