Mark Costello - Big If

Kai Boyle-Asplund, a boy of three, sat across the table, safely strapped into his booster seat, dressed for school and waiting for his breakfast. Peta Boyle was fixing oatmeal at the stove. Peta set a bowl in front of Kai.

“But Mama, I don’t want the oapameal.”

“You love the oapameal,” said Peta. “Remember we decided?”

“But Mama, I want chewy sticks.”

“No chewy sticks till later, Bimble,” Peta said. “Look, I’m packing them for lunch in your power box. See? Boom, right in the box.” She chopped Kai’s oatmeal with a spoon to cool it. “Jens — did you get any sleep last night?”

Jens scrolled through his source code. “Why yes. Did you?”

“I woke up at three,” said Peta. “You weren’t in the bed.”

“I probably took a pee.”

“I woke up to take a pee. You weren’t in there either.”

“I took a pee outside,” said Jens. “I find it inspiring. I love the moon at night, don’t you?”

The moon at night — it was the sort of thing Peta might have said. Jens was being slightly mean, mimicking his wife, and Peta knew it.

“Make him eat it, Jens,” she said.

She went into the bedroom to get dressed.

Jens did not look up from his laptop. He said, “Eat your oapameal, Kai.”

Kai touched the oatmeal with the tip of his spoon. “Dad?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Compiling a subroutine, juggling my function calls. I keep getting error flags. It’s driving me insane.”

Kai nodded sympathetically. “Can I have a chewy stick?”

“Sure,” said Jens. “For lunch. Now eat. Come on, Bongle, we’ll be late for school.”

The front room was a mild mess, an hour’s worth — a couch cushion and a baby blanket on the rug in front of the TV where Kai had watched a Pooh video as he decompressed from sleep, plastic blocks scattered all around, a car or two, a wooden plane, several oil tankers, and a tippy-sippy cup of mango juice, tipped and slowly leaking on the rug. Jens looked through the picture window, checking the thermometer bolted to the house. His neighbors, Sybil Hammerschmidt from Nine The Bluffs and Beth Greco from Five, were talking in the street with a group of campaign volunteers.

The phone rang in the kitchen. Peta got it. “Boyle-Asplund residence! Yes. No. No —can’t you let us live in peace?” She hung up sharply.

Jens said, “Pollster?”

“Christ, they’re vultures. Kai-bo, buddy, eat .”

The phone rang again. They let it ring. Their voice mail listed their opinions on all subjects, so the pollsters wouldn’t have to call them back.

Outside, the canvassers deployed, ringing doorbells. Jens, watching from the window, tried to guess their nationality. A group of college kids from Minnesota had come through the week before, followed by some autoworkers from Hamtramck, Michigan. The best day was when a van of prison guards from Buffalo had the fenderbender with the rabid tort reformers. Today’s contingent had a sober, churchy look. Jens guessed they came from somewhere flat and grassy where cyclone warnings often closed the malls. A canvasser, a young man in big mittens, was coming up the walk. Jens buckled his pants and opened the front door.

“Morning, sir!” said the volunteer. “My name is Raymond Rios. I’m with the vice president. May I speak to Mr. Coakley today, sir?”

Jens said, “I don’t see why not.”

“Great. Is he at home?”

Jens looked up the street. “I don’t see his truck. He usually leaves early.”

“This isn’t Ten The Bluffs?”

“No, Eight. Ten is the one that needs a gutter job. We’ve been after Coakley for months to do those gutters. Are you by any chance from Kansas?”

“No sir. Longmont, Texas.”

Jens was delighted. “The Longmont Easter Twister, 1977. A rare Fujita five. Eighty-mile track, ten dead, forty-seven hurt. Its angry soil-darkened funnel tore the asphalt from the roads. Did you see it, Raymond?”

“Golly, I don’t think so. Did it come at night? I had an early bedtime in those days.”

“No,” said Jens, “it came on Easter morning just as church was letting out. What do you do in Longmont, Ray? May I call you Ray?”

“Most folks don’t, but what the heck,” said Raymond Rios. “I teach Life Science to the bright and gifted at the high school.”

Jens leaned against the door. He liked meeting canvassers and engaging them in the breezy generality of strangers meeting. He had learned many things this way. One of the prison guards showed him how to carve a deadly weapon out of soap. A tort reformer showed him how to armpit-fart. He said, “That’s a lot of ground to cover, Ray, all of life and science.”

“Well they’re bright and gifted,” Raymond Rios said. “Of course, by law I have to give equal time to both accounts.”

“Both accounts of what?”

“Creation,” Raymond Rios said. “We do the Big Bang in the fall, the birth of stars and planets, chemistry and physics, energy and matter, Darwin, speciation and genetics. Then we spend the spring on the first page of the Bible.”

“Must go pretty quick, the Bible. Not a lot to say. God did it, class dismissed.”

“We cover it in depth.”

“So if one of your students wrote on an exam that we evolved over three million years from a stooped, nut-grubbing primate known as Lucy Afarensis, would that student get an A or an F?”

“Depends on the semester,” Raymond Rios said. “In the fall, that’s an A. In the spring, that’s an F, because the whole deal only took a week.”

“Want to see a cool knife made of soap?”

“I should probably hit the other units,” Raymond Rios said. “Do you all need some literature? This one’s about wetland preservation, this one’s about prescription drug benefits.”

“My wife does all our politics,” said Jens. “She’s a volunteer for the VP. We’re pretty well stocked up.”

“Petulia Boyle?”

“She doesn’t use ‘Petulia.’ Makes her cringe, in fact.”

“Says here she’s a strong-leaner, but you’re undecided.”

Jens said, “I’m reassessing.”

“Jens!” —Peta’s voice.

Jens said goodbye to Raymond Rios, closed the door, and hurried to the dining nook.

Kai was clapping in his booster seat. Peta was standing by the fridge, hands on hips, dressed to go. A star-shaped splat of oatmeal was on the linoleum between them.

“He threw it,” Peta said.

Kai said, “No I didn’t. It slipped.”

Peta said, “Bull-loney. Jens, I’ve got to run. Tell him not to lie.”

Peta kissed her husband and her son, grabbed her coat, purse, keys, shades, laptop, beeper, a travel mug of coffee, a binder of new million-dollar realty listings, and went out the door.

Jens and Kai sat at the table. They looked at the splat together.

Jens said, “This is where I tell you not to lie.”

“I didn’t lie,” said Kai. “It slipped.”

Jens wet a sponge at the sink, planted Kai next to the oatmeal on the floor.

“Clean it up,” said Jens.

“No.”

“Clean it up,” said Jens.

“No.”

“Clean it up or else you’ll get a time-out.”

Kai wound up like a pitcher and with a leg kick threw the sponge against the fridge.

Fine. Jens carried the boy to his little bedroom on the front side of the house. The shades were drawn. The room was dark. Jens dumped Kai on the racecar bed and stood by the rocking chair.

Kai was sobbing, facedown on the bed. Jens and Peta didn’t hit, weren’t hitters, did not believe in hitting. Instead they did time-outs. A child having a time-out was supposed to lie still in the dark, deprived of stimuli, and ponder the connection between naughtiness and punishment until time was in again.