Nine

That night, we were experimenting with the idea of the whole family eating dinner together, and it was going swimmingly, except for Ethan’s palpable anxiety that he would miss the opening credits of The Simpsons rerun that started at seven. He practically broke a sweat shoveling food into his mouth with one eye on the digital microwave clock.

Leah, meanwhile, was giving us a sneak preview of what she’ll be like as an adolescent, rolling her eyes every time we asked a question and emphasizing every word she spoke to us when she’d deign to grace the conversation with her chirpy little voice.

“May I please be excused?” Ethan asked, eyeballs nearly popping out of his head with anticipation. Problem was, his mouth was still full, so it came out “maya pease be estude?” Luckily, Abby speaks fluent gibberish. She’s been living with me a long time.

“Not just yet,” she said. “Chew and swallow your food first, wash it down with some water, and wipe your mouth with a napkin.” Asperger’s kids, generally speaking, don’t like to watch people eat, and they don’t see much point in sitting at the table after they’ve finished eating. Not to mention, Bart Simpson, Ethan’s role model, was about to start writing on that blackboard to signal the seventeenth rerun of an episode Ethan still doesn’t entirely understand.

He grumbled a little, but that was muffled by macaroni and cheese, so it was easy to ignore. Ethan did follow his mother’s instructions to the letter, though. As with many autism spectrum children, Asperger’s kids tend to be very specific about doing what they’re told, and do not vary in the least from instructions. He chewed, swallowed, drank, and wiped, an inch from hyperventilating.

“Now may I please be excused?”

Abigail nodded wearily. I try to stay away from such conversations whenever possible, and was staring down at my plate to avoid having to look at Leah, an adorable little girl who has the table manners of a rhinoceros. Ethan leapt up and started to run for the living room, before Abby reminded him to clear his plate from the table. With mere seconds to spare, he made it to the television, and Nirvana.

“So, did you have a lot of homework today?” Abby asked Leah, who was chewing so slowly it was impossible to tell if she was still alive.

“I told you!” she shouted. “I had three pages!”

“You didn’t tell me,” Abigail said with no outward trace of tension.

“I told him!” Leah pointed at me.

“Him?” I looked down at myself. “Him? I used to be ‘Daddy.’”

She rolled her eyes and exhaled. Parents can be so inconvenient.

Abby’s eyes had a faraway look, which meant she was trying not to scream. “All right, young lady, just exactly what has put you into such a mood that. . .”

The front door flung itself open, and Leah’s best friend Melissa flung herself through it. Most of the people we know have given up on the formality of ringing the doorbell or knocking, and Melissa is through that door so many times a day I’ve been thinking of putting in a turnstile.

Leah’s face brightened like a Hawaiian sky after a thunderstorm. “MELLIE!” she screamed, and ran toward her counterpart. They hugged like they hadn’t seen each other two hours earlier, which they had. The remainder of Leah’s dinner went untouched, and Abby sighed, scraped it into the garbage under the sink, and put the plate in the dishwasher.

It was just a little bit of a surprise when the front door opened again, and Melissa’s mother Miriam Bonet walked in, with equal disregard for our doorbell. I made a mental note to test the button later to make sure it was still operating. Miriam and her husband Richard have become the closest friends we have in Midland Heights, and she was carrying a small box that looked like a mini-cooler, except that it had ventilation holes in its sides. Inside it was a lizard.

“Is that IT?” Leah squealed. She raced to Melissa’s mother before Miriam even got a chance to take her jacket off. Miriam, normally a rational person, was beaming from ear to ear. She nodded.

“This is it, honey,” she told my daughter. Abby walked to the dining room, where the females had converged. Leah was busy thanking Miriam so profusely it bordered on embarrassing. Ethan stayed in the living room, where the trials and tribulations of yellow people with blue hair who say “d’oh!” were far more real to him than anything going on in the next room.

“I didn’t know you were bringing it tonight,” Abby told our guest.

“I didn’t know she was bringing it at all,” I chimed in from the kitchen, where I was frantically loading dishes into the dishwasher, to better hide from “company” the fact that we load our sink with dirty dishes until someone makes us stop.

Miriam stopped and looked at my wife. “You didn’t tell him?” she asked.

“I told him about the lizard,” Abby stammered. “I didn’t tell him you were bringing it.”

“Why didn’t you tell him?” Miriam asked.

“He is right here in the room,” I reminded them.

“It’s simple,” said Abigail. “Miriam knew all about the whole gecko thing because Melissa already has one. So when we decided Leah could have one. . .”

“When we decided?”

Abby gave me her “the-child-is-watching-so-please-play-along” look. “Yes, when we decided, Miriam offered to buy it, and bring all the equipment, as an early birthday present for Leah.”

“Her birthday’s five months from now,” I pointed out.

“A very early birthday present.”

“It’s so cute!” my daughter was gushing. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

I considered answering “yes,” but more sensible heads prevailed. Miriam actually looked a little embarrassed. “Well, we’re not really sure yet, Leah,” she said. “We’ll have to give it a few months, and then we can look, maybe with a magnifying glass, and find out.”

“You know what they’re looking for,” giggled Melissa, and Leah laughed along with her. I finished loading the dishwasher and turned it on.

Leah walked in with the cage. “Look, Daddy,” she said. “She’s so cute!”

“I thought you didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl,” I reminded her.

“I’ve decided it’s a girl,” she said practically. “Look, Daddy, look!”

I have to admit to backing up just a tad. “It’s really nice, honey,” I said. “Why don’t you take it up to your room and find a spot for it to live?”

Miriam had brought a small fish tank and other equipment for the tiny reptile, and she set it up on Leah’s desk, with a heat lamp to keep the lizard, which the girls named E-LIZ-abeth, warm. I stayed in the kitchen, cleaning up, while the estrogen brigade set up E-LIZ-abeth with her new home. After a few minutes, Abby and Miriam walked downstairs and joined me at the kitchen table. Miriam put a small plastic container in the refrigerator.

“Is that the. . .”

“Worms,” Miriam said. “And they have to be wriggling, or the lizard won’t eat them.”

“This is a lovely pet,” I told my wife.

Abby started to make coffee, since she is the coffee drinker in the house. I tend to content myself with Diet Coke, but it was evening, and any caffeine at all would keep me up until roughly Thursday. So I abstained. Miriam sat down at the kitchen table with me.

“I’m actually glad you came,” I said to Miriam. “Leah’s been P. . . P. . . P. . . PMS all afternoon.”

Abigail turned the coffeemaker on and looked at me. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Less and less, as I get older. Get what?”

“She was nervous because she knew Miriam was coming with the lizard, and she was afraid of you.” Abby reached into the freezer and pulled out a box of Girl Scout cookies, which she started to arrange on a plate. Girl Scout cookies must be eaten frozen, or not at all.

“She’s afraid of me?”

“You’re the one who didn’t want the gecko,” Miriam said. “Leah knows that, and she thinks that if you say no, she can’t have it.”

“She’s right. If I had said no, she couldn’t have it. But I did-n’t say no. In fact, I don’t remember being given a choice.”

“Leah didn’t know that,” Abby said, putting the cookies down. “She still thinks you’re going to throw the lizard out of the house.”

I groaned a little. “As long as I don’t have to walk it or anything, I don’t care. I take no responsibility for that animal. It lives or dies based on how well Leah takes care of it.”

Miriam always knows how to change the subject—all she has to do is ask about me. “So, what are you working on these days?” she asked.

I told her about Legs and my conversation with Abrams. “You’re a political science professor,” I reminded her, in case she’d forgotten her profession since leaving work today. “Who would Louis Gibson’s enemies be?”

“You’ll notice the word ‘science’ in there, Aaron,” she said, nibbling a tiny bite off a Thin Mint in the time it would take me to eat three cookies. “I don’t deal in minute-to-minute politics— I’m teaching theory.”

“Fine. Give me a theory about who Legs’ enemies might be, based on his politics.”

Abby frowned, but Miriam sat and thought for a moment. Abby got up to retrieve the coffeepot, which had filled.

“Anybody to the left of Mussolini would be an enemy of Louis Gibson,” she said. “You remember that rumor about the Supreme Court nominee about five years ago?”

I resisted the impulse to smite myself in the forehead. “Of course! I knew I remembered that People for The Values We Decided Are American thing! Was he behind that rumor?”

“What rumor?” Abby asked, pouring a mug of coffee for herself and one for Miriam.

“Behind it?” Miriam said. “He leaked it himself.”

“Legs Gibson told the press about that?” I was torn between pride that I knew someone that famous, and revulsion that I knew someone that Fascist.

“What rumor?” asked Abby, putting the mugs down and sitting with us at the table.

“Oh, you remember,” Miriam said. “During the hearings for that woman the Democrats were trying to get on the Supreme Court. And all of a sudden this article appears in the Washington Times about how it was rumored she’d had an abortion when she was seventeen. . .”

“Oh my god, that rumor?!” said Abby. She turned to me. “You’re telling me you went to high school with the sexist idiot who kept Madeline Crosby off the Supreme Court?”

“I didn’t actually go to school with him,” I defended myself. “He was one town over.”

Miriam took a sip of coffee and nodded her head—apparently Abby had manipulated the brew properly. (You can’t prove it by me, I think coffee tastes like hot, liquid dirt.) “Well, all you needed to hear was the words ‘Supreme Court nominee’ and ‘abortion’ in the same sentence, and you could forget that one,” she said. “That’s how Gibson made a name for himself, and the name, in many areas, was. . .”

“Asshole?”

“Pretty much. But I don’t know how many people wanted to kill him because of it.” Miriam thought thoroughly about that.

“Well, it only took one,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” said Miriam. “How do you pick just one from so many?”