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I haven’t been on a swing in twenty years. I get on one anyway, because Bo tells me to, and he counts us off, and we pump our legs in sync, and he narrates our altitude.
“Higher!” And at some point I stop tracking how I look, or whether the two joggers on the path can see a grown woman shrieking on a swing set, and I just go higher.
Next we do the climbing wall. Bo is fast and narrates that too. I’m slower, and he waits for me at the top every time, patient, holding out a hand like a tiny gentleman, and I take it.
By the time we reach the field I’m out of breath and I have laughed more times in one hour than I have in months.
Somewhere on the climbing thing, a dangerous thought goes by. I don’t chase it. But I notice it.
Maybe I could do this.
Not babysitting. This. A Saturday, a kid, a swing set, the whole terrifying warm ordinary thing I filed away years ago under not for me.
I put the thought back where it came from. But my hands are shaking a little, and it isn’t from the monkey bars.
We flop into the grass side by side, both breathing hard, and stare up at a sky doing that early-fall thing, big and blue with fat slow clouds pushing across it. Bo points out a dragon, then a truck. Then a cloud he says looks like his hamster, which it does not, but I agree.
We lie there a while. It’s the most still I’ve ever seen him.
“Hey,” I say, watching a cloud come apart. “You like sugar, right?”
“Obviously.”
“Good. Because I was thinking, after this, we could get...”
“I don’t like snow cones, though.”
I turn my head in the grass to look at him. “What?”
“Snow cones.” He says it like it’s a normal thing. “I don’t like them.”
“Bo. Snow cones are just sugary syrup and ice.”
“I don’t like them.” He is very calm about it. “You bite it and it’s just cold, and the flavor’s all at the bottom in a puddle, and then it’s a drink.”
I stare at him.
“That is the best argument I have ever heard against snow cones.”
“I know.”
“I’m never eating one again.”
“Good.”
“Okay, forget snow cones. There’s a place I want to take you.” I prop up on my elbows. “My favorite bakery in the whole city.”
Bo considers this.
“Do they have a bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“Ok. Good. I have to pee.”
That settles it. He sits up, brushes the grass off with two efficient swipes, and holds his hand out to pull me up like I’m the ten-year-old.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s go before I pee my pants.”
