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New York, NY
Startled by a knock, I quickly turned to the bathroom trash can, tossed the stick inside, and covered it up with a tissue.
“Mom!” Lexi yelled through the door, impatient with the amount of time it was taking me. “This is the seventh time today that the power has gone out, for a total of six hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-four…forty-five seconds.”
I sighed. For a woman who had a full week off work to look forward to, it wasn’t starting off with the awesome bang I’d hoped for. I scrubbed my hand down my face to clear it of emotion before unlocking the door and twisting the knob to open it.
At four-and-a-half-feet tall and growing by the minute, my blond baby girl looked up at me with stern eyes of authority—as though she were the parent and I the child.
“It took you thirty seconds to open the door, and it normally only takes you twenty.”
I loved my kid, obviously, but sometimes, her affinity for time was a true thorn in my side. One prolonged trip in the bathroom and I felt like I was racing the thirty-second clock with the famous “Thinking Music” playing in the background to make my wager for Final Jeopardy.
“What were you doing in there, Mom?”
I rolled my eyes. “None of your beeswax, Lex.”
Her eyebrows drew together, and her mouth turned down in a scowl. Regardless, I wasn’t ready to talk about the reason it had taken me longer than usual to open the bathroom door, and I certainly wasn’t ready to do it with my seven-year-old daughter. She may have been wise beyond her years, but that didn’t mean she needed to be my dumping ground for adult problems.
Part of the glory of childhood was never having to worry about adult shit. At least, for my kid, that’s how I always hoped it would be.
She stared at me for a long moment before her inquisitive, always-running-at-a-hundred-miles-per-hour mind started to focus on something new. “I want to watch videos about molecular compounds on my iPad. When do you think the internet will be working again?”
When would the power turn back on?That had become the million-dollar question, and I was officially over not having the answer.
“I’m sorry to say I don’t know, baby. I wish I did, but it depends on when the power comes back on again and how long it stays that way. We’re not in control of it.”
I walked past her and down the hall toward the stairs, wiping the sweat from my forehead as gracefully as I could manage. The power in New York and the surrounding tri-state area had been on the fritz for the last two days and counting.
Rolling blackouts, they’d called them on the radio, suggesting that the unprecedented heat wave we were experiencing was just too much for the power grid to handle. And since it was July, it wasn’t ideal—the swamp-like conditions of every crevice on my body acting as Exhibit A—but I’d been trying to make the best out of the situation.
Now, though, it was starting to become stressful. Lexi’s limited patience and tolerance for change were beginning to run out, and Wes’s huge Fourth of July barbecue at the restaurant was in critical danger of becoming a giant financial loss.
“Who is in control of it?” she questioned with a little hand to her hip.
I almost snorted. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lexi was asking so that she could call them and make a personal, yet scientifically specific argument, about why said person was a big old asshole.
Luckily—or maybe not—I didn’t know the answer.
“I don’t know, babe. Why don’t you go out in the backyard and play with your water mill?”
We were so fortunate to live in a brownstone in Upper Manhattan. We had a tiny, postage-stamp yard, but it was a yard, nonetheless, and an invaluable asset on a day like today. And with the water table Wes had built for Lexi himself, she could at least find some entertainment by running her mill at different speeds and timing it with her stopwatch for a couple hours.
Excited at the prospect of something to do,something for her mind to fixate on, Lexi was on the move, flashing past me in the hall and taking off down the stairs at a delicate run, stating, “I can see if the fifth lap is still a tenth of a second faster than laps one through four!”
I nodded and maybe, just maybe, laughed a little. There was absolutely no one on this planet like my daughter, and I counted myself as the luckiest parent in the world that I got to experience her brilliance every day.
Speaking of lucky, my phone vibrated in my hand, the screen prominently declaringIncoming Call Wes. It’d been a bit of a stressful morning, but man, a call from my husband sounded like just the ticket to turn my mood around.
“Hey, good-looking,” I answered cheekily, putting the phone to my ear as I made my way down the steps at a much slower pace than Lexi had. “How’s the day going?”
“Well…it’s looking up now that I’m talking to you.” His voice was all deep and throaty, and somehow, it still held the power to scatter goose bumps up the length of my arms.
There was just something about my husband that did me in.All the damn time.We’d been married for over a year, and I still felt so in love with him, if not more than the day I saidI do.
Although, I couldn’t deny, the emotional stress of the day and the lack of power were still all-consuming when it came to my overall mood.
I chuckled, but there was hardly any humor to it. “That bad, huh?”
