Free We'll Always Have Paris by Jennifer Coburn Page B

the smile, then offered, “You do know Mary Poppins is playing.”
    On our final day in England, we woke to the sound of rain banging on the windows of Molly’s house. Oh crap , I thought. “It’s torrential out there.”
    Katie sat up excitedly, her hair still molded to the shape of the pillow. “I bet there’s no line for the London Eye today!”
    “Maybe we just…” I began, then stopped myself. “All right, let’s buy some umbrellas.”
    After our Ferris wheel ride through a cloud, Katie spotted a bronze statue of Salvador Dalí’s melting clock. “What the…?!”
    A man dressed like the surrealist approached us and asked if we would like to visit Dalí Universe. Floating eyeballs, lobster phones, melting clocks—what child wouldn’t love this?
    Inside the museum, Katie was agape. “This guy is crazy!” she said, looking at Dalí’s sculptures and paintings. “And by crazy, I mean brilliant. It’s like this guy has no rules at all. In art class, I once colored my cat green, and the teacher was all, ‘Cats aren’t green.’ I’d like to hear what she’d say about this guy.”
    “Clocks don’t melt,” I suggested.
    “Elephants don’t have long skinny legs,” Katie added.
    I wondered if Katie was simply a fan of surrealism or gearing up for a rebellion against her highly structured, possibly overregulated life.
    “Can I have a Dalí-themed ninth birthday party next year?” Katie asked.
    “A what?” I asked.
    “A Dalí birthday party?”
    “What would that even look like?”
    “Definitely a melting clock cake,” she said. “And we could paint surreal self-portraits and they’d be all weird and it wouldn’t matter.” As if reading my mind, she continued, “And we could hire an actor to play Salvador Dalí like that time Winnie the Pooh came to my party.” Katie saw that I was warming to the idea and persisted, suggesting my friend. “Milo could play Salvador Dalí. I bet his accent would be better than that guy outside the museum.”
    “Before today, you had no idea who Dalí was,” I reminded her. “Will any of your friends care about some painter they’ve never heard of?”
    Katie shrugged. “So Milo will come and tell a story about who Dalí is and why he’s cool and stuff.”
    “We could play Pin the Mustache on Mona Lisa ,” I suggested. “But that’s really more Dada than Dalí.”
    “Dada? I don’t know who that is and I don’t care, it’ll be fun,” Katie said.
    “If you’re still excited about this idea in March, we’ll do it,” I told her.
    She continued, “We can get candles that look like fingers.”
    I smiled, realizing that we were very likely having a surreal birthday party.
    “And bugs on the cake,” Katie whispered again.
    “Bugs?”
    “Yeah, plastic ants crawling across the cake like that picture we saw in the Dalí book of that lady who had a loaf of bread going through her head and bugs crawling across her boobs.”
    “Okay,” I said. “We can put bugs on the cake.”
    Katie kissed my cheek and thanked me, knowing that she had closed the deal.
    The second part of the deal was the one I made with myself. I silently promised that Katie and my mother-daughter trip would not be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, but something we did as often as we could reasonably afford. Home maintenance be damned—our next stop would be Italy.



The three years between our first European adventure and the next rolled along on the pleasant treadmill of middle-class suburban life: soccer tournaments, Girl Scout meetings, and elementary school science projects. I rushed to make writing deadlines and carpool pickup times; William suited up and went to his law office every day. Our lives intersected at Katie’s games and events, family meals, and theater nights, briefly touching then darting off in other directions.
    William was famous among the neighborhood kids for his four-cheese macaroni and cheese. I was the mom who led improv games in which we’d sing