Free Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

get a chance to ask her about her trip.
    T he morning, as always, is a mad rush of brushing-teeth, getting-into-clean-clothes, finding-matching-socks, and eating-breakfast-without-spilling-it-on-above-mentioned-clean-clothes. Things are complicated further by the fact that I have to bathe Jona (grime comes off her in black streams) and wash her hair (I don’t even consider detangling it). Finally we’re in the car, speeding to Mariposa Montessori. Not that one can actually speed through the nine A.M. Berkeley streets, filled as they are with students who believe it’s their God-given right to cross when and where they wish.
    “So, what did you mean when you said my painting was different?” I ask Jona.
    “What? Oh, I don’t remember,” she says, leaning out the window to watch a young man with impossibly spiky hair whizzing by on a skateboard.
    So much for wisdom from the mouths of babes. I decide to follow another track. “What did you do all week?” I’m afraid she’ll say she’s forgotten this, too, but suddenly she’s full of animation.
    “We drove up to Uncle Paul’s, then we went boating on the ocean, then we ate pizza, then we slept in the cabin in our sleeping bags, then we saw whales with their babies, then the whales went away and we went hiking in the forest, then we cooked hot dogs on a fire, then we slept in two tents for two nights, then we didn’t see bears though we looked, then we came back to Uncle Paul’s cabin where the toilet wouldn’t flush, then we went to a music place where people played trumpets, then we ate more pizza—”
    It sounds pretty much like I’d expected. “Two tents?” I ask as we pull into the Mariposa’s parking lot, which is milling with harried parents as usual. “Did Paul go hiking with you?” In my mind I cast about for discreet ways to ask Jona if Paul and Sonny had been smoking marijuana. They’d better not have, if they value their lives.
    “Yup,” Jona says as she unbuckles herself and opens the back door of the car. “Uncle Paul came with us and told stories at night. I didn’t understand them, but Sonny and Eliana thought they were funny—”
    “Eliana?” Paul must have a new girlfriend.
    “She’s my friend, except she’s a grown-up lady. She’s very pretty, with long brown hair and blue eyes like the flowers on that plant you used to keep on the windowsill until it died. She stayed in the tent with us and sang songs for me to sleep—”
    I take a deep breath and try to keep my voice calm. “She stayed in the same tent as Sonny and you?”
    “Uh-huh. She wore a dress with flowers and sang in a different language. Oh, there’s Keysha waving at me. I gotta go. Bye, Mom!”
    “Wait! Did this Eliana drive up from the Bay Area with you?”
    But my daughter is gone in a flurry of pigtails and backpack, leaving me to realize that one can be shocked and seething at the same time.
    I drive around for an entire hour in an attempt to cool down before I call Sonny. But whatever control I’ve gained evaporates as soon as I hear him growling a sleepy hello in what certain people (Eliana, perhaps?) would describe as his sexy bedroom voice.
    “How could you?” I scream into the mouthpiece. “How could you be so crass and irresponsible as to expose my daughter to your perversions?”
    There’s a moment’s silence, then a deep-throated laugh. At one time (I’m ashamed to remember) that laugh used to make me go weak at the knees. Now it only infuriates me. I take a lungful of air and hold it in, hoping to calm myself. Sonny likes nothing better than making me lose my temper.
    “I should have known it was you, Riks!” he says. “You missed me, didn’t you? No one to call up and yell at for a whole week, no one to blame for all your—”
    “Yelling at you is not my activity of choice—”
    “Could have fooled me—”
    “—but in this case, even you have to admit, I have good cause.”
    “Because we didn’t call you from Mendocino?