Free Hush Little Baby by Suzanne Redfearn

they chant in unison.
    “Addie.” I step closer but still out of the water’s reach.
    She glances at me, and her lapse in concentration disrupts the rhythm, and the water sprays against her shins.
    “You lose,” a heavy girl standing beside the hose yells.
    Addie, still standing in the spray, glares at me.
    I glare back.
    “Addie, come say hello,” I say.
    “Go away,” she answers, the spray still whipping around her.
    “Come here now.”
    Her nose wrinkles.
    She only wants to have fun with her friends.
    See how Addie doesn’t listen to her?
    She has no control over her daughter.
    It’s no wonder; she never spends any time with her.
    I walk through the fracas, no longer concerned about the damage the water will do to my Joan & David pumps or my Anne Klein blouse or my Tahari skirt, and my irritation rises with the destruction and the wetness.
    I take Addie by the arm to pull her from the whirling stream, and she pulls back.
    “Leave me alone,” she yelps.
    She’s slippery and impossible to hold, so I change tactics and wrap my arms around her in a bear hug, half dragging, half carrying her from the sprinkler.
    “Let me go,” she screams, her legs and arms flailing.
    I slip and fall to my butt in the mud as I continue to hold my tantruming daughter.
    “Addie, stop it. Say hello and say you’re sorry for not saying hello, and I’ll let you go.” I’m painfully aware of our audience and the humiliation this is causing both of us, but I refuse to let go. She just needs to say hello.
    Two hands, large and strong, reach in and divide us, then lift the despairing four-year-old from my grip. Addie grabs on to Gordon’s neck and cries into his shoulder. He pats her back and carries her back to her friends.
    I push my wrecked self from the ground and stumble past the mothers, who no longer look at me as I pretend not to be humiliated, returning to the shelter of my house and away from my display of maternal failing, completely wrecked, wishing I could undo the last ten minutes, wanting to apologize to Addie, knowing I can’t.
    A moment later, the phone rings. Drew’s after-school club ended an hour ago. He’s been waiting outside the school with the director for me to come and get him.
    I forgot about my son.

18
    I curl on the couch staring at the silent, blinking television as it shows four amateur cooks trying to create an appetizer from a basket of random ingredients—marshmallow spread, cinnamon candy, and artichoke hearts.
    I turn at the sound of Gordon’s feet descending the steps. He raises his clasped hands over his head in triumph—both kids are asleep—a miraculous feat of parenting worthy of celebration. I smile, both understanding his sense of accomplishment and in gratitude that he took on the colossal task tonight.
    He sits beside me, lifts my feet onto his lap, then begins to rub them the way I like them to be rubbed. If I were a cat, I would begin to purr.
    “Artichoke cinnamon s’mores, yum-yum, what a delectable combination,” Gordon jokes, and I laugh. “The one on the left’s going home; never trust a skinny chef.”
    I look with him at the pencil-thin man who at the moment is freaking out because his spatula is glued to the skillet by his melted cinnamon candy caramel. The spatula breaks away, and the pan goes flying, nearly taking out the chef beside him.
    “That’s one way to eliminate the competition,” I say.
    “Speaking of which, how’s the Compton project?”
    “Still struggling. We might lose it. They really want us to build it without windows.” I tell him about the meeting and Kelly’s melodramatic exit.
    “You won’t lose it,” he says. “You’re the best architect in the state.”
    “Yeah, right. More like the finest bullshitter. I haven’t picked up a pencil in years.”
    “I still tell everyone you’re the best.”
    The thin man sobs on the screen; he’s been chopped.
    Gordon continues my foot massage. He loves that I’m an architect, and I love