Free Amanda Bright @ Home by Danielle Crittenden Page A

obvious?”
    “You look as if the Republicans have started drilling for oil in Rock Creek Park.”
    He sat down in his usual place on the floor, shifting to give her room beside him.
    “I’ve just come from speaking to Ben’s teacher.”
    “Oh. That’s always fun.”
    “Yeah, like dental surgery, right? Especially with Burley. Wait till
you
get her. She thinks Ben is too—” Amanda couldn’t bear to use the word
violent
so instead she said, “robust.”
    “Huh.” The father’s
huh
was not uttered with the astonishment Amanda expected; Ben’s reputation had apparently extended into the lower reaches of the nursery school as well.
    “I just don’t understand it,” Amanda went on. “At home Ben is so sweet. He plays for hours with his sister. They barely ever fight.”
    The father stretched out his legs and idly rocked the stroller with one foot. “That’s one of the problems with this school,” he said slowly. “They’re always trying to put your kid into some sort of box. But I tell myself, that’s the world, right? The world is always trying to put you into some sort of box, and you may as well learn early on how to fight your way out of it.”
    His burst of bitter profundity surprised Amanda, and she glanced at him sideways, uncertain how seriously he meant to be taken. He was still staring straight ahead, but his expression was not angry; it was bemused—as if life were always dealing him predictable blows. Her eyes lingered on him for a moment more—she hadn’t ever really taken him in like this; they had always conversed hurriedly, among the other waiting mothers, their attention half focused on the stairwell—
    “I suppose you must encounter that mentality all the time—being an ‘at-home dad,’” Amanda suggested.
    “Yeah. Actually, I’m a playwright, not that anyone ever bothers to find out. I work at home because it’s more convenient and economical, and sure, I can watch Dylan while Lisa’s at the office. But it’s difficult—Nabokov warned of the perils of the pram in the hallway …”
    “Are you able to get much writing done?”
    “I work during Dylan’s nap and again late at night. Right now I have a play being workshopped in Maryland. Fortunately they rehearse on weekends.”
    “That’s great.” It didn’t sound promising, but still, it was something creative, something Amanda couldn’t even imagine accomplishing herself. Guiltily, she recognized that she, too, had succumbed to boxlike thinking in regard to Alan. No matter how much she endorsed the idea of a father at home, when confronted with a fortyish unshaven man in tennis shoes and jeans pushing a stroller, Amanda could not help but think:
Loser.
She corrected her opinion now. Alan’s scruffiness was his defiance of convention, his way of expressing his artistic integrity. For the first time she appreciated, in the sinews of his arms, in the sweat faintly spotting his T-shirt, that as well as being an attentive father, he was also very much a man.
    “What’s your play about?”
    “You know, you’re the first person here to ever ask me that?” Alan said, impressed. “I’ve sat here and chatted with dozens of mothers and we’ve never gotten beyond school stuff.” He lowered his voice, for the mothers he referred to were beginning to arrive and collect around them.
    “My play,” he went on, almost whispering and causing Amanda to lean closer, “challenges exactly these kinds of stereotypes. My protagonist is a homeless man who is not really homeless. He’s a young man who comes from inherited wealth and contracts AIDS. His family rejects him. He rejects them in return and everything they represent. He spends the last months of his life on a journey through the streets, defying the preconceived ideas we have about the homeless and people with AIDS.”
    “That sounds—really good.”
    “It’s coming together okay,” Alan replied modestly. “My last play was put on by the downtown Y. It was