“No, Sadie has to. You go to work and I stay out of your way, right?” she said, challenging a little.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I won’t interfere with your plans with Sadie. I do want her to have a great summer, and she has fun with you. I appreciate your attitude with her, encouraging her to help, guiding her. That’s important to me, and you did well with her.”
“I knew this was an audition,” she grinned, “and except for the whipped cream thing—”
“Which we will never mention again,” I said.
“Right. Except for that, I think I did well.”
“You did. So let me give you an idea of how the routine goes with Sadie. She gets up around seven. You have to remind her to go to the bathroom or she’ll wait too long. Then she has breakfast, gets dressed, and you can play or read or go outside, cook something, whatever. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she’ll have swim at ten in town. I have a booster seat you can put in your car. She gave up napping about a year ago, but sometimes if she’s overtired and cranky you can sneak one in on her if you let her watch part of Beauty and the Beast.”
“Okay. What about eating between meals? Do you have preferred foods or scheduled mealtimes?”
“Three meals a day, snacks if she’s hungry, but limit her to one pouch of fruit snacks a day. She’d eat a ton of those if you let her. I try to get her to drink milk once a day, that kind of thing. She only eats cereal dry. She’ll eat chicken and some fish. She’ll pick at meatloaf unless the onion is invisible.” I shook my head. “I’m raising a picky eater.”
“Sounds like an average kid to me. I would’ve starved without jarred spaghetti sauce. I used to eat it on bread with butter.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Of course it is. Now spill. What was your gross kid food?”
“I didn’t eat kid food. I got in trouble once for picking the egg off a Cobb Salad though. Does that count?”
“No. That’s weird. Did you wear a bow tie all the time or something?”
“Not literally, but pretty much.”
“That doesn’t sound like any fun. Sadie has a much better childhood than that.”
“Thank you, it’s my main goal, for her to have the kind of fun, free childhood I didn’t.”
“I think you’re winning at life. She’s a terrific kid, and she isn’t afraid to speak her mind around you, which says a lot. She trusts you and feels comfortable being herself because she knows you love and accept her. That’s a great thing. I love my parents. They’re good people who did their best, but I would’ve been smacked in the mouth growing up if I’d questioned my parents. Don’t get me wrong, Sadie isn’t disrespectful at all. She’s very natural and sweet and precocious. I’m just saying, I’m glad you’re raising her the way you are. She deserves to get to be herself.”
“You got smacked in the mouth?”
“It’s shocking I still have lips, yeah. And it didn’t even stop me from having a smart mouth. So they went to all that trouble for nothing.”
“I don’t mean to criticize your parents, it’s not my place. But they shouldn’t have smacked you for asking questions.”
“I’m sure they meant well. What did they do to you? Take away your calculator and make you wear itchy knee socks?”
“I had to double my practice time if I was uncooperative.”
“Basketball?”
“Piano.”
“Oh,” she said, “did you like playing piano?”
“No, I hated it. But my mother had a relative who was a famous composer and thought I might show promise at music. I didn’t. I just spent seven years taking lessons and practicing for hours.”
“Just to be told you weren’t any good? That’s harsh.”
“It was—a massive waste of time. I didn’t enjoy it, and I only had the skill that comes from rote memorization.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said sarcastically. “I think I’d rather be smacked in the mouth than spend years on a piano stool.”
“Sadie won’t experience either. Unless she shows an interest in music.”
“Is your family involved in her life at all? I’m not trying to overstep.”
“They’re not. Neither is her birth mother. We don’t speak of it, but the woman who gave birth to my daughter was—not someone I was in a serious relationship with. She found the demands of parenting to be too much and left her with me. She has not been a presence in Sadie’s life, and her parental rights were signed over long ago.”
“That puts a lot of pressure on you. Doing it all alone. Most people have grandparents or aunts and uncles to fall back on in a pinch. It must be—nerve-wracking and lonely.”
“Not at all,” I said too quickly. “I like the way things are. If you’d told me ten years ago I could have this kind of life, I’d never have believed it. But having Sadie gave me the motivation I needed to make a major change and choose some things for myself.”