“Why are your socks so dirty?” I ask him.
“I was playing in the backyard, Mom.”
“In your socks?”
Nico shrugs.
He ends up peeling off his socks, and underneath the socks, his feet are also dirty, but I guess less dirty than the shoes or the socks. I need to dip this kid in bleach tonight.
Spencer and Nico seem overjoyed to see each other, like long-lost friends, even though they were in school together literally two days ago. They race off to the backyard, as Janice shouts after Spencer, “Be careful!”
Janice is wringing her hands together, looking in the direction of the backyard. I don’t know if I should offer to stay or if she even wants me here. What she really looks like she needs is a stiff drink. She finally turns to me, and I’m certain she’s going to offer me some lemonade or cheese and crackers, but instead she says, “How often do you check Nico for lice?”
My mouth drops open. I want to be offended, but Nico has actually had lice three times. So has Ada, and that was much harder to deal with, because you can’t exactly shave the head of an eight-year-old girl. That’s the sort of thing she would have been describing in therapy years later.
But I definitely took a razor to my son’s head. He wasn’t thrilled about it at first, but when Enzo offered to shave his own head too, then it became fun.
“He doesn’t have lice,” I say.
She narrows her eyes at me. “But how do you know?”
I don’t know what to say to that. “He’s not scratching so…”
“Do you have a good lice comb?”
“Um, yes…”
“What brand?”
I don’t know if I can take much more of this. I mean, I dislike lice as much as the next person, which is a lot. But it’s not a favorite topic of conversation.
“Listen,” I say, “I should get going…”
“Oh.” Janice’s face falls. “I thought maybe you could stay for a bit. I squeezed some fresh juice.”
Her face fills with genuine disappointment. Even though she was so rude about my choice to be a working mother, if she does stay home all day, she might be very lonely. And I’ve never been great at making friends either. Maybe Janice and I got off on the wrong foot, and she’ll be my first friend in Long Island. I mean, on Long Island.
“I’d love to try your juice,” I say.
Janice perks up a little, and I follow her to the kitchen. Not surprisingly, her kitchen is immaculate. The floor looks cleaner than my countertops. She has a kitchen table like I do, and it has place settings and coasters on it. Janice reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out a giant pitcher of something thick and grainy and green. She pours two brimming glasses of it and slides one across the table to me.
“Don’t forget to use a coaster,” she tells me as I bring my glass to the kitchen table.
As Janice settles down at the table across from me, I examine the liquid in my glass. Well, it’s almost a liquid. It has some properties of liquids. “What is it, exactly?”
“It’s juice,” she says, like I have asked a very stupid question.
I want to ask what she put in it that made it this vivid shade of green. I can’t think of any green fruits that I enjoy eating. Well, there’s honeydew, but I don’t know if I would want to have honeydew in drink form.
But she’s watching me, and I realize that I have got to take a sip of this alleged juice. Well, maybe it’s better than it looks—it almost has to be. I wrap my fingers around the glass, lift it to my mouth, and then bottoms up. I take a mouthful of it and…
Oh my God.
This is not better than it looks. Somehow it’s worse. This might be the grossest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth. It is taking all my self-restraint not to spit it right back into the glass. It tastes like she took the grass outside in the backyard, dirt and all, and then turned it into a drink.
“Delicious, right?” Janice takes a healthy swig. “And believe it or not, it’s very nutritious too.”
I just nod because I’m still working on trying to swallow the current mouthful.
“So,” she says, “how are you liking your new house?”
“I love it,” I say honestly. “It needs a bit of work, but we’re very happy with it.”
“Most houses do when you buy them,” she says. “And I’m sure you got a very good price on it.”
I lick my lips and am immediately sorry because they taste like the green substance. “Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody else wanted it.”
Janice’s words make me forget all about the bitter taste of juice in my mouth. “What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “Only one other person put in a bid. And they withdrew it.”
That’s not what our real estate agent told us. She made it sound like there were other bids, but they were on the low side. Was she lying to us? Were we really the only ones interested in this cozy but gorgeous house in an excellent school district?
How could that be?
“Why wasn’t anyone bidding on it?” I ask Janice, trying not to let on how curious I am.
