pretends to call Emma. “Were the kids good today in school?”
“There was one little boy who was bad. He pulled a girl’s hair.”
“What did you do?” Olivia asks.
“Gave him a timeout.”
“Want to come over for dinner?” Olivia asks.
“What are you having?”
“Macaroni and cheese.”
“The SpongeBob-shaped ones?” Emma asks.
“Yes,” Olivia says.
“Be right over.”
Elizabeth stands outside the room and smiles. I think she loves listening to the girls play. I know these moments are some of my favorite to record. Olivia and Emma act out what they see in real life.
One night, I was playing with my Barbie dolls in my bedroom. I was around five. I didn’t know that Grandma could hear me.
“What are you doing here?” Barbie asked. “You can barely stand.”
I made Ken wobble. “Come to get me some money.”
“But I gave you money yesterday,” Barbie said.
“And I need more today, woman.”
“You know better than to come here like this,” Barbie said.
“Are you going to give me the money or am I going to take it?”
Grandma walked in. Her hands shook. “No, no, no. That’s not how we play.”
She sat on the floor and picked up the Ken doll.
“Would you like to go out for dinner?” Grandma said in her best male voice.
“Ken doesn’t like to go out to dinner. He likes to drink,” I said. “He likes that bar around the corner.”
Grandma shook her head. “He stopped drinking.” Again, Grandma pretended to be Ken. “Would you like to go out to dinner?”
“That’s too expensive. Why don’t you pick up a roasted chicken at the grocery store and we can pretend that it came from a fancy restaurant?”
Grandma put the Ken doll down. “I can’t play anymore,” she said, and went to her room. I heard her crying.
Olivia bites into an apple and her eyebrows jump to the top of her forehead. She pulls the apple away to look at it.
“Mom,” she yells. “My tooth’s in the apple.”
Elizabeth sets down the basket of laundry. “So it’s finally come out. That tooth has been dangling for days.”
Olivia grabs some tissue and dabs the blood. She hands her mom the apple.
“Emma got a dollar for her tooth last week,” Olivia says. “Wonder what the tooth fairy will bring me.”
Elizabeth pulls the tiny tooth out of the apple. “Guess you’ll have to put your tooth under your pillow tonight and see.”
Olivia jumps up and down. “I have that special pillow Daddy bought me. It has a pocket for the tooth.”
Elizabeth smiles. “I forgot about that. You’ll have to show Daddy when he gets home.”
By the time I lost my first tooth, Matt wasn’t living with us anymore. Despite Grandma’s efforts to get him help, he sank deeper and deeper into a drunken abyss.
Sometimes, I’d catch Grandma looking through old photos of Matt when he was a baby. She even showed me a lock of hair from his first haircut and a baby-food jar filled with his baby teeth. Grandma did the same for me. She kept a curl from my first haircut in a plastic baggie and she covered a baby-food jar with pink construction paper and wrote “Sarah’s teeth” with a black marker on the side. I lost my first tooth at school.
“Look, Rachel,” I said, pinching one of my bottom teeth with my thumb and index finger and wiggling it. “Grandma said it will come out soon.”
“Want me to pull it?” Rachel asked. “My dad pulled mine and got it out.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t brave enough.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Rachel said. “I’ll do it quick. Promise.”
For a second or two, I considered Rachel’s offer but the bell rang and we had to go back to our classroom. Recess was over.
I kind of forgot about my loose tooth until I took a bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch and something crunched in my mouth. I spit out the chewed blob of sandwich and found my tooth inside it.
“You did it.” Rachel clapped.
Rachel was always my biggest cheerleader. No matter how bad something was, she’d always find something good in it.
Tom opens the car door for Olivia and bows as she slips into the back seat. It’s daddy-daughter date night and they’re headed to dinner and the ballet.
“When I grow up I want to be a ballerina,” Olivia says.
“You’d make a beautiful ballerina. It takes a lot of practice, though.”
“Miss Dawn says that we should practice every day, and I do.”
Tom nods.
“Emma does karate. Why does she do that and not ballet?”
Tom smiles. “Because it’s what she likes. Just like you like chocolate cake and Mommy likes vanilla. It’s good when people like different things. If everyone liked the same thing, the world wouldn’t be as interesting.”
“But what if someone likes chocolate and vanilla?”
“That’s OK, too. But sometimes you can only have one and you need to decide which one it will be.”
“Why can’t I have both?”
“We don’t always get what we want, Libby. You’re little and most of the things you have to decide are little like you. But when you get to be a big girl, the decisions will be harder to make. Sometimes you can have chocolate, sometimes you can have vanilla and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can have both.”
I can see the wheels turning inside Olivia’s head. She doesn’t entirely understand, but I know that with age comes wisdom. I pray that the little girl I am keeping moments for will always get whatever flavor cake she wants.
I looked at the pink sign with green lettering on the school door. “Daddy-Daughter Dance.”
“Are
