Daddy Love Read Free Page A

Home Depot as possible. She’d gripped Robbie’s hand to allow the van to pass before they stepped out from between two parked vehicles and in that instant her awareness of the van was no more distinct than her awareness of any other vehicle, stationary or moving, within her range of vision. She did not see who was driving the van, or whether there was someone sitting in the passenger’s seat. She might have been aware that the van wasn’t a new shiny model but a not-new slightly battered model of the indefinable hue of last fall’s leaves trapped in gutters and ravines. She was certainly not aware of the van’s license plates either front or rear.
    “Watch out, sweetie
Do not ever
step out from between parked cars without looking
left and right
.”
    In the mall she’d allowed her little boy to become over-stimulated. It was the indulgence of a young mother intoxicated with motherhood as with an exotic drug.
    She’d shared in his excitement. It was a giddy experience to see the world through a child’s eyes. For she could not remember ever having been
so young.
    Before bringing Robbie to the mall, initially in his stroller, she’d never quite realized how fascinating the displays were inmany of the store windows and in the mall’s three-storey atrium, beside the escalators. (And the escalators were like amusement park rides, thrilling to the very young, and seemingly very safe.) So much in this consumer paradise was gaily colored and in motion to catch the eye’s attention and to hold it.
    She understood: the mall was designed to draw in shoppers, consumers. The children’s displays were designed to draw in children whose parents might be prevailed upon to buy them what they begged for. She and Whit did not “believe” in impulsive buying, certainly not at the whim of a five-year-old. Nor could they afford to spend money on perishable toys or things that Robbie would quickly outgrow.
    Yet there was an undeniable romance to the mall. Ridiculous, the glamour of new-model auto vehicles positioned on revolving platforms, that quite dazzled the eye. The very names were seductive—
Forester, Wrangler, Optima, Cavalier, Echo, Lancer, Sunfire.
Whit complained of the Nissan he’d had for years. It was time to buy a new car, maybe a SUV. They might look ahead to driving their kid with other kids to—soccer games? Little League softball? (Whit was one who’d long scorned suburban life yet each year was sinking a little more into it as if into, as he liked to say, a spongy AstroTurf.) They’d need a vehicle larger than a sedan. But not probably new: “pre-owned.”
    Yes. There was something undeniably thrilling in children’s faces at the mall as they tugged at their mother’s restraining hands.
    Mom-my! Mom-my! MOM-MY!
    Robbie could be headstrong and even defiant, in an environment that was both disorienting and enchanting. The glittery Libertyville Mall was an environment distinctly
other
, set beside which the household in which he lived with Mommy and Daddy was altogether ordinary.
    Whit had read to Dinah a passage from one of his psych texts: at age two the average
Homo sapiens
is as “wantonly destructive” as he/she will ever be.
    They’d laughed together. Grateful that their son was a special child who hadn’t been “wantonly destructive” or even, in fact, unusually difficult, as a toddler; and, by age three, had already begun to show signs of child-maturity—allowing other children to go first in line, curbing his instinct to interrupt, expressing embarrassment for his mistakes. Especially, Robbie was inclined to be deeply embarrassed if he spilled or fumbled something. But when he was tired, or in an edgy mood, Robbie reverted to his younger toddler-self, a tight-wired little creature on the verge of a tantrum.
    The Libertyville Mall was just too large. It must have been miles they’d walked—drawn irresistibly forward by something glittery and promising in the near distance. Dinah had known