Left Neglected Read Free Page B

bring Bunny wherever Linus goes. And she already loves them. How much is too much to pay for knowing without any doubt that your kids are well loved when you can’t be there?
    Charlie gallops into the kitchen, out of breath.
    “Where are my Pokémon cards?”
    “Charlie, you’re still in your pajamas. Forget about Pokémon. Go get dressed,” I say.
    “But I need my Pokémon cards.”
    “Pants, shirt, shoes, and shut off your light,” I say.
    Charlie throws his head back in frustration but surrenders and barrels back upstairs to his room.
    “Any house stuff?” Bob asks.
    “Will you call the garage door guy this time?”
    “Yup, he’s on my list.”
    Our automatic door opener is one of the newer models, and it has a seeing-eye sensor that prevents it from closing if it observes something under the door, like a small child. It’s a great safety feature in theory, but it only seems to drive us crazy. One of the kids, and we suspect Charlie, keeps knocking into the eye on the right side so it’s not level with and can’t see the left side. And when it gets cross-eyed, it won’t work at all.
    When we were kids, my brother Nate and I used to play Indiana Jones with our automatic garage door. One of us would hit the button on the remote, and then we would see who had the guts to wait the longest before running and rolling under the closing door. No safety features in those days. That garage door opener operated completely blind. It would’ve taken all the fun out of the game if the risk of getting crushed to death, or at least painfully squished, had been removed. Nate was great at it, diving and rolling at the last possible second. God, I still miss him.
    Charlie tears into the kitchen wearing a tee-shirt, shorts, and no shoes.
    “Mom, what if the earth runs out of gravity?”
    “What did I tell you to put on?”
    No answer.
    “It’s November, you need pants and a long-sleeve shirt and shoes,” I say.
    I check my watch. 7:15. He’s still standing there, I think waiting for an answer about gravity.
    “Go!”
    “Come on, kiddo, let’s find something better,” says Bob, and they walk off together.
    I wrangle the other two kids into hats and coats, send out a few more emails, buckle Linus into his bucket car seat, listen to my work voicemail, pack my own bag, leave a note for Abby about the soccer game, down the rest of the cold coffee, and finally meet Bob and a suitably dressed Charlie at the front door.
    “Ready?” asks Bob, facing me.
    We both cock our fists back into position.
    “Ready.”
    Today is Friday. Bob drops the kids at school and day care on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I take them on Mondays and Wednesdays. Fridays are up for grabs. Unless one of us makes an indisputable case for needing to get to work before school starts, we shoot for it. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. Rock smashes scissors. We both take the shoot very seriously. Winning is huge. Driving straight to work with no kids in the car is heaven.
    “One, two, threeeee, shoot!”
    Bob hammers his closed fist on top of my peace sign and grins, victorious. He wins significantly more times than he loses.
    “Lucky bastard.”
    “It’s all skill, babe. Have a great day,” he says.
    “You, too.”
    We kiss good-bye. It’s our typical morning good-bye kiss. A quick peck. A well-intentioned habit. I look down and notice Lucy’s round, blue eyes paying close attention. I flash to studying my own parents kissing when I was little. They kissed each other hello and good-bye and good night like I would have kissed one of my aunts, and it terribly disappointed me. There was no drama to it at all. I promised myself that when I got married someday, I would have kisses that meant something. Kisses that would make me weak in the knees. Kisses that would embarrass the kids. Kisses like Han Solo kissing Princess Leia. I never saw my father kiss my mother like that. What was the point of it? I never got it.
    Now I get it. We aren’t