Chapter 19

There’s nothing quite like taking a five-hour drive with a preschooler.

We’re on hour four en route to Ben’s mother’s house for a long weekend. I was driving for the first two hours and now it’s Ben’s turn. He let me listen to pop music for half an hour before making us switch to classical. Then half an hour ago, he killed the music entirely, saying it was giving him a headache. Now he’s just staring at the passing road with the knuckles of his right hand completely bloodless, his jaw twitching slightly every few minutes.

Leah hasn’t gotten the memo that all we’re supposed to be quiet. “The wheels on the Mommy go round and round, round and round…”

“Leah, Daddy’s head hurts,” Ben says.

“The Daddy on the Mommy says, ‘My head hurts, my head hurts, my head hurts…’” Leah sings. Despite everything, I have to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing .

Ben grits his teeth. “Can’t you keep her quiet back there, Jane?”

“Oh, sure,” I say. “Do you want me to put a gag on her?”

Leah pauses her song to ask, “What’s a gag, Mommy?”

He takes his eyes off the road to glare in my direction. “Just… I can’t deal with her complaining. Can’t you just…?”

I throw my hands up in the air. “Do what, exactly?”

“ Mommy , what’s a gag?”

“I’ve been driving for two hours with no break.” He tugs at his sweatshirt. “I’ve got a headache. Please .”

“So do you want to pull over at a rest stop?”

“No, I just want to get there already.”

“MOMMY, WHAT’S A GAG?”

Ben whips his head around to look at Leah, his eyes flashing. “Leah, will you be quiet for one goddamn minute ?”

Leah stares at him, astonished. Ben never yells at Leah. Ever. He’s usually happy to let me be the bad guy. There was a tiny chance that this might have actually shut Leah up for the duration of the drive, but I know my daughter, and I was pretty sure this wasn’t going to be the case. Instead, Leah’s face crumbles and she starts wailing hysterically .

“Maybe some music,” Ben mumbles as he turns Mozart back on.

Leah cries for the entire rest of the drive. By the end, I’m starting to get worried that Ben might crash the car on purpose and kill us all. But somehow we make it to his mother’s house in Reading, Massachusetts (pronounced “Redding”) with our lives intact. I’m not sure if I can say the same for Ben’s sanity.

Ben’s mother Nancy lives all alone in a four-bedroom house that’s so gigantic, it feels like a constant hint that we should visit more. He does have two brothers with kids who visit with some frequency, so that takes a little of the pressure off us. Nancy keeps her house spotless and the bedrooms look like they’re out of a hotel, always perfectly made up when we arrive. She even puts, I swear to God, a mint on our pillows. I sometimes call her house Chateau Ross.

“How are you both?” Nancy asks as we struggle with our bags in her foyer.

“Good,” I lie.

“Fine,” Ben mutters.

Nancy brushes us both away and grabs Ben’s luggage to haul it upstairs herself. She’s thin and small, but wiry. I’ve seen her carrying two huge sacks of laundry down to her basement without breaking a sweat .

“Mom, you don’t have to do that for us,” he protests, although to be honest, I think he likes being babied by his mother.

Leah tugs on my jacket. “Mommy, where’s my present?”

Oh yeah. At some point during the drive, I told Leah that her grandmother would have a present waiting for her, and if she kept crying and complaining, she wouldn’t get the present. It helped. For about five minutes.

“I got you something very special, Leah!” Nancy chirps. She takes Leah by the hand and leads her to her expansive living room, where she’s got three carefully wrapped presents on her coffee table.

Leah’s eyes light up like it’s Christmas all over again. “Presents!” she shrieks as she hurls herself at the packages.

“That was so nice of you, Nancy!” I exclaim.

A minute later, Leah has stripped the first package of its wrapping paper. She pulls out the contents and her little face falls when she holds up a sweater. “It’s clothes!” she cries, crestfallen.

“But it’s so pretty!” Nancy says.

Ben and I exchange looks. “Mom, why would you get a three-year-old girl clothing as a present?” he asks.

“I’m just trying to buy some beautiful clothing for my granddaughter!” Nancy says, looking just as crestfallen as Leah. I’m not sure which of them to comfort first .

You know what? I don’t even care. At this point, I’m just relieved we’re not in the car anymore.

_____

I’ve got definite misgivings as Ben, Leah, and I walk into the Museum of Science.

Boston also has a large Children’s Museum, where I suggested we take Leah today. That was an hour-long argument. Ben didn’t want to go to the Children’s Museum because it wouldn’t be interesting for us . I pointed out that if we go to a place that isn’t interesting to Leah, we’re definitely not going to have any fun. He shot back that the Museum of Science would have plenty of exhibits that would be interesting to Leah.

So anyway, you can guess who won that argument.

The entrance to the Museum of Science has two lifelike models of dinosaurs. Ben nudges me, “Isn’t that cool?”

I shrug. “Not that cool. The T. rex doesn’t even seem all that big.”

“What are you talking about?” He waves his hands expansively at the dinosaurs. “It’s really big!”

“It’s big,” I admit. “But it’s not so big that it could just step on you and kill you. I mean, it looks like you might be able to fight with it a little. In any case, it wouldn’t be a total blow out. ”

Ben looks skeptical. “ You would be able to fight with a T rex ? Jane, you can’t even open a jar of spaghetti sauce.”

That’s an exaggeration. Sometimes I can’t open spaghetti sauce. In my defense, sometimes when I hand the jar over to him, he can’t open it either. Why do they make it so hard to get at spaghetti sauce? “They’re entirely different skills.”

“Leah,” Ben says, “ you think it’s cool, right?”

Leah shrugs. “It’s not that big. I like the bones ones better.”

She’s talking about the skeletons in the Natural History Museum. At the time, she actually didn’t seem overly impressed with them, but right now, I’ll take it as a win.

We make our rounds through the museum. Ben tries to interest Leah in an exhibit called “Mathematica.” I’ll give you three guesses how that turns out. The optical illusions exhibit doesn’t seem to catch her fancy either. Then they have an exhibit involving live butterflies, which Leah usually loves, but suddenly she announces that she’s “’fraid of butterf’ies.”

“How can you be afraid of butterflies?” Ben demands to know. “They’re butterflies ! They’re the least scary animal in existence!”

Leah won’t budge .

Finally, after an exasperating forty minutes of dragging her around the museum, Leah discovers an exhibit called “Science in the Park.”

“See-saw!” she shrieks as she runs excitedly toward a see-saw that’s probably supposed to teach my four-year-old about levers or something else she doesn’t care about.

I feel some of the tension leave my shoulders now that Leah finally seems placated. Unfortunately, Ben is now unhappy.

“We’re not going to spend the whole time here, are we?” he says.

I shrug. “Why not? She’s happy.”

He looks around at the swings and see-saw. “Why did we spend a hundred bucks to take her to a museum then? We could have just taken her to the park by my mother’s house for free.”

“Well, she didn’t like anything else here,” I point out.

“We didn’t even try to show her everything.”

“Actually, we did try.”

“Barely.”

Ben and I glare at each other. Honestly, what’s the problem? Leah is finally happy. Why drag her away from the one thing in this stupid museum that she actually likes?

“Look,” he says, “I’m not spending the entire time I’m here in a playground exhibit. I want to see the rest of the museum. ”

“So fine,” I say. “Just… go.”

He folds his arms across his chest. “I’d rather you come with me.”

I gesture at Leah, who is playing happily. “I’m not dragging her away from here.”

“Okay…” He glances behind him. “I guess you can text me when you’re ready to leave then.”

“Okay.” I bite my lip, hoping maybe he’ll decide to stick around. Maybe he’ll decide spending the afternoon with his family is more important than a science museum. But he already left me at a party in Ronkonkoma. It apparently gets easier each time.