Chapter 4

Somehow I manage to get Leah home. It involves Mila coming over to have a brief but stern word with her. At which point she instantly puts on her hated pink coat, and promises to never wear her Frozen nightgown ever again. I have never felt like such an incompetent parent.

When I get Leah into the house, I find Ben sitting on his recliner in the living room, his laptop planted on his legs, looking cute in his boxers and an undershirt. To make up for the fact that I forgot to kiss him this morning, I lean in to give him a peck on the cheek, but he turns his head to catch me on the lips with a peanut buttery kiss.

Ben has a big jar of chunky peanut butter tucked into the crook of his arm. Leah has Frozen and my husband has peanut butter. I’ve never seen a grown man who could just eat peanut butter straight out of the jar the way he does. I’ve seen him polish off an entire jar of Skippy in an hour .

Of course, he doesn’t just eat plain peanut butter. Our cabinets are stacked with an assortment of gourmet peanut butters: chai spice peanut butter, maple bacon peanut butter, blueberry vanilla peanut butter… you get the idea. Whenever he finds an interesting new peanut butter online, he’s got to have it. On his last birthday, he went totally crazy over this toffee crunch peanut butter I bought for him. Right now, I can make out the label on the jar of peanut butter he’s holding: coconut lime peanut butter.

Coconut lime peanut butter? That can’t possibly taste good.

“Ew,” I say as I drop my purse on the floor of the living room, which is its official place in the house. “Coconut lime peanut butter? You’ve lost your mind.”

“It’s good ,” Ben insists. He scoops out a hefty spoonful and holds it up. “Try some.”

“No way.”

He raises his eyebrows at me. “Don’t make me chase you around the house to make you try this. Because you know I’ll do it.”

I clamp both hands over my mouth. “Do your worst.”

He gets off his chair and makes an attempt to get the spoonful of peanut butter past my lips, but just succeeds in smearing it on my fingers. After that, he gives up, which makes me feel a twinge of sadness. Back in the old days, before Leah, Ben really would have chased me all over the house to get me to eat that spoonful of peanut butter. He would have tackled me on the sofa and tickled me till I opened my mouth. He gave up far too easily. It makes me feel like he doesn’t even care that I’ll never experience coconut lime peanut butter.

“Were you home all day?” I ask Ben.

“Oh.” He smiles sheepishly. “It was cold out and I didn’t feel like going in.”

Well, great. If he knew he was going to do that, he could have helped me out by bringing Leah to preschool. But I don’t feel like starting that argument right now.

“I got yelled at by Mila,” I tell him.

Ben settles back down into his chair. “For what?”

“The nightgown. I told you she’d go crazy over that.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? She yelled at you because Leah was wearing a nightgown?”

“I told you she’d freak out.”

“Mila is completely nuts,” he mutters. “Why do we send Leah there? We should have sent her to that other place. The one with the gourmet lunches. Where they teach kids Japanese.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

I notice that Ben is doing a crossword puzzle on his computer. He’s a crossword puzzle addict. Back before we had Leah, we used to spend our Sunday afternoons at Starbucks, drinking coffee and doing crossword puzzles from the New York Times on his laptop. For those of you who don’t know about New York Times crossword puzzles, they get harder as the week goes on. So the Monday puzzle is fairly easy, whereas the Sunday puzzle is damn near impossible.

Ben can do the Sunday puzzles. He’s the Crossword Puzzle Master. But he used to save the earlier week puzzles for the two of us to do together at Starbucks. I remember shoving him out of the way to take over the computer because he would fill in the blanks too quickly—he would tease me for being too slow.

After months of doing crosswords, one Sunday we decided to write our own. We learned something that day. As Ben said, “Writing a crossword puzzle is freaking hard !” It really is.

Even though crossword puzzles are something that Ben has always done and will likely always do, it irritates me to see him doing it now. I mean, I’ve been working all day and then I picked up Leah (and got yelled at because of him). And what has he been doing? Sitting here in his underwear, eating peanut butter, and doing crossword puzzles.

“Did you put away the dishes in the dishwasher?” I ask him.

He lifts his brown eyes from the crossword puzzle. “No. I’ve been working all day.”

“You’re not working now . ”

“I’m taking a break.”

I stare at him.

“I am .” He frowns at me. “You know, just because I’m home all day, that doesn’t mean I’m not working hard. You can’t expect me to do chores around the house just because I’m here. Do you do dishes while you’re working?”

No. But I did clean about three examining rooms.

“I’m just saying,” I mutter, “it would be nice if when I get home after a long day of work, the dishes would be put away. I’m the one who cooks, so you should handle the dishes.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’ll do it later, okay?”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Later .”

“But I need the dishes now .”

“So take out the dishes you need and I’ll put away the rest.”

“Never mind,” I say. “I’ll just do it myself.”

I stomp over to the kitchen, where I fling open the dishwasher. Ben and I never seemed to fight over things like the dishwasher when we first got married. I’m not sure why because we obviously used dishes back then. But somehow, in the early days of our marriage, we were like a well-oiled dishwashing unit, in which I would load up the dishwasher and he’d empty it without coaxing. Somehow during Leah’s first year of life, our dishwashing unit disintegrated.

I remember when Leah was about ten months old, I exploded at Ben because I could not find one even one of those plastic multicolored baby spoons that was actually clean. And that was no small feat, considering we owned no less than two million of those spoons. (I was constantly finding them in the crevices of the couch, caked with dried mashed peach cobbler.) Ben’s excuse was always something along the lines of, “I was about to do it.”

That’s his excuse for everything. He’s constantly on the precipice of doing every single chore in the house. Meanwhile, how am I supposed to feed my family with zero clean dishes?

After a few minutes of putting dishes away, making as much noise as I can possibly manage, Leah comes into the kitchen to watch.

“Why are you being so noisy, Mommy?” she wants to know.

I feel a twinge of guilt. I’m too old to be throwing a temper tantrum.

“I’m putting away the dishes,” I explain.

“You’re hurting my ears.”

I take a cleansing breath, preparing to do a more zen-like putting away of the dishes, but then Ben ambles into the kitchen with his peanut butter .

“Come on, Leah,” he says to her as he shoves his peanut butter in the cupboard. “You and I are going to put the dishes away together.”

I nod at him. “Thanks.”

“By the way,” he says to me. “Because I stayed home today, I’m going in tomorrow.”

I frown. “What about the Winter Concert?”

He looks at me blankly. Ben, I swear to God…

“The concert at Leah’s preschool,” I remind him.

“Oh right.” He scratches his head. “When is that again?”

For the tenth time: “Tomorrow at three.”

“Yeah, I could probably leave early,” he says.

“Don’t come exactly at three,” I warn him. “The parking is going to be difficult, so give yourself enough time.”

“I know,” he says irritably. “What is this thing anyway? Is it like a play or something?”

“Daddy, it’s the Winter Concert!” Leah pipes up. She tugs on his boxers. “We’re gonna sing songs about snow!”

“Songs about snow?” he asks.

She nods emphatically. “Like Frosty.” To demonstrate, she sings, “Frosty the Mommy was a very happy Mommy, with a corncob Mommy and a button Mommy and two eyes made out of Mommy!”

Ben grins at me. “I’ve got to see this snowman. ”

I roll my eyes. I’m sure she’ll sing the right words at the actual concert. After all, she’d never dare disobey Mila.