Days Three Ways

1.

On Sunday late morning we discovered someone had gone through both our cars while we slept in the night. Noah's car was under the carport, inches away from the main door to our house. There was nothing valuable in the cars and nothing seemed to be missing. Everything had been pulled out of the glove boxes and was scattered across the floors. One of the doors to Noah's car was still cracked open, his backpack removed from the car and sitting on the cement, unzipped and rifled through. We called the police and Indy put on a pink hat with piggy ears. "This is my scared hat", she said. I wasn't scared, I was confused and a little offended. I had left a bottle of gin in its paper bag lying between the seats overnight. The prowler had removed the gin from the bag, presumably examined it, and then left it there. He didn't steal our gin.

Even our gin isn't good enough to steal.

2.

I feel pretty claustrophobic in this small town and Noah keeps teasing me about Dunkin Donuts, which doesn't help. He says I'm obsessed with Dunkin Donuts but that's not the truth. The truth is that, will all the change going on in our lives, we've both been craving donuts. But the only place to get donuts here (I'm reading a memoir where the author calls a city of 76,500 a SMALL TOWN. The population here in Brevard is 7,553, which is less than a third of the population of the college I went to) is stupid Ingles, the grocery store I despise, and their donuts are crap. There's a drive-thru Dunkin Donuts in Asheville, 40 minutes away. Stay with me. So the night before last, while Noah put the girls to bed, I caved and drove to mother-effing Ingles for donuts. When I got home we sat down on the couch to eat them and regretted everything within three bites. Disgusting. We threw them away. Cut to the next day. Noah and I have to drive to Asheville because we need the Best Buy and the Sprint store. We stop to get lunch. On the way home from lunch what should we pass but the Drive Thru Dunkin Donuts. "Do you want to stop for a donut?" I say. But no. Neither one of us wants a donut now that we could actually have one. We are both too full on Mexican food.

3.

Ayla is 9 years old and she has a boyfriend. His name will be withheld to protect his privacy. She never really talks about him except once at the end of last school year when he gave her a ladybug necklace and I said, oh why did he give you that, and she got a little flustered and said, "well because he is my boyfriend." Last year she was invited to his birthday party at the rec center and his mom said they hear about Ayla all the time. I couldn't say likewise. She didn't mention him at all over the summer, but when school started up again, he gave her a paperclip bent into a heart shape. I suppose hearts have been won on smaller gestures. I asked her why he is her boyfriend and she said it's because he's funny and nice. I kinda wish she didn't have a boyfriend but I'm not losing my shirt over all this. It's a turnaround from Kindergarten, when Ayla spoke all the time about Jack, a boy who looked like his very pretty mother, brown curls, raspy voice. Ayla wrote Jack a note. It said, "Dear Jack, you are in love with me."

Meanwhile Indy has made up some story about the discerning gin snob who rifled through our car. She says she heard a noise and then she saw him, and then his friends came, and they walked away. Or something. None of this is true. What I can't work out is whether or not Indy believes it. Indy lives in some in-between place where anything might be true. When I tell her that gypsies are real, she needs all kinds of clarification. Are mole-people real? What about vampires? And zombies, they are real but not the part about the brains? Out of the blue yesterday Indy stood on a chair and did stand up. Her inflections were like Seinfeld's. "When I was born I thought Ayla was a MAN," she said. "She had super short hair like daddy and I am like, is she a man?" I had her do it again for the camera, but then she tried too hard and lost her flow.