Tiger Babies Strike Back by Kim Wong Keltner

Author:Kim Wong Keltner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

21

The Mice Go On

Let’s just say I was in despair but didn’t know it. Maybe it was best not to admit it to myself, because I figured there was no point in complaining. No one wants to hear it when someone talks about her vague feelings of impending doom. If any person noticed me looking dejected and said, “What’s your problem?” the only answer I could muster was, “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

One weekend, we took a drive up to the Sierra foothills and visited the town of Nevada City. We’d been there several times a few years earlier, before we’d had Lucy, to have lunch and sightsee. This time, while I was browsing in a shop, Rolf waited on the corner in front of a real estate office and absentmindedly scanned the home listings.

“Check this out,” he said when I came out of the store. It was a Victorian house nearby, a place that didn’t end up being what we needed, but right then, an idea quietly began to germinate.

Later that night, in the darkness, with both of us awake and knowing the other was up but not saying anything, I finally whispered, “What if we moved?”

“You could never leave San Francisco.”

“Well, why couldn’t I?”

“Could you?”

“You’re right. I couldn’t.”

Variations of this terse conversation popped up for the next few nights. Meanwhile, during the daytime we were consumed with our frantic search for a public kindergarten for Lucy. San Francisco Unified School District uses a lottery system to place students in different schools. You are supposedly guaranteed one of your top seven choices, but we had been through the lottery twice, and neither time were we selected for any schools nearby or that I’d even heard of. There were ten schools in our neighborhood that would have been all right with us. But wanting a school assignment close to a kid’s home is treated as a petty, bourgeois request in the City by the Bay. The situation was further demoralizing because Rolf had been busting his butt for the district for six years, but despite his dedication, the impersonal kindergarten placement process continued to dog us.

So on another night, without actually bringing up the question of moving, I said, “Do you want to go up to Nevada City again this weekend?”

Rolf gave me a look. “Okay,” he said.

In retrospect, I can only say that maybe when you’re about to make a crazy, life-changing decision, like leaving the one home you’ve ever known, you can only summon the nerve by not thinking directly about it too much or you’ll scare yourself out of doing it. So we dropped Lucy off with my parents, and we spent the next few weekends looking at homes in Nevada City.

And why there? It was only three hours away from San Francisco, close enough that we wouldn’t feel too cut off, and far enough to feel like my nerves could recover. And it is very beautiful. I feel most comfortable in old places, and Nevada City is one

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