Want by Lynn Steger Strong

Author:Lynn Steger Strong [Strong, Lynn Steger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250247544
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2020-07-06T18:30:00+00:00

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My husband works on weekends so we don’t have to pay for childcare. During the week, while I work, he takes care of our girls. We have an extra thousand dollars in our bank account because he just got paid for a job, so I call the sitter and she comes over and I run fifteen miles and take a thirty-minute shower.

Once the sitter’s left, I set up paints on the floor atop a pile of old issues of the New York Review of Books and set out paper and old wood from various of my husband’s jobs and let the girls make things. The baby nurses and I get light-headed from the running and her eating. They paint the paper and the wood and then their hands and feet and I wonder briefly if I should tell them not to paint their bodies, but it’s only watercolors, so then they start painting my face.

I get a news alert on my phone, an hour into painting: a ballistic missile alarm went off in Hawaii, the alert says, but officials say it was a false alarm.

I’m quiet a minute, looking at my phone, then back and forth between paint-covered children.

Can I paint your eyes? the four-year-old says, coming at me with a fine brush covered in purple. I throw the phone up onto the couch, smiling at our daughters. I lie back on the floor with my eyes closed, my hand resting on the baby’s calves as she moves around me.

I say: Only the lids.

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