Should Have Known Better

I rushed home, ready to tell my husband all about the senior bathroom tryst. Reginald was raised in Augusta and Mrs. Harris had been his third-grade teacher. He’d never believe she was canoodling in the bathroom with Mr. Lawrence. But my rush was put to rest when I turned onto our street. I could see through the rosebushes on the corner that his rusty green work truck wasn’t parked in the driveway, and I hardly needed to stop to read the note on the front door to find him. He’d taken the twins to the park.

The other thing the doctor with the gray beard in the white coat couldn’t tell me about my son’s autism was why his twin sister hadn’t gotten it and if she ever would. He told me to keep a diary and bring her back in six months. Seven years later and my daughter, Cheyenne, was still OK. But really we’d all been affected by autism.

“Here you are,” I said, finding Reginald sitting on the end of a bench of a long row of babysitting, BlackBerry-holding dads.

Reginald was a big man. He came from big Southern people, and had muscular, broad shoulders and the kind of lacquered black skin that made him stand out—even in a room full of black people.

“Oh, hey,” he said dryly before clicking his phone closed, and I could tell in just those two words that it had been a bad day.

I looked out over the muddle of bright playground equipment. Kids were everywhere, screaming and pulling. I saw my daughter’s red shirt at the top of a jungle gym. It was a three-walled clubhouse where she and her girlfriends, too old to continue to enjoy the sand and slides and too young to sneak off to the bathrooms, kept court.

“Where’s R. J.?” I asked.

“Sandbox,” Reginald said, pointing his phone in the direction of a sea of babies and toddlers and preschoolers scooping sand into pails. In the middle of the tide was a ten-year-old in a dark blue hoodie. His head hung low.

“He had a bad day?” I asked to confirm.

Reginald got up without speaking and walked me halfway to the sandbox.

“The school called me to get him early,” he told me. “I had to cancel two jobs.”

“Oh, babe, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling a little pinch in my gut.

“I really need you to get off early so you can get them from school,” he said. “It’s killing me. Especially now that it’s about to be summer. More light equals more hours and more grass to cut.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I said this with a straight face as I waved at the mother of one of Cheyenne’s friends. “I can’t ask Sharika to close the library by herself. She already opens alone so I can get the kids to school.”

“Just do something,” Reginald commanded. He came in closer so the woman couldn’t hear him. “And stop making it seem like I’m the bad guy. I’m just trying to get us ahead a little. I’m starting to feel like I can’t do anything big because I’m so busy dealing with all of this stuff.” He gestured to the sandbox.

“Stuff? You mean our kids?”

“You know I don’t mean it like that. I just need you to have my back. That’s all I’m saying. We can’t get what I want us to have if you don’t support it. Is that so bad? Is it so bad that I want more for my family?”

“I never said it was bad,” I said. “You’re just starting to sound a little different.”

Reginald wasn’t a particularly argumentative husband, not like some I knew, but we’d had this argument before. The truth was that Reginald never wanted me to work in the first place. His mother had never worked. His grandmothers had never worked. When we first got married, I was OK with it. Not working? Most of my friends were buried in work and dying to find a man who wanted to take care of them. I stayed home and took care of his parents and tried to make their house—which we’d moved into when we’d gotten married—our own. But then I got bored. Going to graduate school was something I started online when I was pregnant and on bed rest. I picked what I thought was the easiest major, and when I graduated I convinced Reginald to agree to me working so we would have health insurance as he built his lawn care business. Unfortunately, getting that job at the library meant that Reginald had to pick up the twins from school every day. They were ten, but R. J. wasn’t allowed on the bus because of his meltdowns.

“His teacher said he wouldn’t speak all day,” Reginald said. “She realized at lunch that a red marker was missing from her desk. Another kid said R. J. had taken it. He admitted that he had it, but wouldn’t give it back.”

“Did you get it back from him?”

“I’ve been on calls all afternoon, Dawn. Come on; don’t do that.”

“I wasn’t doing anything. I’ll get it.”

We stood there and watched Reginald Jr. push his hands into the cool sand and leave them buried there for a time. Kids half his size ran in tight circles around his space in the sandbox.

“When we got in the car,” Reginald went on, “he just kept saying, ‘park—255—’ ”

“Means Drive. 255 Means Drive,” I added, walking toward R. J. “His favorite place. The park.”

“Hey, Mama’s honey bunny.” I inched in slowly on R. J.’s right side.

He didn’t respond. He kept his wide, brown eyes buttoned to the sand between his legs, but I could see my reflection in the corner of his eye. I squatted beside him. This kind of detachment was typical when he’d had a new experience or was being confronted with a series of things he’d rather not face. He could see me, but he was pretending he couldn’t.

“How was school?” I asked, dusting a few stray grains of sand from the red sweatpants he was wearing.

R. J. looked up from the sand and over at the benches where Reginald had been sitting. While he was Reginald’s “Jr.,” he followed his sister in looking like me. All three of us had my father’s bushy eyebrows that would turn into a unibrow with a month of no grooming, my mother’s brown eyes, and teeth that were perfect without the aid of braces. He had his father’s size though. Had always been the biggest kid in his class. The doctors warned us that as he grew, the more difficult it would be for us to control his meltdowns.