The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

Carter told me on a Sunday night in October, sitting in the bathtub with a plastic stegosaurus in one hand and a washcloth in the other, while I rinsed the shampoo out of his hair.

He said it the way six-year-olds say everything that matters, in the middle of something else, with no idea that the floor of the world had just tipped.

“Kendra gives me the pink medicine at seven,” he said. “So I go to sleep.” He made the stegosaurus dive under the bubbles and come back up spouting water.

I kept the cup of rinse water in my hand. I remember being careful with it, as if spilling it would make what he said more true. “What pink medicine, buddy?”

“The cherry one. In the little cup.” He held up his thumb and finger a small space apart. “You have to drink it all the way to the line or it doesn’t work.”

“Every night?” I asked. My voice came out normal. I have no idea how.

I work in an insurance office, and I have learned to keep a level voice when a man is yelling about his hail claim.

“Every night at Daddy’s,” he said. Then he went quiet and pushed the stegosaurus around a bar of soap.

“I always miss the Saturday cartoons. Daddy said he’d wake me up but I don’t wake up.”

I poured the rinse water over his head and he squealed the way he always did, and I laughed the way I always did, because he was watching my face and I was not going to let him see it fall.

I got him out and dried him off with the green towel with the hood, the one he was getting too big for.

I helped him into his pajamas and listened to him read three pages of his library book about a farm dog.

I tucked him in, kissed his forehead, turned on the night-light shaped like a moon, and told him I loved him to the elevator and back, which is our saying in our family, because the elevator is the tallest thing in town.

Then I went into the kitchen, sat down on the linoleum with my back against the dishwasher, and shook so hard my teeth knocked together.

Two months of wrong Mondays

My name is Megan Thorson. I am thirty-six. I manage the office of a small insurance agency on Main Street in a town of about six thousand people in eastern South Dakota, the kind of town where the grain elevator is the skyline.

Carter’s dad is Josh. He is thirty-eight, and he has worked at the co-op elevator since he was nineteen. We were married eight years.

We have been divorced for two, and it was not a war, mostly. It was two tired people giving up.

Josh is not a bad man. I want to say that early, because this story could make him sound like one, and he is not.

He is a man who hates conflict so much that he will agree to almost anything to make it stop.

When we split, we worked out the schedule at this same kitchen table with a pad of paper. I had Carter during the week for school.

Josh had him every weekend, Friday after school until Sunday at six. Neither of us wanted a judge picking for us.

About a year ago, Josh moved in with Kendra. She is thirty, and she has two little ones of her own, a boy who just turned three and a girl who was nine months old that fall. The father of those babies is not in the picture.