Fathermucker by Greg Olear

pacifier, and takes cover behind the tail of my untucked T-shirt.
    â€œStill with that binky, huh?” Jess says. “Isn’t that for babies ?” She’s talking to Maude, and she’s teasing, and she’s also right, but it’s hard not to take this as a judgment, especially when Jess makes the same damned comment every week, usually followed by an aside that too much pacifier now means orthodontia bills out the wazoo in ten years. Also—and this is a pet peeve, I realize—I hate that she calls it a binky. Binky sounds like a slang term for oral sex, if you ask me. Gonna get me some binky.
    Maude peers from my shirt-tail to address this last point. “It’s not a binky; it’s a passie ,” she says, as if Jess were a complete idiot, and tauntingly chomps on the pacifier for effect. (This is one of those moments when I could just about burst with parental pride.) Then Maude hands me the passie and makes for the next room, where the faerie versions of Emma and Haven flit about, as Gloria implores her androgynous son to be careful , a sentiment she delivers so often, and in so many benign situations (such as now, when he’s six inches away from the corner of a coffee table he’s a good foot taller than), that she may as well just ignore him altogether. Aesop for the twenty-first century: The Mom Who Cried Be Careful .
    â€œHow are you?” Jess asks, hugging me firmly and pecking my cheek. “You look tired.”
    â€œI feel tired.”
    â€œThere’s fresh coffee,” she says. “Catskill Mountain, Moka Java blend. When did Stacy leave?”
    â€œMonday.”
    â€œOh, you poor dear. Maybe you’d prefer a beer?”
    â€œNo, coffee’s good. If I have beer, I’ll sleep, and I’m not allowed to sleep.”
    â€œJust as well. The only beer we have is this weird microbrew stuff Chris is into. Fin du Monde. There’s so much alcohol in it, you’re better off doing tequila shots. I had half a bottle over the weekend, and I swear, I had a headache for like two days.” We process through the kingly archway into the kitchen, and she takes out a cup—an oversized thing with the insidious face of Mickey Mouse on it; I can’t escape rodents this morning!—and pours me a generous helping. “When’s she back, tomorrow?”
    â€œYeah.”
    There’s a crashing noise, and Haven starts whimpering. Leaving the coffee, Jess and I race to the next room to see what happened—and to make sure that our respective charges aren’t the ones responsible for upsetting the little crybaby. I won’t say Gloria is overprotective, but she makes the Secret Service look like a bunch of art school dropouts at the Phish Halloween show. Check that; I’ll say it: she’s overprotective. If she would just take a chill lozenge, these little gatherings would be a lot more . . . I hesitate to say fun , because I’m not sure the bonhomie derived from a good playdate constitutes fun, exactly . . . but the time would go by faster. And for all the horseshit about socialization and learning to share , that’s the real purpose of playdates: to kill time. You know how if you go to a really awesome party—one without kids, I mean; a wingding in, say, a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village—and you get there at nine thirty, and you start drinking and dancing and schmoozing, and the next thing you know, you look at your watch, and it’s two in the morning? That sort of thing rarely happens to me these days. Almost never, in fact. Parenthood is like prison in that regard. I’m always aware of the hour, aware of the fact that it’s always earlier than I’d hoped, aware of the vast and intimidatingly vacant Sahara between now and the undependable oasis that is the kids’ bedtime (a bedtime that may turn out to be a mirage!). Gloria, at times, can be a cellmate from hell,