Moving on, I said. The mom, Audrey, finds the boys in the basement. The baby is toddling around with this cigar-shaped magnet in his mouth, which is hilarious, usually, but now Audrey yanks it away before scooping him up and asking the older boy where Dad is. Upstairs in the bathroom, he says. He’s not feeling good.
Sure enough, Audrey finds her husband on his hands and knees in front of the toilet, almost delirious he’s so nauseated, so she orders pizza and gets on the computer for a refresher course. And it’s all so obvious now. They had never cleaned inside using standard lead-safe practices. Think of the dust people’s shoes must have picked up on the half-scraped porch and dragged inside. Since he started crawling that’s been the baby’s favorite hangout, next to the front door, where he loves playing with the shoes, of course, and the way he puts everything in his mouth it’s inevitable he’s chewed on them, and who knows how much dust went from the door to the rest of the house, and then there’s the toys, which were in the baby’s mouth all the damn time, because they’re slobs, is what they are, and leave his toys scattered everywhere and go weeks without washing the floor, months, maybe, without getting under the couch and recliners, and who lets their baby put shoes in his mouth?
Our guests looked at each other.
Exactly. But to Audrey it now feels like a tarring-and-feathering offense. We’re talking about the kid’s IQ dropping. His growth might be stunted. Learning disabilities, hyperactivity, anti-social stuff. What’s infuriating is that Audrey can’t figure out how bad a seventeen is, compared to, say, a five or a ten, or, for that matter, how bad a five or ten is. The fact is, nobody knows, but the sentence she sees everywhere is There’s no such thing as a safe lead level. Then she reads an anecdote—she knows she shouldn’t, but can’t stop herself—about a five-year-old who measured an eighteen as a baby, and he’s still in diapers and doesn’t speak. Just then the pizza arrives, and while she’s paying the delivery guy, she hears her husband finally, thank god, start retching.
Sorry, I told my listeners, I’m dragging this out a little.
“As long as you get to this leaving-her-husband business,” the husband said.
Audrey’s husband was a good guy, as I understand it. I met him a few times, and he sure seemed like it. But it was one of those things. Audrey had gone in one direction since they got married, he’d gone another. He worked at Trader Joe’s, which is absolutely not a criticism, but his ambitions had been higher. He’d lost his passion, she said. He was a good dad, but even there he was missing—I can’t remember how she described it, but let’s say vigor. In fact, and this is uncanny, Audrey had reached the point of leaving him about, let’s see, twenty months earlier, but the baby had interfered then, too. Talk about a shock. What’s complicating things this time around is she’s fallen for another guy and he’s on tenterhooks, waiting for her to deliver the news.
“‘Fallen for’?” said the husband.
“Is it tenterhooks or tenderhooks?” said the wife.
“When did this happen?” said my wife.
“Tenter,” I said. “And yes, they were sleeping together.”
The “when” question was tricky, but the husband bailed me out. “Was this dude married too?”
“He was single,” I said. “Not even dating anyone. And Audrey’s older kid is in high school now, so it must have been four, five years ago? Maybe six?”
I watched my wife do the math. Five years placed it safely before we met; four years meant it happened just before we started dating. She waited, as if giving me a chance to nail it down, then adopted an expression of concerned puzzlement.