The Literati Quarterly | Fall 2015 | Issue No. 5

wanted to follow June around, making scary monster faces and laughing , June holding her and picking her up and putting her down and talking to her and asking her questions and June laughing at her and June laughing with her and her making June laugh. She decided to make up a song and dance for her: “Wanna have me make up a song and I’ll be dancing too like in the movie? It’s fun!”

“Yeah! Let’s do it.” June leaned in because she wanted Addie to feel what she remembered feeling as a child, that she was everything.

Adelaide rolled her little hips and sang sometimes soft and sometimes loud. She seemed to put an emphasis on the rhyming words and Eugene wondered if the fact that she understood that rhyming words sound better in a song than non-rhyming words meant she was some sort of a genius. Or if it was something normal. Adelaide’s oldest sister was a prodigy on the guitar: at age nine she knew every Beatles song in English and German, left handed on a left handed guitar and left handed upside down on a right handed guitar. Addie’s other sister was seven and could speak three languages, thanks to some natural ability and her multiculturally aware San Francisco school. She also had a sharper sense of comedic timing than any child Eugene had ever met. He was always watching Adelaide and waiting for her talent to emerge—dissecting small sentences and monitoring motor skills—hoping she would develop a less dangerous one than her mother’s charm and influence, which was a fear that did not keep him up at night, but often grabbed hold of him unannounced, in the middle of the happiest days.

June saw tiny movements in Adelaide that were just like Sarah’s and remembered watching Sarah sing “Nights in White Satin” at karaoke when June turned twenty-one. June did not sing that night because she could never compare with her sister and she found a relief in that and happily faded into the background and let her sister be the one to be charming and happy. She remembered a sort of fear watching her sing...Nights in white satin, Never reaching the end, Letters I’ve written, Never meaning to send...and even June’s friends who maybe had never heard the song recognized her power and June did, too, and at the end of the night everyone loved her and wanted to be her. Even June forgot about those ugly things that rested in the middle of Sarah—the momentum that swung her from one side of the pendulum to the other, to places that our self-preservation stops us from going.

“Well I guess we should head home now,” Eugene said, “Grab your bag, Addie.”

“Grab your boob!” Addie and June and Eugene laughed together as they gathered up to leave and the things about waiting is that if you do it long enough, often enough—as Eugene had done—you forget what is waiting or not waiting for you.

It was only six blocks to Eugene and Sarah’s house and for four of those six blocks they walked in silence, Addie sometimes stopping to look at a flower or crack in the sidewalk or a dried up worm. They waited patiently while she did this because Eugene didn’t believe in rushing children out of being children.

“Papa hates this,” Adelaide said, picking up a dandelion that had dried and was ready to spread its seeds around. Eugene wondered if they were close enough to their house that if Addie blew, those seeds would find their way to his yard. Would Sarah be waiting in the yard or in the house and if she was what would he feel. He would not ask Why or What like he used to do, because it didn’t matter either way. One doesn’t talk about why a mouse chews holes in cereal boxes.

June looked and said, “Make a wish and then blow all those little pieces off.” She 36