Recently in Flashbacks Category

It's eight o'clock in the morning, and the sun shines, hostile, over the baked asphalt. I am wearing shorts and sandals and can feel the heat on my legs, rising from the blacktop. The scent of pine chips is heavy in the air, and the atmosphere pulses with excitement, shouts and laughs and occasionally, tears. Mom is in a hurry. I want to stop and look around, but she has to be at work, she's starting late today just for me and it was a bitch to find someone to cover, she should have just made Zachary take me but then he'd be late and he has that hardass Walker for first period. Pay attention, she said, because I can't take you every morning and you're gonna have to walk yourself to school.

The kindergarteners' area is separated from the main playground by a cyclone fence and a gate whose latch is too tall for an ordinary child to reach. It reminds me of a dog park, but I don't say so; I'm too busy taking in the sights. There are probably more grown-ups than children here today, and most of them are couples, men in slacks and nice shirts, women in jeans or business clothes. Is this what kindergarten is going to be like? I think. I had been imagining school books and math tests and lockers, but so far it looks like a party.

Mom lets my hand go to open the gate, and I dart inside. There are other children, of course, but I have eyes only for the adults. I run up to one woman, lose my nerve at the last moment and sidle up to another, tall and cool-looking with her dark curly hair and sunglasses. She is drinking a Pepsi.

"Hi," I say, and reach up to take her hand. Before I can tell her my name my mother is there, flushed from running in the heat, and she pulls me away.

"I'm so sorry. She just goes right up to strangers like she knows them. I don't know what I'm going to do with her, it's a miracle she hasn't gotten herself kidnapped."

I know of kidnapping only from Disney movies and think it involves being taken away to Louisiana and put to work collecting diamonds - it sounds to me like an exciting adventure.

It is Thanksgiving, less than a week before my fourth birthday, and I am in the care of strangers.

The thing about being my mom's kid is that I'm always in the care of strangers. Zachary is sixteen and too irresponsible to even take a damn shower, as she puts it, so when Mom is at work I usually spend the day with her upstairs neighbor, an older lady who eats cough drops like candy and takes little interest in me. I am well-versed in Leeza and Geraldo, and I have a healthy fear of small dogs with underbites. Sometimes, when the neighbor is too busy, Mom takes me to the drop-in center near where she works, which is staffed by a revolving door of immigrant women and young, optimistic, overprivileged girls who are learning about child development in the local community college. None of us are regulars. Mostly I dig snake paths in the sandbox and stay out of the way of the other children, and when Mom comes she takes my hand and wordlessly pulls me out to the car.

That she would leave for a holiday, however, is unprecedented. She may have to work; I'm not sure. At any rate, my Thanksgivings thus far have been less than memorable - Zachary will tell me later that they involve the three of us sitting at the kitchen table eating a roast chicken, and that's not exactly different from most nights - and I don't yet understand the concepts of "family togetherness" and "holiday" well enough to feel like I'm missing anything. Zachary is off with a friend, and understandably, the friend's family doesn't want a preschooler underfoot. So I'm here. I'm not sure exactly where "here" is, or who is supposed to be my guardian for the evening; I have been introduced to her, but a lot of the women look the same and I can't remember what she's wearing.

I am in the dining room and the adults are taking forever to get things going. I bend my legs, lean forward and jump as far as I can toward the door to the den, and then I jump again, and again, until I'm in the doorway. I press myself up against the doorjamb and watch the boys lost in their video games.