Last Sunday she was sitting on the kitchen floor making a bracelet for Lila, beads spread around her in a wide, colorful arc, and she looked up and said, “Mom, can we get a dog?”
I looked at the beads on the floor, at the popsicle wrapper she had not yet thrown away, at the math worksheet from Friday still on the counter, at the small, ordinary mess of a child’s life spreading comfortably through a house that finally felt like it belonged to us.
“We’ll talk about it,” I said, which is what parents say when the answer is probably yes but they need a moment to catch up to the fact that the life they are living has become, against all odds, the kind of life where getting a dog is the biggest question on the table.
She grinned and went back to her bracelet, and the kitchen was quiet except for the small click of beads being threaded onto string, and outside the window the evening was coming on soft and blue, and I stood at the counter and let the ordinariness of it wash over me like something I had earned.
