Amanda Bright @ Home by Danielle Crittenden

international consulting firm. She described motherhood as “the hardest multitasking job I’ve ever held.”
    Meredith gulped and sobbed while Patricia inspected a bump on the side of the girl’s head. Even with a wet face and disarranged pigtails, Meredith looked as if she had just tumbled from a Victorian etching. Her mother dressed her in exquisite pinafores and ruffled blouses bought at a boutique that specialized in European clothing. Amanda had ventured into this store once, shortly before Ben was born. The shop’s prices left her gasping, but she could not stop herself and paid seventy-five dollars for a tiny white linen sunsuit for Ben’s ride home from the hospital. When the day arrived, Amanda unpacked the beautiful garment from its tissue wrapping and somehow wriggled his resisting body through the confusion of straps and buttons. Unfortunately, the nurse neglected to warn Amanda that her baby’s first venture into the outside world would likely be accompanied by another colossal achievement: his first bowel movement. “Good God, it’s leaking out the collar!” Bob gagged as he raced to their front door, thrusting Ben as far away from him as a proud father’s arms could reach. That was the end of the sunsuit. It was also the last time Amanda bought clothing for her children that couldn’t be washed or, for that matter, sterilized.
    “Am I broken?” Meredith asked plaintively.
    “There, there, you’re not broken, darling, but it is a bad bump.”
    The other women exchanged awkward glances. Amanda murmured that she would go get Ben, but at that moment her son entered, pulling fiercely against the hand of Christine’s nanny. In contrast to Meredith, Ben—dressed in sale-rack army shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a ferocious dinosaur—could not have appeared more guilty.
    “Mommy!” he cried at the sight of his lone ally. He freed himself and charged head-on into Amanda’s stomach. “I didn’t do it!”
    Ben’s denial provoked a fresh round of outraged screams from Meredith. The mothers looked to the nanny, a slight, nervous woman from the Philippines, who addressed herself to her employer. “This boy hit little girl with truck, ma’am. I tell him to say sorry but he say no.”
    “I didn’t!” came Ben’s muffled voice as he buried his face deeper into Amanda’s lap.
    “Ben,” Amanda said, gently tugging on him until she had gotten Ben to look up at her. “Tell Mommy what happened.”
    “Meredith’s
head,”
Ben insisted, “got in the way of my
truck
.”
    “Huh,” Patricia sniffed. “I think a time-out is in order. At least, that’s what I’d do.”
    “Ben,” Amanda continued, “if you don’t say sorry to Meredith right now, we are going home. Do you understand?”
    “No!”
    “Ben!”
    The little boy walked sullenly over to Meredith. “Sor-ry,” he spat out with as much contempt as a five-year-old can articulate. He shambled past her back to the playroom. The little girl looked helplessly to her mother.
    “You stay away from that boy,” Patricia warned her in a hushed, but not hushed enough, tone. “He’s
violent
.”
    Meredith bit her lip and nodded, and was led away by the nanny.
    “Well!” Christine declared. “Boys will be boys, won’t they? Who needs some more wine?”
    The mothers lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Amanda stewed in mortification. Patricia would not look at her. The two other mothers, Kim and Ellen, offered her weak smiles. Every child in the play group had, at some point, launched a surprise assault against another, but Ben was thought to possess unique nuclear capability. Amanda knew that if it weren’t for Christine, she would have been drummed out of the group long before. Amanda had tried to drop out herself, but Christine had been adamant that she remain. “I know Patricia can be rude—you know how ridiculous she is about Meredith—but really, Kim and Ellen would be
devastated.
And Victoria adores Sophie. So do all the