One True Theory of Love by Laura Fitzgerald

things.”
    “I left it on my printer last week, but I have it right here.” Catherine pulled it out of her team-parent binder, handed it to the macrobiotic woman, and then turned to Meg. “I have to ask you not to offer anyone else a brownie. Please.”
    Meg met Catherine’s firm gaze. Oh, the things she would not say! They were delightful to think of, anyway.
    “Catherine, I get the sense that you’re personally offended by my brownies.”
    As the other parents laughed, Catherine sneered. “We don’t do sugar on this team,” she said. “We do organic fruit. Otherwise the kids go crazy. We witnessed some of that last week, remember?”
    Meg’s mouth dropped open. The nerve of this woman! “You mean Henry? My son?”
    Catherine nodded smugly.
    Unbelievable! Did her kid never misbehave?
    “Oh!” Meg chastised herself for taking so long to figure it out. “Let me guess. Your son’s Bradley, isn’t he? The one Henry yelled at?”
    “That’s right,” Catherine said. “And he was very upset afterward.”
    She stepped closer and bulked up her shoulders, and all of a sudden, it turned into the full-fledged mom’s equivalent of a pissing contest. One version of Meg’s imagination had her throwing down the plate of brownies and tackling Catherine.
    It was not the response she chose, of course.
    “How about we get the boys together for a playdate soon?” she said. “Maybe Bradley can come over and swim.”
    “We’ll see,” Catherine said. “I don’t know that he’d feel comfortable.”
    “Have you looked at him recently?” Meg said. “He seems pretty happy to me.”
    While the other kids ran around and sprayed one another with their water bottles, Henry and Bradley kicked a soccer ball back and forth. Bradley was positively beaming. To Meg, it looked like the start of a beautiful friendship.
    “Look.” Meg pointed them out. “They’ve let bygones be bygones. Forgiveness comes so much easier to kids than it does to us grownups, doesn’t it, Catherine?”
    Catherine ignored the saccharine smile on Meg’s face and didn’t answer, but when the lone dad on the team winked and grinned at Meg, it took absolutely every single ounce of self-control she had not to offer him a brownie.
     
     
     
    “Organic fruit,” Meg complained to her Loop Group friends as she chomped on a rejected brownie that night down by the pool. “I can’t even afford organic fruit for myself, much less for fifteen kids. What planet are these people from?”
    “They’re from the land of plenty.” This from Kat—Crazy Kat, Crazy Sexy Kat—who had a penchant for short skirts, high heels, low-cut tops, and men who were into that sort of thing, as were most men, from what Meg could tell. Kat was a parole officer, tough and strong, African-American, and with the most solid thighs Meg had ever seen on a woman. Meg wondered about her motives in choosing to wear such provocative clothes to work, as it very much seemed to be asking for trouble, but parole officers were a breed unto themselves. Besides, Kat was a girl with a gun. She packed heat and her aim was fearless. No one messed with Kat.
    Also at the table was Harley, resident manager of the complex. He’d gone by Jeff until a few years ago when he got a divorce and bought a motorcycle and grew his hair ponytail-long and stuck pirate-hoop earrings in both ears and let someone ink a string of tattoos down his arms. Now he brought home women who wore superblack eyeliner.
    Absent from the table was Opera Bob, a man whose age Meg couldn’t quite figure out and for whatever reason felt she shouldn’t ask. He had a pregnant-man paunch and worked by day as a phone technical-support representative, a faceless voice to those crying out from the nanotech wilderness. At night, he watched the national news—Meg often saw him alone in his apartment, leaning forward on his beige couch, letting his senses be bombarded for thirty minutes with everything that had gone wrong in the world