Small World by Tabitha King

teacher.
    ‘ . . . geez, I wish I was the president’s daughter and somebody gave me a dollhouse . . . ’ A chubby girl with a pouting lip.
    ‘ ... the 1948 to 1952 restoration was marked with a gift from King George VI, presented by the then Princess Elizabeth. It was an early eighteenth-century mirror, here copied . . . ’
    You tell ’em, Dolly, Nick thought as he passed within hearing of her recorded lecture.
    He bent to tap a small boy on the shoulder. ‘Brian,’ he said, ‘touch that,’ pointing to a large Victorian cabinet dollhouse with oversize windows, the better to peep through, and furnished with relentlessly sturdy pieces. Brian grinned and bee-lined for the dollhouse. Nick caught Brian’s teacher’s relieved eye, nodded, and made for his security conference.
    Lucy’s father opened the door to Nick’s knock.
    ‘Hello, Mr. Novick,’ Nick said, shaking the older man’s hand. ‘Come on in,’ he was greeted. ‘She’s still getting rigged out. Be right down.’
    He followed him into the living room where Laurie and Zach were watching television.
    ‘Set down,’ Mr. Novick invited him.
    ‘Okay.’ He sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘Laurie needs a good tickling, doesn’t she?’
    Lucy’s father snorted amiably and said, ‘I guess.’
    Nick reached casually for the seven-year-old, who wriggled away from him, giggling, while trying to keep her eyes on the TV screen. Zach spared a glance long enough to grin at them, and then turned back to his study of Snoopy’s ongoing angst.
    During the next commercial break, Zach climbed wordlessly into Nick’s lap. and sat there, poised as nervelessly as the top man on the circus pyramid, with one thumb in his mouth, and the other hand working the gap in his pajama bottoms. Nick moved his left arm to support the boy. Laurie glanced up and tickled Nick’s leg to get his attention. He followed her gaze to Zach’s hand and they grinned at each other.
    Lucy found them arranged in comfortable wordlessness before the TV. She removed Zach from Nick’s lap and deposited him next to Laurie on the sofa. Laurie’s arm slipped under the little boy’s head in a motherly gesture. Lucy kissed the tops of their heads.
    ‘After Snoopy, it’s bedtime,’ she said to her father. ‘Night, Pop.’
    ‘Did you write down the number for Pop?’ she asked Nick, and he paused to jot the telephone number of the restaurant on a piece of paper.
    Mr. Novick followed them to the door. ‘Have a good time,’ he boomed.
    ‘How is your father?’ Nick asked Lucy, when the door had closed behind them and they were walking to the car.
    ‘Well enough, I guess. He had words with my mother tonight, right after supper. She’d seen the magazine; she called about that.’
    ‘I didn’t know they were on speaking terms.’
    ‘There’s not much to talk about anymore. The kids.’ Lucy laughed. ‘Most of their conversation tonight ran to my father hinting that Mother is missing her grandchildren, to whom he happens to be very close, heh, heh, and her suggesting that he’s imposing on me at the very least, and probably drinking my cooking sherry behind my back, too.’
    ‘She liked the VIP piece?’
    ‘More or less. The kid’s picture, anyway. She said she thought you—'
    ‘Oh, oh.’
    ‘—you looked distinguished but older than she’d expected. Then she sniffled a bit and allowed I wasn’t her baby anymore.’
    ‘Oh.’ Nick couldn’t see her expression. She had found something to stare at out the window. ‘No,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I guess you’re not, are you?’
    Lucy didn’t answer. She apparently didn’t want to pursue the subject. Nick wished she would open up to him but she held her past to herself tightly. He knew that her parents had divorced when she was in her early teens and that she had never quite recovered from feeling that she was an embarrassing leftover, the one real barrier to a permanent erasure of the disastrous marriage for both of them.