The Choice by Jason Mott Page A

her mouth. “Lisa, do you know where Mommy put the aloe?” Samantha called.
    Her daughter did not reply.
    “Lisa, honey,” Samantha said. “The aloe?”
    “Mom, was the man on TV dead like Mr. Whiskers? Or was it a different kind of dead? Do people always come back? Will everybody come back?”
    “Dear Lord,” Samantha groaned.
    “You’re fighting a lost battle,” Peter replied. “She’s hypnotized by it. Try looking in her bedroom. That’s where everything ends up eventually.” He put his coffee down and patted himself, looking for something. “Have you seen my phone?”
    “No. Last time I saw it was in the car last night. Lisa was playing some kind of game on it.”
    Peter huffed and started for the garage.
    “Peter?” Samantha called. She turned to face him and folded her arms over her chest. She looked exhausted. “The anniversary dinner Saturday…did you book it?”
    “Yes,” he replied. He paused as if there was something more to say, but there was only silence and tension between them and nothing else came to fill the space, not even an explanation for how things had so suddenly come to this.
    * * *
    When he was outside in the wet morning air, Peter felt that he could finally breathe again. He walked with his hands behind his head and his face aimed up at the clouds, like a teenager taking stock of his place in the universe. He watched the Johnsons drive past, waving as they did. He waved back at them and listened to the sound of their two boys roughhousing in the backseat disappear down the block. One day those boys would probably wind up making eyes at his daughter.
    When he got into the car, the smell of rotting fruit hit him. He coughed and put his shirt over his nose. Likely as not, Lisa had left something somewhere beneath one of the seats. The entire car was cluttered with books and candy wrappers and pages from coloring books in various stages of completion.
    He sighed and, for a moment, stopped and marveled at the fact that he was now married, now a father. He saw himself from a distance, hunched over in a car that smelled of bad fruit and was littered with the flotsam of family life. He looked down at his hands. One of the fingernails on his left hand was colored a soft shade of purple. He stared at it for a moment, and then realized what it was: nail polish.
    Sometime in the past couple of weeks Lisa had come home from school with a bottle of nail polish. And, somewhere along the line, she’d taken up the odd—yet endearing—habit of painting one of his toenails or fingernails while he was sleeping. It was usually something he never noticed until he was out in public somewhere. And, in spite of himself, he couldn’t help but chuckle.
    Which is what he did now.
    This was his life: a thirty-five-year-old father with nail polish on his finger. Wasn’t it just yesterday that he was a flustered, shaggy-haired kid picking up Tracy Whitland for their first date?
    Tracy. Tracy Whitland.
    They’d grown up together, in much the way Peter imagined Lisa would grow up with the Johnson boys next door. Almost every one of Peter’s memories of his childhood was punctuated by Tracy. When the Fall Festival came around each year, Tracy had gone with him. When he was eight years old and took Communion, so had Tracy. The time he got lost in the swamp near his house, it was Tracy who’d trudged alongside him through the mud and muck. It was Tracy who’d kept him from letting fear get the better of him. “It’ll be okay,” she’d said over and over again, and it had annoyed him at first, her repetition. But then it became an incantation, something that he eventually believed. So much so that, when they finally made their way out of the swamp, almost eight miles from home at nearly ten o’clock at night, with frightened and angry parents searching for the both of them, it was he who turned to her and said, “I told you it would be okay.”
    When they were both twelve, she became his first kiss.