Page 37 of Please Send Snow
But Dylan is rushing up to his dad, pointing at the plate on his desk and miming eating with a big smile on his face.
Jake nods to him, but I can tell it’s time for us to go.
I grab Dylan’s hand and point back toward the living space and he allows himself to be led away.
I’m torn between being grateful that Jake wasn’t angry with us and being a little angry myself that he couldn’t be more demonstrative with his son.
When I was a kid, there was never one time that I burst into my dad’s studio that he didn’t stop everything to swoop me up in his arms. Even when Mom scolded him for caking my clothing with clay, he was always glad to see me. He would show me what he was doing, and I would watch him turn lumps of clay into funny little animals while The Beatles played on the old boom box that sat on a shelf by the window between the potted ferns and spider plants.
I even had my own little table in the corner where he would set a lump of clay and some wooden dowels so I could make my own figures. He probably dreamed I would follow him into the family business. But I never had any talent for it. I just liked being near him and feeling the cold clay smush between my fingers.
“What are we going to do now?” Dylan asks.
His voice has that plaintive tone that tells me I’d better get the answer right if I want to push away the storm clouds and bring the sunshine back to him.
“We can do whatever we want,” I tell him with a smile. “But I can’t stop thinking about Froggy. And we do have snacks for lunch...”
“We’re writers,” Dylan says excitedly. “We can write while we eat.”
We spendsome time writing more of Froggy’s story while eating our snacks, and we even draw lots of pictures. After a while, Dylan finally gets antsy again, so I suggest that we go out for a quick nature walk.
“What’sthat?” he asks me.
“We just go outside and look around,” I tell him vaguely, not really sure myself what we’re doing other than stretching our legs. My dad was always fond of nature walks. I guess he was probably looking for inspiration. “We’ll see what we can find out in nature, and maybe it will give us an idea for Froggy.”
I bundle him up within an inch of his life and we head out the front door. This morning’s rain has made the bark on the trees and the fallen leaves darker and more beautiful against the soft gray of the sky above.
The lawn in front of the house is just brown winter grass—not much to see there. But when we hike around back, past the bit of lawn there, we see birds hunting for worms, and we look for signs of foxes and deer.
“Oh, you guys have a fire pit,” I notice on the way back toward the house. “That’s awesome.”
It’s a nice one too, made of stone blocks with hand-hewn wooden benches all around it.
“What’s that for?” Dylan asks, wandering over.
“You can put wood in there and have a nice fire at night,” I tell him. “Then you can sit around it and tell stories.”
I don’t sayghoststories because he’s just a little kid and it might freak him out.
“That’s nice,” he says.
After our nature walk, we go back inside and warm up. Then we play UNO and hide-and-seek again before jumping back into our book.
By the timethe sun is setting, Dylan is hungry again, and Jake is still working—I haven’t seen him all day.
“That’s okay,” I tell Dylan. “Should we make some more grilled cheese? You can help me this time, if you want.”
“Okay,” Dylan says, looking pleased.
He’s such a genuinely nice little boy. It makes me sad thinking about what he would be doing with his day if his dad hadn’t thought to ask me to help out.
His mom mostly took care of him, I hear Jake saying in my head.
I can’t help but wonder what happened with his mom. I guess Jake is right, I probably should have looked him up online. But that would only tell me about his business dealings. I probably wouldn’t learn much about his wife.
Why doesn’t Dylan talk about her?
But there’s no point trying to guess. I figure that I’ve got about fifteen minutes to get food into him before he starts melting down.
