How to Party With an Infant by Kaui Hart Hemmings Page A

playing with this toy the other day. I took it away and she didn’t even notice it wasgone. Then I put a mirror in her face and she didn’t know it was her own reflection. Babies are funny. You can totally mess with ’em.”
    Georgia holds the steering wheel tightly. She takes a deep breath. “Why?” she says. “What?” She doesn’t know what to ask. An officer told her that he was arrested for third-degree burglary. She gasped, but then he explained that Chris walked onto someone else’s property with the intent to burglarize—that’s what constituted the burglary.
    “Why did you go onto this person’s property?” she asks. “And who’s Leroy? I had no idea you had a friend named Leroy.”
    “It’s pronounced Lee roy. He’s not frickin’ French.”
    Chris puts his foot on the dash and plucks off dried clumps of dirt from his boot. “This guy stole Leroy’s jacket. We know him! His name’s Dumb Todd. So we went to his house to get it back and he called the cops like a little bitch. You can’t steal your own threads. It’s a bullshit charge. Don’t worry about it.”
    He fusses with the stations on the radio, then stops on what Georgia thinks is Brazilian music. She waits for him to change it, but he doesn’t.
    “Well, I am worried about it,” she says. “I’m very worried about it. About you.”
    “Don’t worry about me,” Chris says. “I’m the least . . .” He looks up at the ceiling and crosses his arms over his chest. She isn’t sure if she should take 280 or 101. She slows down hoping he’ll indicate which way he’d like to go.
    “Oh, wait, stop,” he says. “Turn in to there. Can we get In-N-Out? I’m starving.”
    “What’s In-N-Out?”
    “You’re kidding me? Are you serious right now? Are you for real?”
    She doesn’t answer.
    “It’s fast food,” he says. “Hamburgers.”
    “Oh,” she says, noticing he didn’t say “It’s fast food, God!” becauseeverything he usually says to her is constructed that way: “Do you want dinner?” “Yes, Mom. God!” “Are you ready for school?” “Like ten minutes ago, God!” Sometimes when he speaks this way she wants to shake him and ask, “Don’t you remember how much you loved and needed me? You used to hold my face and repeat ‘Mommy’ in the sweetest voice that made me feel like we were in on something together. Something small. Something tremendous.”
    She turns in to the strip mall, then takes a deep breath. “Do you remember going to the playground with me?” she asks. “Do you remember all that time we spent together? Do you remember holding my face?”
    “Are you having a stroke or something?” he asks.
    “Maybe,” she says, giving up.
    She drives to the end of the lot toward the neon lights sparkling like a refuge. Zoë makes a frustrated whimper. Georgia wishes the other two weren’t here, that it was just her and Chris. She glances back at Gabe. His pacifier has fallen on his lap and sits there like a severed thumb.
    “How have you not heard of this place?” Chris asks. “You and Dad are so disconnected or something.”
    “We like that Thai place on Masonic,” she says, remembering that when Chris was little they used to get takeout from there every Friday. They called it Thai Day Friday. Eric always got number 42, and it was sort of an unspoken agreement that they’d make love that night. They’d do a position she called Thai Me Up, which was really just missionary position, but it was fun to say, and she was really into themes back then. Then Thai Day Friday turned into every other Friday. Then it disappeared. She misses it—the food: green curry and prawns with chili paste, that soft, squishy eggplant she’s never been able to re-create. They still have sex occasionally, though she really has to give herself pep talks or trick herself into attraction. If she squints her eyes when Eric’son top of her, he kind of looks like Eliot Spitzer, so that helps. It helps a lot.
    “Is