![]() It was once Quinn’s nursery, before everything happened. So you put it off, and before you know it, you’re too uninspired to write a novel, too tired to travel the world, too old to bother with broken things.īefore you know it, your kid is six and you are 40, and your sister is coming to stay with you, and you finally have to tackle the empty bedroom upstairs. My husband, Justin, and I always meant to have a second child, in the way people mean to do lots of things, like write a novel or travel the world or fix all the broken stuff around the house. If we call it a guest room, it will never be a nursery. I don’t call it a guest room, because in my mind, calling it a guest room means it will never be anything else. I have three weeks to tackle the thing I’ve been avoiding for nearly six years, this big looming thing - it looms now, literally, over my head: the empty room upstairs. I run down the days, stacked on top of each other like Tetris blocks. Ours is less complicated, a standard spiral-bound paper calendar that hangs on the inside of our pantry cabinet, just big enough to hold the comings and goings of our family of three. I pull out our family calendar and think of my friend Rebecca, who requires a shared Google calendar to organize the hectic lives of her family of five. ![]() “The week of April 17th,” my sister says. They usually stay with my (our) parents, who live a few minutes from us, but this year, my parents are redoing their guest bathroom, and much of the house, including Ali’s old bedroom, is taped off with swaths of thick plastic to corral construction dust. ![]() It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year. My sister always comes home with her husband for a week each April. We spin through our topics like a well-worn record: what I’m doing (figuring out how long one is supposed to cook enchiladas), how her day was (annoying one of her students is a kleptomaniac), what my six-year-old son is up to (“Quinn! Say hi to Aunt Ali!” I call to him he’s busy coloring and ignores both of us), how long it’s been since she’s seen him (“Three months!” she anguishes), how much we miss each other (a lot). I lick enchilada sauce off my finger and tap at the phone, answering the way we always do: “Meow.” Those days, she listens to a murder podcast. My sister always calls me on her way home, and when she doesn’t, I know it’s because her third-grade students have sapped her energy and hoarsened her voice to a scratchy growl. I know without looking that it will be my sister, Ali, calling as she drives home from work, a one-hour trip that shoots north from Massachusetts to a small town just over the New Hampshire border. ![]() My phone rings a little after 5 p.m., just as I’m sliding enchiladas into the oven. One … and done? / Illustration by Kaitlin Brito ![]()
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