“Especially consonants,” declares an unfazed Dobbins.
When he bumps into Hanh and his mom again, it is at the Halloween parade. Pete has been joking that he is a high-dpi replica of himself. Sasha is a Gypsy princess. Bethany completely got her ready but then had to go teach. “On Halloween?” he said in disbelief, as if it is a sacrosanct holiday, during which the holding of classes was inconceivable. The upshot is that Pete gets to march with Sasha, and when he spots Ms. Hanh he’s sure glad Bethany couldn’t make it.
“Hey, it’s Hanh!” he yells to Sasha, as if she’s been asking about him nonstop. “Remember Hanh?” She’s scratching her head, probably only to shake out the Gypsy glitter that has glommed there.
They make their way over through the crowd. Hahn is a stingray. He looks pretty realistic, his tail rendered out of something spindly and sharp, maybe a coat hanger wrapped in fabric.
“Awesome costume, Hanh!” he says, giving the kid a high five.
“And look at you, a darling Gypsy!” Hanh’s mom says.
Sasha backs away shyly and conceals herself behind Pete’s leg, and he feels a pinch of shame that they have merely dressed Sasha as the latest developmentally appropriate gender cliché instead of being, like Hanh and his mom, fiercely original. Unless, of course, there’s some popular cartoon stingray out there that hasn’t been brought to his attention yet, a goofy but irresistible stingray who is always getting into trouble for poking everyone inadvertently and gets exiled or saves the reef from some external environmentally devastating force, skewering nasty oil riggers and winding up a hero, domesticated and garlanded within the undersea community.
“Sasha, you remember Hanh and. .”
“Ariana.” At last.
“Pete,” he says, relieved, wanting to write it down but not needing to because it seems obvious now that this has to be her name. He adds, “Sasha’s not usually shy. Honey, what is this?”
A woman Pete remembers from playgroup calls out to him from the crowd and makes her way over. He can’t recollect her name, but the daughter is Esther, and now there’s a beet-faced being in a carriage, but Pete can’t quite tell whether it’s a boy or a girl. Esther was always shier than Sasha, retreating, you might say, and secretly when they’d go to playgroup, he was proud that his own daughter was more a risk taker, attaining greater altitude and veering near but not in the road and every so often taking things away from others. Esther still looks prim and proper, her costume expressing her essence sartorially. Pete can never remember the names of any of the parents, but it doesn’t matter — like the owners of sports teams or music producers, they barely exist.
“Esther, are you a completely elegant lady?” he asks in his sweetest Dadese, and she blushes, nodding, and for once he’s said exactly the right thing. Now Ariana introduces herself to Esther’s mom and he gets the mother’s name and then loses it because he’s focused on Ariana’s lips, and then comes the blare of megaphone. The parade lurches forth, past the tiny Unitarian church and the giant white-stuccoed Presbyterian church, which for some reason makes him think about the person who painted it and, in turn, makes him wish that he had a job like that, lobbing fresh glop on the side of something, anything. They go by the Montessori school, hang a right at the world’s smallest graveyard. The whole time, he and Ariana are talking, and every few minutes she has to grab Hanh and retract his stingray barb from someone, a ninja and a robot and a belligerent carton of orange juice. Sasha, meanwhile, has bonded with Esther and the two of them are skipping along like lifelong playmates. This affords the chance, kind of, to actually talk to Ariana. She and Hanh live in those new Riverbelt Apartments. She moved here to be with a boyfriend, whom subsequently she left. Hanh, she adopted from Hanoi before she met the bf, and she has no qualms about raising him alone. Right now she is working at the vintage clothing store, hence the fantastic fabric that comprises Hanh’s stingray suit.
In turn, he finds himself touching on his own struggles — the divorce, its effects on Sasha, that it’s tough to get seed money these days if you’re starting up your own company. A tough time to raise a child, no easier for a brainchild. He says this as if it is true for him, not just Angus, and in the marching he starts to believe it, no more dubious than skeletons walking and zombies shuffling. An older guy, a bird-watcher, dresses every year as an obscure bird; this year he is the Mauritius fody. They stride next to the high school and in an age-old town tradition the older kids are there also in costumes, more grown-up costumes, a slew of boy-wizards and some wit who’s a blackberry bush except sporting the handheld devices in lieu of plump, juicy berries.
They get so wrapped up that it takes Sasha to wander back and point out that Hanh’s protuberance is completely tangled in Esther’s skirts, and she is struggling to pull away. Esther’s mother says sharply, “Can the parent or guardian of this stingray please remove him from my daughter?”
Pete rushes in, still high on conversation, swirling, something real, like he’s just been gathering morels, communing with fecund things of the earth. He steers them to the sidewalk, out of parade traffic, kneeling with hands on their shoulders. “It looks like we’ve got ourselves a situation,” he announces. “These stingrays,” he says, patting Hanh on the head, “have been washing up near the shore and bothering — not bothering, bumping into swimmers. And these lovely ladies in their fancy old-fashioned swim outfits have been getting hooked on these stingrays. Nobody’s happy about this, right?” He can see Hanh’s eyes through the flaps of brown vintage fabric and Esther’s expression, and the crazy thing is that they’re buying into it, nodding along like he’s an emergency marine biologist, there to rescue them. Hanh pulls back with a rip, causing Esther to cry out, and Pete says, “Yikes! Those stingrays can cause a little damage.”
“But no blood, right?” Ariana’s joined him at kid level. And the kids are disentangled, Esther leaping into her mom’s arms.
Esther’s mother gives them a withering look as she pulls Esther away. No thank you, no nothing.
Ariana says, “See what I told you?” to Hanh, but she and Pete are unable to contain themselves at how uptight Esther’s mom is and, by extension, Esther, although the girl was kind of a good sport about it, the more Pete thinks about it.
This time, they exchange information and agree to get together for coffee and, as Pete puts it, “to discuss the stingray situation.” She leans in and whispers to him, “You handled that really well.” In the car on the way to her mom’s Sasha says, “Was that Hanh’s fault or Esther’s fault or nobody’s fault?” He realizes that she was taking it all in, and while he might be lying he doesn’t feel guilty when he says, “You know, that one, I think, nobody was to blame.”
That November, they start getting together for coffee. Hanh is in afternoon kindergarten, and Pete splits his days between a couple of not-yet-expired contracts in the area and Angus’s latest projects, as well as getting really adept at the game Docent, which involves leading tour groups around a museum where the works of art come violently to life and do things that might occur in an anxious art history major’s nightmares. He’s reached the Guernica screen, which is basically like an animated version of the painting, unlike some of the earlier ones, which are more liberally embellished, such as Botticelli’s Venus having laser-beam eyes. The cool thing is that you actually learn a tiny bit about art and leadership while you are playing.