Page 143

She looks at the truck for a while.

“Upstairs on the left,” I tell the driver.

He is a man with four stops after mine and I am not going to make his morning worse to prove a point to somebody in Minnesota.

It takes them fifty minutes. The bed is better than any bed I have ever slept in. The lamp is the kind of object that photographs well in a room nobody uses. The desk is solid oak with a drawer that closes itself at the end, slowly, the way expensive things close.

The desk is not green.

Tova comes back from Gabi’s and stops in her doorway.

“Whose is this?”

“Yours.”

She goes to the desk first. Not the bed. She puts one hand flat on the top of it, then crouches and opens the drawer and shuts it and opens it again, and watches it close itself, twice.

“It’s showing off.”

“Mm.”

“Mamma.”

“Yes.”

“This is a real desk.”

“It is.”

She gets up on the bed with her shoes on, and I let her, and she bounces once with her arms out, and she is twelve and she is six and she is going to be furious with me about something before the week is out.

“Did Colt buy this?”

There are several true sentences available. I select the one that leaves my daughter out of it.

“Yes. He did.”

“Are you going to send it back?”

Her face is completely still while she asks me that. She has been in rooms where the answer was yes. She was four the first time and she does not remember it and she behaves as though she does.

“No.”

“You’re not going to think about it first?”

“It is your room. It is your desk. Nobody is taking it out of here.”

She breathes out, and then she is off the bed and back at the desk with her hand on the top of it again.

“Can I paint it?”

“Paint it.”

“Green.”

“I know.”

The drawing has been on our refrigerator since last February. A desk in profile, green, four drawers down the left side and a slot underneath for paper, and the words MY DESK in capitals with the S the wrong way around, which she did on purpose and will deny.