Plague Journal, Day 13: Sick Girlfriend, sick Kid

It’s Wednesday, meaning it’s three days The Girlfriend has been achy, tender, listless. She takes two naps — before this pandemic, I think the only time in 32 months I saw her nap was on vacation in Andalucia, when we took daily siestas after boozy lunches. 

The Kid stays sick, too, with headaches, wooziness, and her weird heart-racing symptom every time she expends energy, even to take a shower. At The Co-Parent’s house, The Kid’s 14-year-old stepsister now has the same symptoms. But the two adults are fine. I’m not 100 percent — I feel tingly, tight, drained. I also nap. But once I rest my energy returns, and my symptoms may be entirely psychosomatic. Among our sick, no one is coughing, no one has a high fever.

“It’s like we’re walking around on the edge of a rug, blindfolded, with shoes on,” The Co-Parent says. “Does this feeling mean I’m near the edge? At the center? On hard wood? What am I even feeling? We’re trying to read signals without tools to translate them.”

None of the sick in my family can get tested for Covid-19. Even those with fevers who go this week to New York City hospitals may not get a test. The Times writes about Elmhurst Hospital, in Queens, where 13 people die within 24 hours. The ER is jammed; ventilators and beds are scant. A resident calls the scene “apocalyptic.” The story quotes a 35-year-old warehouse worker who, coughing and fevered, sat in the ER for six hours Sunday, stood in line for hours in the Monday rain, then stood for seven more hours Tuesday, all without getting a test. 

Germany, which since the disease’s appearance began aggressively testing and tracking the infected, as of Tuesday had more people diagnosed with Covid-19 than France (31,150 to 20,149). But the death rate in Germany is 0.4 percent, while in France it’s 4.3 percent. (So far the U.S. death rate is 1.45 percent.) Germany’s care isn’t better; they’ve simply tested and identified far more asymptomatic carriers, whom they can isolate to stop the disease’s spread. Deaths lag infections, by perhaps as much as a month; Germany’s death percentage could rise. But every country that has contained the disease for now has followed a similar strategy. Our nation's failure to secure sufficient test kits in January and February will haunt us. 

The Senate Wednesday night appears ready to provide U.S. residents and corporations $2 trillion in aid; the House will likely approve on Thursday. Number of Covid-19 infections in New York State as of Wednesday: 30,811, up 20 percent from Tuesday. Deaths: 285.

Cleaning out the cabinet beneath my sink I find gold: a thermometer, of the old-fashioned glass-tube type. I arrange to bring it, and some of the white-beans-under-crumbs dish I made yesterday, to the co-parent’s house, where replacing the sole thermometer’s dead battery proved unavailing. The Girlfriend’s children, meanwhile, need her mailbox key to retrieve mail. I think about riding my bicycle, consider the chill and my fatigue, and use The Girlfriend’s car. 

Observation: driving in New York City makes perfect sense during a pandemic lockdown. Who knew the traffic signals on Washington Avenue were synchronized? I hit greens from Atlantic Avenue to Eastern Parkway; a typical 30-minute trip takes 15. 

I drop the key; The Girlfriend’s child, perky as usual, touts from the apartment building doorway a mid-‘00s British detective show they've been binging, Rosemary & Thyme, about middle-aged women gardeners who solve mysteries. I say I’ll consider it.  

At The Co-Parent’s house, The Kid perks up enough to walk from her bed to the top of the stairs; she looks tired but reasonably clear-eyed. The Co-Parent steps out from her office, her fiancé takes a break from stove scouring (nearly every surface in their house has been cleaned multiple times over the past three days, they attest), and the four of us have a perfectly physically distanced conversation from the corners of their foyer. I linger longer than perhaps I should; it’s nice to spend time with other human beings. 

The Girlfriend perks up to teach her public university course, an interdisciplinary graduate seminar, which she co-leads while sitting in bed. Ten of the 12 students participate in the class’s first videoconference. The students’ collective mood: melancholy, laced with solace in community. Most are artists who have sacrificed to stay in grad school; their well-laid semester plans have been dynamited. Most face financial woes. Many are isolated. Several are performers whose final project plans have been rendered moot. (Performing music together via videoconference is impossible, says a singer.) Some struggle to concentrate. But for others, school work provides much-needed focus and structure. The seminar is about making art during an epidemic; in the syllabus that epidemic was AIDS, but the course is flexible enough to incorporate the new pandemic. Everyone’s glad to participate, looks forward to coming next week. The Girlfriend looks exhausted.  

I make coq au vin. It’s quite a few steps, and I’m tired. Earlier in the day, with fresher energy, I’d started a St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake; its bottom layer of yeasted dough has risen, and I need to finish. So I cream butter and sugar and corn syrup (by hand; I have no stand mixer) while The Girlfriend watches a documentary. By the time it comes out of the oven — weird but good: a slightly sour yeasty layer topped by a super-sweet layer, the combination of which has a lemon-bar texture and somehow works — The Girlfriend’s asleep. I eat two pieces by myself, crawl into bed. 

Plague Journal, Day 12: The Four Ts

“Daddy, you change things in your blog,” the kid said. 

“I do?” 

“You do.”

“For instance?” 

“When you wrote about ‘DrawingWiffWaffles,’ you wrote that it was ‘annoying.’ But in real life you said it was ‘gross.’”

“I did? That doesn’t sound like something I’d say.” 

“You did, and it does.” 

“Do I change more than individual words? Realize: you have a better memory than I do. I’m not taping these conversations. I forget stuff. And then sometimes I’m writing for effect.” 

Pause.

“You get most of it OK.” 

That was Sunday. Now it’s Tuesday, and I can’t see the kid because she’s in bed at her mom’s house, fevered, dizzy, listless. She had a croupy cough Monday night — her illnesses routinely include a croupy cough — but this morning that’s abated.

“We had to help her back to bed after breakfast,” her mom says by phone. “Her heart was racing. I’ve never felt anything like it. She hardly did anything and it was going a million miles a minute.” 

“That’s unprecedented,” I agree.

The Girlfriend, meanwhile, feels better — achy, weird body tingles, heaviness, tightness of breath, intermittent energy, but no cough, no fever. 

“I can’t tell if it’s real,” she says. She describes her symptoms as the Four Ts: “tired, tight, tingling, tender.” It’s worse when she reads the news, which she’s no longer doing at night. 

“It just makes me tense,” she says. “The fifth T.” She thinks: “Trumped out: There’s a sixth.” 

After breakfast I start to feel listless, like I’m wearing a lead vest. After lunch I feel achy, take a couple of acetaminophen. 

“You should take a nap,” The Girlfriend says. “You don’t have to write every day.” 

Writing every day feels important. I pound out an entry, say I want to take a walk. Normally I’d bike to my co-parent’s and walk with the kid. 

“I’ll come with you,” she says. 

We head into the thin spring sunshine. She’s walking at about a third of her normal pace. “I think I’ll just sit in the sun,” she says. We walk to a nearby park, find a bench.

“Don’t push it,” she says. “Job One is staying healthy.”

“Walking keeps me healthy,” I say. 

New York City remains the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter. (As of Tuesday the state has 25,665 cases, up 23 percent from Monday, three out of four in New York City.) Deaths: 271.

I go two blocks to DeKalb, head east. Pratt College has closed its campus. Bummer. The kid and I like to walk through its sculpture-filled courtyard. Some of the pieces are good, and even the bad ones shift our perspective, make us think about materials, form, beauty, craft. The city can feel relentlessly commercial but abounds in art. Now the culture industry is shuttered; my eyes and brain feel the lack.

Pedestrian traffic is thin: dog walkers, parents with strollers. Lots more masks — almost half of people are wearing them now. A young man emerges from an apartment building in a mask with black straps over his head and dual filters, discs on each cheek like miner’s lights, ready for casting in Mad Max. 

Car traffic is thinner: the quiet disquiets. I keep waking to the sound of birds; I can pick out individual cars or trucks or buses instead of the usual river of street noise. 

“It’s like living in Charleston, West Virginia,” I tell The Girlfriend, a city where every destination lies within a block of available parking. 

Most people on the street are laborers: movers, deliverers, truck drivers, sanitation workers, other city workers. Most are people of color. I turn south on Nostrand, see a dozen people awaiting a B44 bus (running for free during the crisis), keeping their distance along the block between DeKalb and Kosciuszko. All are people of color: a couple in nurses’ uniforms, men in suits, a security guard, two elderly women with shopping trolleys. It’s a visible reminder: as in most of this nation’s natural and economic calamities, the Covid-19 virus and recession won’t hit communities equally; more poor and people of color will sicken and die. 

I see several orthodox Jewish men; Satmar chasidim (originally from Hungary) have been riding the gentrification wave south from Williamsburg into Bed-Stuy for a few years now. I pass between two young men (black coats, black wide-brimmed hats) in intense conversation, speaking what sounds to me like German. (“Nein,” says one with a head shake.) Yiddish?

I head west on Clifton Place. Two clusters sit on stoops a few blocks apart: a group of oldsters with a boom box playing The Stylistics’ “People Make The World Go Round;” men in their 20s with unseen technology playing R&B-tinged rap (Childish Gambino’s latest?). The mood is friendly. Everyone practices social distancing. 

I head back to the park, turn on Lafayette. A young man on a stoop says to his phone, “I get a solid eight hours, I wake up, I tell you, I’m already exhausted. I go back to bed and sleep four more.”

I pick up The Girlfriend; we head home. She’s tired; I feel energized. I cook Cal Peternell’s recipe for white beans (soaked overnight, cooked with carrots, onion, celery, thyme, brown sugar, salt) baked with a top layer of crumbs (French bread pulsed in a food processor, mixed with olive oil and salt, baked golden crispy) and served with Swiss chard sautéed with garlic and chili pepper. Chopping, heating, stirring, tasting: the tasks and ingredients are simple, the results deeply satisfying. 

After dinner I run out of steam, take a bath. The Girlfriend’s energy returns; she takes a work call for an hour, works on a jigsaw puzzle. Before I fall asleep my co-parent sends pictures: the kid’s still in bed but has enough energy to mug for a couple of shots. It’s not compensation for missing our daily constitutional, but it helps. 

Plague Journal, Day 11: Devolution: Thermometer edition

The Girlfriend feels punky. She’s achy, listless, seems to have a fever. We can’t tell for sure because we have no thermometer.

If a case can be made for devolution — life evolving in a negative direction —  the development of household thermometers has to be on the evidence list. When I was a lad our family had a couple of mercury-filled glass-tube thermometers that did excellent service. (Mercury when heated conveniently expands by an amount directly connected to temperature.) Break one and mercury vapors are released that can in theory harm. Poison control centers rate the risk “low” since the amount of mercury is tiny, but many states banned them. 

Pharmacies are now filled with electronic thermometers, which send a voltage across their metal probes, measure current flows and resistance (heat hinders electricity flow; resistance rises), then use a microchip to convert the resistance to a temperature measurement. Swell. But throughout our daughter’s childhood we worked our way through eight or nine thermometers, of at least five different brands. Most were battery powered, some with AAs, some by tiny round-cell batteries filled with, fun fact, mercury. AA thermometers never worked, giving wonky readings or conking out after two or three uses. The round-cell batteries are designed to hold a charge for three years but in our experience died on a schedule exactly equivalent to the time between illnesses. Unlike, say, safety razors, pharmacies don’t routinely stock round-cell batteries.

I’ve lived in my apartment for three years and never needed a thermometer. (I lost one in the move; my child and I have since been fever-free.) In the Covid-19 era, thermometers turn out to be harder to find than gold nuggets or toilet paper. Online searches this month revealed either no stocks or confiscatory prices ($80 or $100). I visited four Brooklyn pharmacies, all of which were out of stock and told me to come back within days for their next shipment; return visits revealed that the promised shipments contained no (or an already sold number of) thermometers.

At month’s beginning the Girlfriend also had no thermometer. She ordered one online that turned out to gauge water rather than body temperature. She called her father, who mailed an extra from his Western state. Since The Girlfriend is staying with me while her son uses her bedroom, I use The Girlfriend’s car to drive in the late afternoon through a cold rain across mostly empty Brooklyn streets to her apartment building, where her daughter runs downstairs in fuzzy oversized cat slippers and hands me Pa’s thermometer. I drive back. Brooklyn feels more forbidding in a vehicle, with less human contact (even that allowed by the socially sanctioned six feet), more haste, more felt urgency. Pa’s thermometer was apparently bought in Eastern Europe, where he often travels; it measures in Centigrade. Thirty-seven degrees, it turns out, is the conversion of the awkward 98.6 F. The Girlfriend hits the 37-degree red line twice: normal. Still, we decide to use extra caution and to sleep apart. 

While she rests I call my best friend, who lives alone upstate in a town of about 25,000. He’s been sick for 10 days: aches, listlessness, mild coughing, and, oddly, the opposite of a fever, with temperatures never rising above 97 F. It’s allergy season, and he’s routinely afflicted. Maybe it’s just regular flu. He’s been isolating, working from home, which his non-profit management job allows and which he likes. Then he awoke last night from a sound sleep, unable to draw a breath. He stifled his panic, used self-calming techniques, regained equanimity and regular breathing. His doctor this morning via videoconference told him he’s doing everything right, and not to come in unless his fever spiked or breathing woes persisted, as in pneumonia. He may have Covid-19, she said; we don’t know much about the virus, and it’s exhibiting different symptoms in different regions. (Seattle, for instance, is seeing many sufferers with digestive woes, which has not been true in Wuhan.) But we don’t have enough tests to check all but the most likely cases. His spirits remain high; he’s not worrying. 

Just before I head to my daughter’s bedroom for my night of solo sleep, my co-parent texts from their house: the kid is sick. Headache. Sore throat. Slight fever, perhaps: their thermometer battery died, so who knows? I offer to head out in the morning to scout more pharmacies, but she counsels against it; her fiancé needs to pick up medicine in the morning, and he can shop for batteries. In the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter, with the city under lockdown, every trip will likely mean intersecting with a disease vector. 

Are these illnesses around me real? Routine flus and colds and allergies? Psychosomatic? Physical manifestations of ungodly stress? In South Korea or China my kid, exhibiting a fever, would be immediately tested; if her temps were high, she’d be taken to a clinic and isolated, her family quarantined. Here? We’ll sit tight unless she needs to go to a hospital. Will that system work? For her? For New York City? For smaller hospitals upstate? For the nation?

As of Monday night Covid-19 cases in New York state total 20,875, up 5,707 from Sunday, or 38 percent. The number of dead more than doubles, to 157.

Plague Journal, Day 10: Found poem, Patti Smith's "12"

Sunday. Feelings come in waves; today I feel scared. It’s colder. Prospect Park remains busy but less dense. The park’s southwest corner, where Caribbean folks gather for reggae, drums, barbecue, had a sizable party Saturday evening; tonight at dusk sees but a ghostly remnant. A half-mile away at the parade ground another group of Caribbeans play spirited soccer. It’s their last gasp, presumably. New York is shutting down for all but necessary workers at 8 p.m., and Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio say police will break up large gatherings. 

The spread of Covid-19 cases in New York continues unabated: 15,168, up 4,812 from Saturday (46 percent). 

Kai Kupferschmidt, a molecular biologist and journalist, writes, “The virus has gone around the world at astonishing speed.” According to the World Health Organization, it took three months to reach 100,000 cases, 12 days to reach 200,000, four days to hit 300,000.

Kupferschmidt cites the world’s odd complacency in January and February while the virus raged in Wuhan, despite China’s sophisticated public health system. Bergamo showed the West how the virus can overwhelm a community’s hospitals, but even then governments in the U.S. and England acted late (too few tests; limited physical distancing). Peak ICU need in Wuhan came four weeks after the peak in Covid-19 cases, so the cost of inaction to New York City and London is pending. Costs to Latin America and Africa will come later. 

“We are all Wuhan now,” Kupferschmidt writes. What worked there: ruthless state action to identify cases, isolate them, find their contacts, quarantine them. We’re not following that pattern. And how long can we isolate entire communities? And will isolation work? Wuhan remains on lockdown; the virus threatens to resurface in other parts of China. Cases in Singapore and Hong Kong, which took aggressive early action, ticked up this week; the dean of Hong Kong University Medicine cites what he calls “response fatigue” after two months of quarantining. 

We hold our family phone call, which we’re doing weekly rather than monthly during the crisis.

— My mom, 89, is fine. A few neighbors in her 55-plus northern California community gathered on courtyard benches to chat Saturday, which she describes as a surprisingly powerful gift. It will rain this week, but perhaps they can use the community’s good-sized common room. 

— My older sister is helping her boss, her Western city’s mayor, connect to his meetings by videoconference; the technology bamboozles him. Her husband, who has a variety of health woes, had cataract surgery in his one “good” eye (through which he has quite limited vision; the surgery could help enormously) postponed because it’s not an essential medical procedure. Her son, a teacher who bartends summers at an arts festival, will lose income when the festival cancels. 

— My younger sister, a university librarian, drove Saturday from the town of her mid-Atlantic college campus (now closed) to her New York City apartment and is happy to be in her upper Manhattan neighborhood near her boyfriend and me and others in her community while she works remotely. 

— My brother, who runs his own business selling flooring to retail outlets across California, faces financial uncertainty. California’s shelter-in-place order has the construction industry scrambling. “Critical infrastructure,” including housing construction, plumbing, and electrical work, is exempt. But most home renovations are presumably not. No one knows which jobs can proceed. Some of his customers are open, some not. His main flooring supplier suspended operations. He’s got long-term projects to prepare; he may use the slowdown to change his product line and customer base. But none of that will generate short-term income. Will his business qualify for government loans or grants? Who knows? 

On our Prospect Park walk my daughter says “everyone” in her house — her mom, her mom’s fiancé, the fiancé’s 14-year-old daughter — is driving her crazy. I tell her The Girlfriend and I, battle-scarred relationship veterans, agreed from the start, two-and-a-half years ago, never to move in together. We’ve vacationed together but otherwise never spent more than three or four nights together in a week. The intermittent distance suits us. Now, suddenly, because her son had to leave his dorm and is living in her bedroom, we’re cohabitating. 

“Annoyances?” I tell the kid. “The Girlfriend makes two cups of espresso every morning and leaves coffee grounds on the countertop, every single time. Her dishwashing is, by the standards of either of your grandfathers, terrible. She never cleans out the kitchen sink. She never turns out the bathroom light. She never puts the tops back on anything — she just places it, like a decoy, so you think the top is on and when you lift it the entire bottle spills. Our two toothbrushes are different colors but she uses them indiscriminately. Same with our towels. She likes a lot of pillows and just brought two new ones; I sleep with one flat pillow, so now I have to throw four pillows on the floor every time I want to go to sleep. Should I continue?”

“Please, no,” the kid says.

I haven’t thought this conversation through. In fact, The Girlfriend and I are doing fine. Later, I wish I’d said: “Living with other people is hard. Annoyances are real. They’re relevant. You need to learn how to process them. Some of them you may need to negotiate. And some of them you’re going to have to let go. Families are tricky, and right now, if you’re lucky, they’re pretty much all we’ve got.”

My mood remains apocalyptic. A social media friend says she’s listening to a Patti Smith album of cover songs called Twelve. I stream it. The album is imperfect; some songs (“Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” say) are clear missteps. Smith delves deep into no one’s catalog; with a couple of exceptions, each song is among the artist’s biggest hits. She performs no radical make-overs; each song is in its original tempo, with modest arrangement changes. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”’s banjo-and-violin treatment is as experimental as it gets.) 

Still, I listen over and over. Smith strikes me as a singer from a saloon in a distant colony, like the town in Altman’s “McCabe And Mrs. Miller” but more sere: civilization’s last dusty outpost. She’s leaning against the bar, unreadable, lank hair swinging in her face. She knows everybody, is friends with maybe the barkeep, maybe the pianist, maybe nobody. She can size up a stranger in seconds. She can drink you under the table and beat you at cards, quoting Rimbaud or Burroughs when you fold your last shitty hand. She walks to the piano, closes her eyes, breathes deep, and kicks her world-weary voice into a spare rendition of “Gimme Shelter,” talk-singing the heat of a street burning like a red-coal carpet, or “Helpless,” making you wonder about a town in north Ontario. She’s a signpost marking the existence of rock’n’roll, what it means, what it conveys, its potency, its ephemerality. The post may not stand much longer, but it’s what we’ve got, and it matters.  

Twelve 

(Found poem, based on songs from Patti Smith’s “Twelve”)

A storm is threatening my very life today.

The clock says it’s time to close now.

There's a room where the light won't find you;

The chains are locked and tied across the door.

I feel stupid and contagious,

And I've gone by the point of caring

The way we look to a distant constellation.

And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion,

They've been wasting most their days in remembrance of ignorance.

When you think you've had too much, 

Remember what the dormouse said:

Eden is burning. 

Either brace yourselves for elimination,

Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.

Trumpets and violins I can hear in the distance.

I think they're calling our names.

— By Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Roland Orzabal, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain, Gregg Allman, Paul Simon, George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, Michael Stipe, Grace Slick, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix. 

Plague Journal, Day 9: Great brownie debate

Saturday's numbers: 10,356 Covid-19 cases in New York State (up 1,958 from Friday, a 23 percent increase). Six in 10 of those are in New York City (6,211). 

Late afternoon, just before I leave on my bicycle to pick up The Kid, the Co-Parent texts: “Can you bring her a brownie as a surprise?” 

“They’re at The Girlfriend’s. I could stop there first.” 

“That’s OK.” 

The temperature has dropped 30 degrees from Friday, but Prospect Park is packed. The farmer’s market at Grand Army Plaza is closing down, with hundreds of people still congregating. Does Saturday market day still make sense? I keep moving. 

“How are things here?” I ask the Co-Parent as we watch The Kid put on her shoes. I know 95 percent of the parenting rests on her, atop a stressful managerial job which is in full-time corona-crisis mode; plus she’s in a household with her fiancé and his 14-year-old daughter; plus her fiancé’s 21-year-old son, who lives elsewhere in Brooklyn, has been sick with a non-viral disease. I’m sensitive to the difficulties, appreciative of her labor. 

“Well, we got in a screaming match a while ago, but we’re OK now,” she says. 

“Proximal cause?” 

“Brownies.” 

“Sounds serious.” 

Our kid wanted to make brownies from a package in the kitchen. The 14-year-old, who was out with her dad, had requested the brownies be bought. The Co-Parent thought perhaps the 14-year-old wanted to make as well as eat the brownies, thought it best to wait for her return. The kid responded negatively; things spiraled. I listen to them both tell the story, the kid with mild agitation. 

“This is exactly the kind of crisis that’s causing sheltering families all over America to melt down,” I say. 

“Or over chocolate chip cookies,” the Co-Parent says. 

“Rice Krispie treats,” I say. 

“Pecan pie,” she says. 

Suddenly, The Kid, seriously upset: “Stop laughing at me! It’s not funny!” 

Co-Parent: “We’re not laughing at you!” 

Kid: “Yes you are! You always gang up on me!” 

Me: “We’re really not.”

Kid: “You always do this! It’s not fair!” She stomps out to the street, dudgeon high. 

I hold up my hand to stop her mom’s protests, close the door, walk to the street. The Kid is heading — still stomping— north, toward the park. I catch up. 

“I was thinking we could go for a treat,” I say. 

“No!” 

“Okay.” We head north. The stomping abates. 

“Adults always take the other adults’ side when they’re fighting with kids, no matter what it’s about!” 

“I hear you. I think that’s mostly right. But it’s not universal. When The Girlfriend and her two kids were fighting yesterday, I told everyone they were partly right. The Girlfriend was right that her kids needed to step up and be more active. And her kids were right that The Girlfriend needed to stop being angry about it, since that didn’t help anyone.” 

“You and Mom always side against me.” 

“Actually, in the Great Brownie Debate, I’m on your side. I think you could have made them today, then gone out and bought more if the 14-year-old wanted to bake.”

Silence for a while. The Kid asks, “What was the treat?” 

“Oh. I thought we could stop by The Girlfriend’s. I made brownies yesterday, and they’re at her house. You want some?” 

“Yes.” 

We turn, head south for the 10-minute walk. When we get there, The Girlfriend’s 22-year-old comes to the apartment-house door with a foil-covered plate; I open it, take three. We chat for a bit from a 6-feet distance, leave. 

After a bite of her second The Kid says, “These are the best brownies you've ever made.” 

“Why?”

“The texture’s right. And they’re not too chocolate-y.” 

“It’s The Girlfriend’s recipe. Actually, it’s Mimi’s recipe. Mimi’s brownies. I can’t remember who Mimi is. The Girlfriend’s aunt? Great aunt? Great-grandmother?” 

“Is it one of the twins?” The Girlfriend’s grandmother was a twin; a pastel portrait of her and her sister as teenagers hangs in her house. The Kid’s interest in twins is long-standing. 

“It might be. I kind of fudged the recipe a bit. No pun intended. You know how The Girlfriend’s texts are always short and cryptic? Her recipe was like that, too. ‘Melt 1/3 butter. 2 chocolate.’ I’m pretty sure that was one-third cup of butter and two chocolate squares. But my baker’s chocolate squares were small, and I wondered if I should use four. I compromised and used three. I should have used another one.” 

“No, you shouldn’t have. You always use too much chocolate. These are perfect.” 

“You want the last one?” 

“Don’t you want any?” 

“I had some last night. Let's split it.” 

More people wear masks today — maybe one in four? We observe the styles: over mouth but not nose, atop heads or below chins, one double mask, a couple of Halloween-style fright masks. No judgment: Any mask is better than no mask, and we can’t tell who needs them, who might be overreacting. Better to grant the benefit of the doubt. Yesterday, I say, The Girlfriend saw an unmasked man kiss a woman’s masked lips. Everybody’s trying to figure it out, I say. 

We stroll back to the Co-Parent’s house. 

Later, The Girlfriend says she’d have taken my Co-Parent’s side in the Great Brownie Debate. 

“Really? Why?” 

“I’ve tried to blend a family. You don’t want to favor your own children too much. Better to err on the side of the step-kids.” 

“Another thing to be grateful for," I say. "You and I aren't blending families. Life’s hard enough.”