I’ve started looking into the big picture window before I even enter to see if I can catch the telltale two-toned hair and wide-eyed stare of Mary Tampa Moore. She’s not here today. I wonder why. Did someone raise an eyebrow at her and send her scurrying for cover? Moreover, the table appears to be empty and, when I walk in, there’s a handful of free biscotti left at the counter. Look at that: Everything’s coming up Miles. Who cares why she’s a no-show?

I’ve just grabbed my coffee and biscotti and gone over to the sugar and cream station when I sense something wheeling by in my peripheral vision. I glance over.

It is . . . a stroller. Inside of which is a child of maybe two or three. Is that too old for a stroller? Jordan and I used to joke that children always seem to leap from tiny, burrito-sized wraps to enormous slabs of chunky thighs and grubby hands who somehow look too big to be engaging in whatever activity they’re engaged in: drinking a bottle, sucking on a pacifier, whining. “Have you ever seen a kid who’s in the in-between phase?” I asked her one day, not long after we’d gotten engaged. “Do you, one night, put down a tiny blob of indeterminate features and then return the next day to hear Seth MacFarlane’s voice coming out of someone who looks like a Halloween costume of a gigantic baby?” She laughed, as expected. Less expected was when she said to me, “I don’t know. But let’s find out soon.” I don’t think I ever loved her more than at that moment, when I looked at her and knew we were both envisioning the same future.

Anyway. This stroller is being pushed by a different mom, a woman in her mid-thirties who is very, very pregnant (definitely plus six weeks). She looks like she might have been awake for about as long as I have, minus the benefit of a long run or a cup of coffee. Her child is screaming, and I can hear her hissing under her breath, over and over again, “Nathan. Please.”

This causes no change in Nathan’s behavior. But now they are settling down at the large table while she takes out an assortment of jangling, screeching, singing, and flashing toys from underneath the stroller and places them on the table in front of the red-faced Nathan, who merely screams louder with every object that emerges. The last thing she takes out is an iPad, which is the sole thing he finally lunges for—immediately quieting down mid-sob.