In the afternoon I hung the laundry all around the house, and E and I pretended we lived in a forest, where all the children had, one day, quite suddenly and with no warning flown away, leaving only all their clothes, hanging on the branches. Weee we whispered to each other from among the branches, swinging.

At the park, I began to watch another mother with her children. She also came most afternoons to sit by the pump. She had a baby, a boy, maybe six months old, that she wore snuggled in one of those complicated wraps. She seemed to spin into and out of it, the wrap, without trouble, as if love made such a thing easy. She had another child, also a boy, about E’s age, who walked beside her along the clipped green hedges that lined the park, his hand in her hand, the space between them so lovely, like a garden, like a kingdom between their hips.

She carried her things easily, her bags I mean. A blanket for the baby, the toy the older child particularly wanted, snacks, a yellow washcloth, water bottles. She spoke with her baby as if they were in constant conversation, meeting his eyes, making him laugh. Rolling a ball to him over and over as if she could never tire of it. Singing to him. Leaving him easily, to push her son on the swing, to find his truck, to fill a bucket with water as if this was no trouble. Well, I was fascinated by all of it, the way she moved, the way she was, the way she loved them. I drank it up, maybe, is the way to say what I did, what I was doing watching her at the park. Drinking.

She was beautiful, her face was like a collection of interesting things arranged perfectly along the high shelf of her cheekbones. Arranged, as if to say look at this, or this, or this. A long nose, thick eyebrows, one crooked tooth. There was some wildness about her that I couldn’t place. That made me look back at her wondering. I couldn’t tell if her quiet poise meant calm or terror. I couldn’t tell what kind of animal she was.

Men walking past the park would catch their eyes on her. They would get caught up and tangled like that, for a second, for a half a second. Fathers meeting their children in the park after work would hesitate for one heartbeat maybe, at the edge of her blanket, as if they’d just then remembered dropping something.

She never looked up though, at the hesitating heart-stopped fathers. She wouldn’t have. I knew she wouldn’t have. I watched the way she held the ball she tossed to her baby, the way she pushed her boy in a swing, the way she took her son’s hand as they walked, so I felt I knew these things. I called her Nell, to myself, inside my head, when I thought about her. She smiled at me once, and I smiled back. She had the most delightful gap between two of her teeth, not her front ones. See? I could have said to her. See? Who we are? Who could reproach us? Who could think a single bad thought about us? We who are doing the most beautiful thing in the world.