Ethan peeked out between the stage curtains. I checked my teacher’s watch with the big analog face and nodded to him. Ethan disappeared again. Lorna and I walked to the back of the room. I flicked the light switches repeatedly. “Please silence all personal electronic devices, including laptops and cell phones,” Lorna and I repeated over and over again like flight attendants.

The audience—parents and grands and siblings—chittered and chattered away as everybody took their seats.

I felt John’s presence before I saw him. My heart actually skipped a beat when I picked him out in the back row, dressed in a charcoal gray suit and red tie. He looked handsome and intelligent and kind and everything you’d want the guy you were hoping to spend the rest of your life with to be. It had been his idea to come watch the performance. I want to see you shine, he’d said.

In all the years we were married, my wasband had never once come to a Bayberry performance. Although, of course, my life being my life, he was here now with his replacement wife to watch their twins perform. Not only that, but he was waving at me from his seat. I ignored him, smiled at John.

My dad and Johnny slid into the seats beside John. Behave, I mouthed to them. I wasn’t even pissed that I knew they’d come more for Polly than for me.

Kate Stone and the teachers filled in the front row. They wound up the brightly colored yarn and piled up the poster board signs and handed it all to me like a neatly wrapped Christmas present.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Break a leg,” my bitch of a boss said.

“Not with our health insurance,” Lorna mumbled as we walked away.

The Bayberry students were jammed into the green room, which was a long narrow room off the backstage area. They were sitting cross-legged on the floor with their assistant teachers.

Ethan and I smiled at everybody. “Shhh,” we said as we put our fingers to our lips. The kids’ eyes lit up as they put their fingers to their own lips and shhh-ed.

I walked the third-year students who were playing the two dogs and two cats to the short podium Ethan had made out of repurposed wood pallets, which we’d placed near the front of the stage and off to stage right. They’d stay there and recite their dialog as the song and dance numbers unfurled behind them.

Ethan joined us on stage. When he turned on the microphone attached to the podium, it made a noise like a fart. The students playing the dogs and cats completely lost it. The kids behind us in the green room joined in with an explosion of laughter that carried right out to the audience. The audience started laughing, too. In true preschool fashion, the kids who could fart on command began doing just that.