I even got fancy, sautéing onions and chopping parsley, while Bailey built a sand castle on the once-gleaming kitchen floor. I did a double take. Yes, she had crumbled what was probably an entire box of graham crackers into some sort of sandlike state. She sat in the middle, gleefully trailing her grubby fingers through the layer like it was her personal zen garden.

“Oh, Bailey,” I groaned.

She sucked on her crumb-coated fingers, but I couldn’t even be upset about the mess when the state of the entire kitchen smacked me like a frying pan. It was a disaster. The counters were piled with food in varying states of cooked.

I laid the layers of lasagna and stuck it in the oven, then set about cleaning. First I put away all the produce and ingredients. Then I grabbed the pan to wash it and burned my hand in the process.

Ouch. Leave it to some fancy brand of cookware to actually have fewer features than a cheapo knockoff, like say, plastic handles for safety. Probably they were expecting rich people not to be idiots and spring for pot holders. Fair enough.

Bailey watched me curiously as I ran my hand under the cold water, and I realized I’d been making monkeylike sounds in my pain.

A smile slid across my face. “Mommy silly?”

In response she puffed up proudly and presented her hand, covered in crumbs. “Cracker!”

My shoulders slumped. “Right.”

Although I had plenty left to do cleaning my own mess, I figured I’d fix the floor first. For all I knew, he’d take one look at the nuclear wasteland that was his kitchen and order us out into the street. Okay, probably not that drastic, but it wouldn’t be good.

He wasn’t used to living with a kid. Even if he was, graham cracker snowfall was not an everyday occurrence. So I cleaned like a woman possessed. I would not even mention that regular graham crackers did not crumble on touching them. It was probably the grains, being whole as they were, but he wouldn’t hear that from me.

Possibly I was becoming unhinged. A hysterical laugh bubbled up, but I ruthlessly forced it down. I was going to make this work. Everything was going to be fine, and if it wasn’t…well. Well.

I swept up the crumbs, though the wet ones got caught in the broom’s bristles and had to be washed out. Then I went back over the floor with paper towels, but the particles had wormed their way into the grout, as if it could camouflage itself with cement. I scrubbed until my hand was tired, but this called for stronger stuff.

I ducked my head into the cabinet under the sink, rummaging for some harsh chemical shit to wipe those suckers out.

“Uh, Allie?”