Teddy is still looking at me like I’m telling him there is a Santa Claus: like he wants to believe but knows he shouldn’t.

“Is she gonna die, too?”

* * *

Long before the sling, during the fall before my mother got sick, when the universe of our tiny immediate family was still in perfect alignment and I was the sun of Teddy’s world, we got into a new routine: once a week or so, after school pickup, I’d take him to Costco for a snack: a churro or a slice of pizza or some ridiculous thing they called a chicken bake (chicken, cheese, bacon bits, all wrapped up in a cheese-covered crust). Costco was right off the highway that connected school to home, and it seemed as good a place as any to kill that strange and slightly sad gap in time between after-school and going-home, especially as the fall would wear on and it got colder and darker earlier and earlier.

We didn’t go to Costco every day: most pre-sling days I’d take the dog for a walk; some days Teddy would have a playdate or stay a few hours at the after-school program, building forts in the woods behind the school or shooting baskets in the all-purpose room that’s kind of a gym but isn’t really or playing made-up card games with the younger kids, imagining that they were all his siblings. Other days we’d just come home and he’d play outside if the kids on the street were there or he’d watch TV and I’d make him a snack—a little frozen pizza or some macaroni and cheese from a box or a bowl of ramen noodles, torn from the plastic package, the bowl on a saucer with a napkin underneath to catch the spills. But for a few months we’d gone to Costco on a pretty regular basis, and while it wasn’t something I bragged about on social media, since his churro or slice of pizza or chicken bake didn’t come with a side of organic broccoli or a soccer practice or a French horn lesson, it was something he liked to do—with me—and so, we’d do it.

I loved taking Teddy to Costco and sitting and eating and talking at a white indoor picnic bench with a red plastic umbrella under all that unnatural artificial turkey-neck-revealing fluorescent light. It was my guilty pleasure, what I looked forward to most every week. Because even then, years before it happened, I knew that there would come a time when I’d be begging him to do things like that. Being a child’s primary focus is temporary, fleeting; I knew that the aperture was closing, that the light on me would eventually dim and I’d be replaced with friends.

Once he’d decide what to order, I’d pay for it, then he’d find a table and get the napkins while I waited for the food and got the little cups for free water. Life is made up of tiny rituals, and those were ours, the ones I loved most, especially the part when I would find him and set the food on the table and sit down across from him. While I watched him eat, we’d talk about his day, my day, his friends, my friends; we’d talk about which we liked better, plain pizza or pepperoni, churros or fried dough, the Stones or the Beatles; and while the questions and answers would vary, the feel of our Costco trips was always the same: it was special time. Joy is joy, no matter where you find it or what you’re doing, and those afternoons at Costco, sitting together under all that harsh light, was our version of special time.