Offering, I think, and words tumble around in my head like Scrabble tiles. Officious. Official. Offensive. Off. Off with her fucking head.

The twins join Steven’s cleanup parade without too much objection, and Sonia and I are left at the table.

“You all right, darling?” I say. Then I place a hand to her forehead. A moment ago, my girl was sweating like a gin and tonic forgotten on a porch in July; now she’s settled down a bit. Not sweating, but far from a cool cucumber.

This is the worst of all of it. This, right now, watching Sonia track Steven, watching her grow more calm with every step he takes toward the kitchen. It’s the worst, because now I know what Sonia is really afraid of.

I don’t speak, only cock my head toward the place where Steven is rinsing bits of ground beef and potato off plates, humming some old tune.

And she nods.

Steven was eleven when his only sister arrived—almost old enough to be a father himself, if only in the biological sense. He had a way with her, kept her distracted and happy, changed the crappy diapers without more than a “Hey, Mom, this is some crappy nappy!” Few tweens learn baby sign language, but my eldest son was one of them. By barely older than a year, Sonia had the signs for her entire world down: eat, drink, sleep, dolly, and—her all-time favorite—go poo. Steven dubbed this particular gesture, often accompanied by the spoken words, a translation of some primitive language, a system so arcane that no one, not even Dr. Jean McClellan, would be able to piece it together.

He launched into a tune so grotesquely bastardized I didn’t know what to think. Patrick nearly spilled his morning coffee at the sound of Steven singing.

There were the Police and their doo-doo-doo-da-da-da—or however it goes; there was that Lou Reed piece about how the “colored girls” sing “do-do-do”—ultra-racist now, but it was Lou Reed and he could get away with all kinds of shit back then; there were those Motown bands and those white people who wanted to sound like they were a Motown band and there was every other songwriter in the modern world who stumbled over a lyric and ended up filling the space with something that rhymed with the kiddie word for defecation. And, finally, there was my own son crooning along to the entire musical canon from Brahms to Beyoncé, replacing each and every word with “poo.”

The memories make the present doubly hard, but, finally, I say it.

“Did Steven come to your school today?”

A nod.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

No. She does not.

“Story, then?” I say.