I mean, rilly

It was regulation on base housing to have your name and rank on the front of your government housing. We were issued the little white metal letters the day we moved in. Denny had them in his hands with the keys and paperwork and I’d slotted them onto the metal rack outside our new house before we even got the kids out of the car.

SRA & MRS Dean

I stood looking at them now, sliding them along, closing the gaps between the letters, evening out the spaces between our names. I wondered if it was standard for the man’s title to go first, even if the military member was a woman or if that woman outranked her husband. I wondered if you had to have someone’s name up, even if they weren’t there.

It was three minutes to nine. The speech therapist was supposed to arrive at nine. The company we’d been referred to had a huge waiting list but I’d called them every day since the diagnosis. They finally decided to send someone out just to shut me up.

A woman pulled up in a gray sedan and parked across the street. She stopped, tilted her rear view mirror and touched the edges of her mouth. From the way she was brushing crumbs off her chest, it looked like she ate her breakfast on the way over. She leant over the passenger seat to gather her things and caught my eye. I didn’t want to look like a stalker so I rearranged the letters on the door again.

MRS & SRA Dean

Denny wasn’t there. I figured I outranked him because of that.

Miss Kathy was taller than she appeared in the car with a mop of wiry wet curls that reminded me of Lionel Ritchie. The ceiling in our little one-story house wasn’t low but she stooped nonetheless. It took me a few minutes to realise she might be doing that for me, on account of my shortness and I wished she wouldn’t because I didn’t feel short until she did that.

I ushered her into the living room which I had cleaned to American hygiene standards. I got up way before the girls and swept and mopped and put everything messy out of the way, out of Sammie’s reach. It was even tidy after breakfast, after we got back from taking Lola to day care, but when Kathy and I walked into the living room, it had already been annihilated. Cushions, pillows, blankets and sheets were scattered all over the floor. Sammie was sitting demurely parked in the middle of it, grinning as she flicked through The World of Science. Such was the air of sophistication around her, I almost expected her to lick her finger as she turned the page.

If you had just walked in off the street, you would never believe that she was the little beast who had dragged all the base cushions off the sofa. She didn’t look strong enough. My cleaning hadn’t gone far enough either. There were crumbs and pen lids and a half-eaten cookie was waving shamelessly from the larger of the two sofas. I wanted to die. My face was hot. I knew I’d gone red. Kathy pretended not to see any of it and crouched amongst the cushions by Sammie.

‘Well, how do you do Miss Sammie?’ She took Sammie’s hand and gave it a tiny shake. ‘Aren’t you just a darling. What pretty hair. Yes, it is,’ she said, stretching the word ‘is’ into two syllables in a way that I didn’t know was possible.

Sammie looked up at Kathy, right into her eyes and her face scrunched into a smile. Kathy picked her up and held her on her hip. Sammie let her.

I had the sudden urge to start picking up the mess. I wanted them to get started. I was dying to see what Kathy was going to do and how it would all work. I started gathering cushions, plumping them and throwing them back on the bare couches.

‘Oh please don’t’, said Kathy. ‘Not on my account, rilly. You should see my house,’ she told Sammie, her eyes widening. Sammie laughed and flung herself backwards.

‘Whoa, I guess that means you’re ready to do something else,’ Kathy said, starting to release Sammie down onto the floor again. Sammie jumped down onto her feet and ran away down the hall.

Kathy glanced around. She asked me where I wanted them to work and I told her I didn’t know, where did most people do therapy? She flattened her hair and told me a lot of people have a therapy room, or at least a particular place in the house where the child could work and keep their therapy equipment, maybe the basement?

We didn’t have a basement, or a therapy room or even any equipment. My face tightened. I felt like I’d gone to my first day at school without a pencil case. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Don’t worry, said Kathy. ‘All we need for now is to find somewhere she can’t escape from? I mean, rilly?’ She smiled. It was a big smile, one of those smiles that pings onto a person’s face like they just had a surprise, a spotlight springing surprise, the kind where everyone else knows before you even realise, just how lucky you are.

I couldn’t help smiling back at her. I was grateful that she understood that I had no idea what I was doing. Sammie scurried back into the room with something in her mouth which looked uncannily like the underwear I’d been wearing the day before. She disappeared just as quickly, flinging my dirty knickers down as she passed.

I went very red again and considered how to pick the knickers up without acknowledging they were there, but Kathy just smiled and clapped her hands together and said, ‘so yes, somewhere we can keep her sort of contained. I think that would be helpful, don't you?’ She held both of her hands out in front of her. ‘I mean rilly!’

We both laughed and suddenly I felt ok about this. I liked Kathy. I liked how she didn’t notice the crisp packets down the sofa and how she said rilly after every other word, and how she greeted Sammie like she was greeting the Queen. I’d forgotten what it felt like when someone gets excited about your child. It’s like they are excited about you. It’s like they like you or something.