Jill wants the Vietnamese take-out again. Fine with me, so she phones up fried noodles and some chicken glop we decided to try but won’t have again. Fried spring rolls and spare ribs.
She’s had luck with Alex and food. He was still a blob in the carriage with an oxygen cannula under his nose when she wheeled him to a Queens coffee shop and stuck bacon under his nose. “Guess who’s eating bacon?” she said on the phone that afternoon. I didn’t have to guess; we had just one child then. “Guess who ate a brownie?” Jill wanted to know on the phone a year or so later. She’s had the food luck.
Marie, who comes from the agency and sits with Alex a few hours a week, prepares to leave as I look in the kitchen and see Jill with Alex. I see them standing near each other and Jill’s hand rising to his mouth in a way a mother’s hand usually doesn’t have to move toward the mouth of her 15 year old son. “I have breaking news,” Jill says, seeing me. “Guess who’s eating spare ribs?! Chew and swallow,” she says to the man of the moment as he chomps and chomps on maybe a cubic millimeter of spare rib meat while balancing his iPad on one hand.
Wow. He’s never eaten spare ribs. I have a few seconds of victory until Alex’s head pitches up and his chin juts out and dives down and forward and the liquid spurts from his mouth. Luckily into our sink.
“Okay, okay,” Jill says patting his back. She looks at me. “He doesn’t know how to eat!” she says. “He needs to drink. He needs to swallow.”
Alex doesn’t eat enough and he doesn’t drink enough – certainly not enough water on a hot day, when we’re out somewhere and we pass him the bottle of water and he tips it back like the most unpopular man in the lifeboat. Time after time I’ve watched the water slosh in the bottle until the last of it is gone. Thanks, Alex, what are we supposed to drink now?
Alex swallows and I give him a nibble of my spare rib. He nibbles again. My spare rib. Jill has a spare rib and so does Ned. I give mine to Alex. I’m a good father. “Water, Alex,” I say to him. “Drink some water.” He holds the glass to his lips and through the glass I see his lips and teeth as he swills the glassful.
Then up comes the spray and puddle that make me ashamed I still write about Alex. Jill shoves the coffee table over by the TV while I sit on the couch as if this was happening to someone else’s family. Marie charges in with paper towels.
“He really liked those spare ribs a lot,” Jill says later. “He kept wanting more. Kept nibbling, picking them up himself. Just thought I would try.”
Marie does her stuff with the paper towels. Nothing solid comes up. “He doesn’t seem upset at all,” Ned says. Nothing solid came up. So we have that.
