That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

She didn’t want to play. Play was work, a child’s work, and it was important—this was how you learned to exist in the world—but it was work that she was done with. She wanted to be alone for half an hour, and to take a shower, and come downstairs and find the place magically tidied (not spotless even; just all the wooden train tracks in a box and out of sight) and drink a cup of hot coffee and then go into her office and turn on Dvořák and sit at her desk and just—well, what would come after that didn’t even matter.

“How old?” The argot of mothers. Shorthand for Can we be friends?