Lesson 4: Expand
“What’s all that?” Garrick asked.
“We’re going to build a scale model of Troodon formusus,” Denise said. She’d accumulated wire, cardboard,
duct tape, glue, and a crate of other odds and ends for the project.
“What’s the objective?”
She told him about reading to the children about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the Victorian artist who
was the first person to build life-size models of dinosaurs, for the Crystal Palace.
“It was the children’s idea,” she said. “To better appreciate the size of these animals and what they looked
like. Troodon is relatively small as far as dinosaurs go, but a good deal larger than the children. Actually, it leads
us nicely into the next unit: adaptations. We’ll get a close look at Troodon’s anatomy.”
Garrick shook his head.
“What?” she said.
In her home office closet, she kept a bag of flour. She’d scooped out white powder until the bag was exactly
six pounds, one ounce. She paced around the room with it some nights, her eyes closed, the door locked. Garrick
had commented a couple of times in bed that she smelled like bread, but that was the extent of his observations.
He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t brush away the sediments to see what was underneath.
“Nothing,” he said now.
He turned on the news. It was about the nearly 300 girls and women the Nigerian military had rescued
from Boko Haram. None of the schoolgirls who’d been abducted the year before were among the rescued. Not
one, the reporter said.
Garrick quickly turned off the television. He closed his eyes.
Denise remembered something she’d read in the literature the counselor had given them, how the survival
of any relationship, no matter its trials, no matter its history, boiled down to one thing: you had to lean into
each other. The advice sounded so simple, but as she considered how to respond to Garrick—how to touch him,
what to say—what she felt was the force of her mother’s hand on her teeth.