The Sock Is Wrong

The bus came at 8:04, and at 7:41 the Gill house was already losing.

Outside it was the flat hard dark of a prairie winter morning, minus thirty on the thermometer nailed to the deck and minus forty if you asked the wind, and out in it Papa was scraping the car with half of an old CD case, because the good scraper had gone wherever good scrapers go.

Inside, Mummy held the snowsuit open like a net.

“Arms,” she said. “We have twenty minutes.”

“Twenty-three,” said Kabir.

“Twenty-three is not a number that helps. Arms.”

He put his arms in. Then he stopped, one arm in and one arm out, with the stillness of a boy who has felt something he cannot walk past.

“This sock is wrong.”

“The sock is fine.”

“It isn’t. The line is on the wrong side.” He sat down, half inside the snowsuit, to attend to it. “The line is supposed to go on top of the toes. This one is underneath. I can feel it down there. It’s walking around.”

“It is a sock. It does not walk.”

“It walks when I walk. That’s worse.”

“Kabir. In eighteen minutes a bus comes. If we are not on the road, it does not wait. It has other children. It has a schedule.”

“Who’s in charge of the schedule,” said Kabir, reaching for his sock. “You, or it?”

“Do not start that today,” said Mummy.

She got down on the floor, which was not where she had planned to be at 7:44, and pulled the sock off and turned it and put it back on, seam on top of the toes, exactly where the world required it to be.

“There,” she said. “Fixed. Boot.”

Kabir wiggled his toes. His face did a thing.

“Now it’s on top but it’s too on top.”

Somewhere in the kitchen, Tara, who was two and understood chaos the way other people understand their own names, took off both of her boots and hid one.

“Papa!” Mummy called. “How is the car?”

“The car is a fridge,” Papa called back, from inside the fridge. “The car is a smaller, colder house. Two minutes.”

Papa opened the store on Thursdays. If NordMart’s doors were not unlocked by nine, a small line of cold people formed on the sidewalk and looked at their watches, and one of them always mentioned it to the manager, and the manager always mentioned it to Gary. Gary could not be late. Gurmail had all the time in the world; Gary was due at 8:45.

“Boot,” Mummy said again, holding one out.

“That’s the left.”

“It’s a boot. It goes on a foot.”

“It goes on the left foot. That’s the left. This is my right foot.” Kabir presented the foot as evidence. “If I wear the left on the right, then all day my feet will be having an argument, and I’ll be inside the argument, and I won’t be able to hear the teacher.”

“You don’t hear the teacher anyway. You argue with the teacher.”

“That’s different. That’s on purpose.”

7:52. Mummy found the other boot behind the couch, where boots were not kept, and found no matching mitten anywhere, because the matching mitten was in Tara, who had put it somewhere with the calm confidence of a person who will never, under any interrogation, give it up.

“Tara. Where is the mitten.”

Tara looked at her mother with the enormous clear eyes of the truly guilty, and said a word that was not a word, and pointed at the dog they did not own.

“We don’t have a dog,” said Kabir.

“She knows,” said Mummy, digging in the couch. “It’s a diversion. Your sister is very good. Boot. Please. I am asking you nicely and the nice is running out.”

Papa came in with the cold rolling off him in a sheet, stamping his feet, his eyebrows white. “Car’s going. Are we going. Why is nobody’s coat on. Why is one child in a snowsuit and no boots and one child in boots and no pants.”

“Tara has no pants because Tara is a problem for after the bus,” said Mummy. “Kabir has no boots because the boots are the wrong boots on the wrong feet in a way I cannot fix in the time God has given me. Take him. You’re driving. I can’t. Tara’s naked.”

“I’m not naked,” said Kabir.

“Not you.”

Papa zipped the snowsuit. The zipper went up four inches and stopped, on a bite of fabric it would die before releasing.

“No,” said Papa, to the zipper.

“Is it stuck?”

“It is not stuck. It is resting.” Papa pulled. The zipper held the cloth in its teeth with the loyalty of a dog. “Do not breathe out. Breathe in and hold it.”

“That’s what Ms. Dhillon does.”

“Then it works. Hold it.” Papa yanked, and the zipper let go all at once and shot to the top, and the snowsuit swallowed Kabir to the eyes, and there was, for one second, the pure clean silence of a fully dressed child.

7:58. It had taken them seventeen minutes to put four things on one boy.

Which left six minutes, and forty steps of ice between the door and the bus stop, and a sock that had been turned, and re-turned, and was, even now, quietly beginning to walk.