We had just turned into the parking lot and it was packed. Cars everywhere. “Wow is right,” I said, “some of the moms at the gymnastics studio were saying there’s this thing called Kid-Expo going on. It’s like an indoor carnival. I guess with the crummy weather everybody and his mother decided to come here…Hey maybe you could get your face painted.”
“Not likely,” he said, “Do you think the movie will be sold out?”
“Not to worry, I already bought the tickets on line and besides it’s PG13. These little tykes won’t be seeing Avengers 7 or whatever we’re seeing.”
We parked the car in the garage and headed for the door to the mall. When we got inside there were people everywhere. Booths were set up in the middle of the mall and there were jugglers and clowns and on a stage a group of acrobats were performing. “Hey look, face painting,” I said.
“No way.”
“Fine, be that way. You’d better stick close, if we get separated it will take forever for us to find each other.” As we moved through the mall Kevin kept getting bumped into and he’d call out for me to wait up. I nearly lost him a couple of times.
After a while I said, “Look, maybe we should hold hands. I’m afraid we’re going to lose each other.”
“Yeah, I guess so. This is hard and I don’t really stand out in a crowd.”
So, off we went holding hands. I have to admit, I kind of liked it. The crowd thinned out as we moved further into the mall, but Kevin still held onto my hand. At one point we passed a wall that was polished steel and I could see our reflection. There I was dressed in a skirt and polo shirt, with a diaper bag over my shoulder holding the hand of a little boy. We both had the “map of Ireland” on our faces as my granddad would have said. If I were a little older people probably would have thought I was his mommy. I kind of liked that too.