Aurora Magazine 2017

Jennifer Jewett The Park

“Please, please, please Becky,” she whined as she jumped up and down in the kitchen chair, upsetting a small glass of orange juice in the midst of her fit. Adelaide had been begging her nanny to take her and her brother to the park since her feet hit the floor that morning. Becky scowled at her from the kitchen sink, “Well that’s no way to convince me to take you anywhere. You know better than that little lady.” “I promise I’ll behave, I promise,” Adelaide mewed in her sweetest little voice. Becky sighed as she placed the last dish in the cabinet. “I suppose Addie, but if you start acting up or picking on your brother, it’s straight home and down for a nap.” Adelaide jumped off the chair like she was jumping from a burn- ing building and took off running down the hall. “Preston! She said yes! She said we’re going to the park!” She screeched with the excitement only a six-year-old would have over such a small triumph. After Becky had cleaned up all of the carnage from break- fast, which consisted of spilled juice, sloshed milk from cereal bowls, and what seemed like a hundred errant pieces of cereal off the kitchen floor, she peaked into the living room to see what Ad- die and Preston were up to. Preston was running in circles around the coffee table with a plastic clothes hanger that had been trans- formed into a steering wheel, vrooming and screeching in his pretend race car. Addie was sitting on the couch brooding very quietly, which Becky had learned that a miffed Addie was a disas- ter waiting to happen. Just as Becky was about to turn around and head upstairs to get the children’s things together for their outing, Addie slung her foot up onto the coffee table sending her brother over her outstretched leg face first into the floor. Becky ran across the living room to the wailing little boy laying sprawled out face down on the rug. “Adelaide!”, What is the matter with you?” she shouted at the little girl. “He was getting on my nerves,” she

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