Get Thee to the Playgrounds

by Jeffrey S. Chapman

Since Lydia’s death, Manny takes his daughter Elena to the playground every day after work. It gives her a chance to burn off energy and gives him a chance to be out of the house. He hates being in the house. He can’t bring himself to move Lydia’s things. He has been living in the guest bedroom for over a year now and Elena has taken to calling it Daddy’s room. He knows he should move on, that Lydia would want him to. But he can’t. Boxing up her things feels like just another burial.

He and Elena have a routine. He picks Elena up from kindergarten with a snack in hand and a coffee for himself. He would love to fill the coffee mug with beer, or spike the coffee with whiskey, but he doesn’t want to risk it. They have a handful of parks they like to go to. He’ll push her on the swings or follow her through the jungle gym, but mostly he gets to sit there and pretend the world doesn’t exist. He waves politely at the other parents, mostly moms, and they nod back, but he is too shy and too sad to talk to anyone. 

Then one day, Elena goes down the big slide way too fast, gets twisted in the middle, and crashes hard. She screams—louder and more urgent than Manny has ever heard. He runs towards her, but another woman gets there first. She kneels in the mulch and inspects Elena’s leg with practiced care.

“Oh, darling,” she says. “That looks so painful, I know. That’s why I never go down slides. I’m not as brave as you.”

“You never go down slides?” Elena asks, as if that’s the heart of the conversation, as if all the other grown-ups meet up at night to go down slides and she, Elena, has discovered the one outlier. 

“Never,” the woman tells Elena, very serious. She looks up at Manny over Elena’s head and mouths: All the time. She puts a finger to her lips and winks, as if sharing a real secret.

Elena can’t put weight on her leg. The woman—she introduces herself as Sylvia—helps Manny carry her to the car. Before he leaves, she makes sure he puts her number in his phone.

“Let me know how it goes,” she says and touches him on the arm.

The leg is broken, it turns out. She has to get a cast. He does call Sylvia. He overcomes his shyness and calls her and tells her about the leg. She jokes that she needs to come sign the cast. He says yes, yes, she should sign the cast.

Sylvia is smart, sarcastic, deeply into true crime. They sleep together a couple of times, which is great—Manny had almost forgotten what that felt like. It feels like something is waking up in him again. He thought he would feel guilty, but he doesn’t. After a few weeks, however, things just kind of plateau. Nobody ghosts anybody. Nobody cries. They just fade out, through gradually slower texting.

By then it doesn’t matter. Elena’s cast is magic.

At the playgrounds, Elena sticks to the swings. It’s all she can do with a cast. She loves the swings but she’s a melancholy spectacle with her broken leg. People start talking to Manny left and right. 

“Oh, the poor thing.”

“How are you holding up?” 

They smile at him like he’s doing something special. He just puts on his best tired-but-brave expression. Sometimes the job of a parent requires a saint. 

Then a mom, recently single, asks him out for a date. Another soon follows. Suddenly he has more dates than he can keep track of. 

It has been years since he dated. He doesn’t know what the rules are now, or even what he is looking for. At first, it’s enough just to be wanted. To have some company. He shares several good meals and one really bad one, commiserates over being a single parent, trades a few kisses in cars. It’s nice to have fun. The world cracks open a little.

One or two first dates go really well. So well that he starts thinking about what it would be like to be with a person for more than one or two dates. He starts thinking in longer, more frightening, more exciting intervals: a week or a month or five years. Trips to Guatemala or Fiji. Tomato gardens. Hammocks for hot summer nights. Watercolor classes at the community center. Fresh pasta, made with four hands, because two is never really enough. All the bits and bobs that make up a life together. He can see it. Feel it.

But then the next date doesn’t have the same magic. Dating is hard. He doesn’t remember that. As far as he remembers, it was so easy with Lydia. They hit it off from the first moment. 

He will find someone. That person is out there. He knows that Elena’s cast will work its magic. He just has to let it simmer.

He’s so focused on this— on finding that next date, on listening to stories and heartache, on searching for something real—that he completely forgets about the cast itself. It isn’t until he flips the page of the calendar and sees the appointment in the middle of the week that he remembers the cast is going away. He feels a deep sinking in his chest. He isn’t ready.

He looks at Elena, happily playing with Duplo on the kitchen floor. She can’t read yet. The calendar means nothing to her. She is by now totally used to the cast. What will one more week matter to her? What will two more weeks matter, if it means that she has a new family? 

He calls up the doctor’s office.

“I need to reschedule my daughter’s appointment,” he says.

The receptionist is friendly. “When would you like to reschedule it for?”

“A month?” he says. “Maybe sooner if things work out well?”

“A month?” the receptionist asks. “Is there a reason you can’t make this appointment?”

“Travel.” He panics. He didn’t expect her to ask for justification. “We’re out of the country. Europe. But a month should be good.”

When he gets off the phone he is breathing deep. Elena is singing a little song to her toys.

“That was the doctor, honey,” he says. “They said you can get your cast off in a couple months. Maybe two or three.”

She looks up at her dad and smiles. 

Her smile says to him, Go. 

Her smile says to him, Get thee to the playgrounds. 

Her smile says to him, Get to work. 

About the Author

Jeffrey S. Chapman writes fiction and graphic novels near Detroit and is an associate professor of creative writing at Oakland University. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD from the University of Utah. His work appears in journals including Black Warrior Review, The Florida Review, and CutBank.