Eleanor had come by to check on her “sick” daughter. “Nastya, could you stop clattering those pieces around?” Susan said, pressing her fingers to her temples. “I have a migraine from the noise. And honestly, why does a little girl have such strange toys?”
“Dinosaurs? A girl should be playing with dolls, developing some maternal instinct.” Then, with a theatrical sniffle, she added, “Otherwise she’ll grow up like me, empty-handed.” Nastya, a child with sharp gray eyes and the same analytical mind her mother had, gave her aunt a long, thoughtful look.
“Diplodocuses are herbivores,” Nastya said matter-of-factly. “They don’t clatter. They chew leaves.” Then she added, “And I do have nurturing instincts. Yesterday I gave Barsik his deworming pill by hiding it in turkey.”
Eleanor gasped and put a hand to her chest. “Good heavens, Mike, come in here and listen to how your wife is raising this child.” “No respect for another person’s pain.”
Mike hurried in from the living room with the expression of a man yanked away from a football game and dropped into a minefield. “Okay, kiddo, how about you use your tablet with headphones for a while?” he suggested weakly. “Your aunt really isn’t feeling well.”
Dasha, who had been standing in the hallway with a basket of clean laundry, stepped into her daughter’s room. “Nastya can build her diplodocus as long as she likes,” she said in a level voice. “If your sister has a migraine, there’s ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet. It works in about twenty minutes.”
“Dasha,” Mike said, trying to sound firm and only managing tired, “you’re pushing it.” “We should show some compassion. Susan can’t have children. It hurts her to look at all this.” “At what?”
“The diplodocus?” Dasha said dryly. “Or the fact that in this house, I set the rules?”
