Lily stood in the bay window of the living room looking out at the street.  She had her arms crossed over her chest, and the thumb of each hand tapped the taught muscle of the opposing bicep.  She tapped her right foot in perfect timing with her thumbs.

Her son, Henry, stood beside her.  He was seven and small for his age, barely able to see over the loropetalems outside the window.  He did not have his arms crossed over his chest.  He did not tap his thumbs or his foot.  Although it couldn’t be guessed from his posture, he was ready to run and throw his arms wide and hug.

Then Malcolm’s Lexus emerged from beyond the Freis’ privet hedge three houses down.  It came on swiftly, and then Malcolm braked suddenly, as if almost forgetting that this was his house, and turned into the driveway.

Henry turned and ran for the front door.

“Henry!  Don’t you dare go out there until your father is all the way into the garage with the engine shut off.”

Henry stopped with his hand on the front door knob.  He was doing a sort of dance with his hand still on the knob.  But then he froze.  Maybe he realized that from there he couldn’t tell when his father reached the end of the drive and turned into the garage.  Or maybe it occurred to him that he could reach his father more quickly by running back through the house and out the door in the kitchen that led into the garage.  Probably the latter because he suddenly whirled and ran back past his mother, who was coming out of the living room.

She reached for Henry but missed him.  She jerked her shoulders as if to say, What the hell, what the hell.

When she got to the kitchen, Malcolm was coming through the door—or attempting to.  He was having a difficult time trying to close the door behind him while carrying his briefcase in one hand, keys in the other, a grocery bag in his arms, and Henry draped around his legs.

“Daddy!  Daddy!  Daddy!”

“Henry, let your father get in the house at least.”

“Ambushed.  This varmint ambushed me again.”

“Daddy!  Daddy!”

“Stop, Henry.  You’re going to make your father drop those groceries.  Put them on the counter, Malcolm.  Henry, let go of your father.”

Malcolm managed to slog his way across the kitchen to the butcher block, Henry attached.  Lily came over and began removing items from the bag.  Malcolm grabbed Henry, turned him upside down, and when Henry’s T-shirt dropped down exposing his torso, Malcolm put his lips to his son’s belly and “brpbrpbrpbrpbrpbrp!”  Henry squealed in delight.

“If you boys don’t get out of my hair, we’ll never have dinner tonight.  It’s going to be late as it is,” Lily said, giving Malcolm a look, which he missed because he was still spluttering against Henry’s belly.

But then he put Henry down and said, “Come help your dad change while Mom’s making dinner.  Then we’ll play up a storm.”

Before they made it out of the kitchen, though, Lily called after them, “Where’s the eggplant?”

Malcolm turned back to her.  “Eggplant?”

“Eggplant.  I’m making moussaka tonight.  It’s kind of hard to make moussaka without eggplant.  It was the very first thing on the list.  Don’t tell me you forgot it, Malcolm.  Don’t tell me that.”

“Well, I remember thinking about getting it.”

“Thinking about it doesn’t mean shit.  I told you I was making moussaka.  Eggplant was right at the top of the list.  And you think about it.  Typical.  That’s so goddamn typical, Malcolm.”

Malcolm bent over, put his hands over Henry’s ears, and with a comical expression said, “Oops!  Volcano Mommy is about to blow!  Better cover your ears!”

Henry tried to grin by stretching his lips out and exposing his teeth.

“Sure, make a joke out of it.  You’re an hour late, and I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs waiting to make dinner and . . . Oh sure, I know what you’re going to say.  You were working.  Malcolm works.  Malcolm has a real job while all wifey does is sit on her ass all day and watch soap operas.”

“I never in my life said anything remotely like that, and you know it.”

“Don’t you tell me what I know and don’t know.  Don’t you dare tell me that.”

“You’re right.  I wouldn’t dare tell you because no one can tell you a damn thing.”

“No?  Well, I can tell you something.  You can’t make moussaka without fucking eggplant!”

By this point Henry had wrenched himself free from his father’s hands, which had been pressing down more and more tightly over his ears.

He grabbed his father’s left wrist in both his hands and tried to pull him out of the kitchen, his body rigid with the effort, heels digging into the hardwood flooring.

“Daddy!  Let’s go play up a storm!”

His father turned slightly toward him without taking his eyes off his mother and snapped, “In a minute.”

Henry had studied time in first grade.  He knew that a minute was sixty seconds.  His teacher had told them that if they counted slowly to sixty, that would be one minute.  Henry counted slowly to sixty, but his parents were still hollering at one another.  He let go of his father’s wrist.

*

They finished fighting as they always finished fighting, when their fatigue overcame their anger.

Malcolm went upstairs to their bedroom.  The fight with Lily had drained him.  He took a long shower and then came back downstairs and began to read the newspaper on his I-pad.

Lily came in from the kitchen.

“We’re having soup for dinner.  I put on a can of soup.”  She said it like a challenge.

Malcolm just nodded.

 She looked at him.  “I thought you were going to play with Henry,” she said.

“Oh, right.”

He logged off the I-pad and went upstairs to Henry’s room,  When he came back downstairs to the kitchen, he had a funny look on his face.

“Henry’s not in his room,” he said.

“Oh?  Where is he?”

Malcolm looked around the kitchen.  “He’s not down here?”

“Of course he’s not down here.  I wouldn’t have asked you where he was if he was down here,” she said, her voice rising.

She walked past him out of the kitchen.  Malcolm listened to her mounting the stairs to the second floor.  He looked at the pot on the stove, steam rising from it.  The toaster oven was on.  Lily was probably making fish sticks for Henry.

Lily came back downstairs.

“He’s not in his room,” she said.

“I know that.  I told you that,” Malcolm said in a tone that could easily have started another fight, but Lily hardly seemed to have heard him.  She put her index fingers to her temples and frowned in what might have been a comic pantomime of someone thinking very intently.

“He’s probably hiding.  I’ll go back upstairs.  I’ll look in every room.  You look in every room down here,” she said.

“Okay.”

She went back upstairs and searched in Henry’s bedroom again, then their bedroom, and then the spare bedroom.  She knelt and looked under beds, looked in closets.  She looked in the linen closet where Henry sometimes hid when they played hide and seek.

She went back downstairs.

“He’s not down here,” Malcolm said before she could ask.  “I looked everywhere.”

“But did you . . . Wait.  The garage.  Maybe he’s in the garage.”

“I already checked.  I checked both cars.  I looked everywhere in the garage.”

At this Lily looked stunned, as if Malcolm had taken a swing at her and just missed.

She called out, “Henry!  If you’re hiding, come on out.  Mommy and Daddy can’t find you.  Come out this instant!”

They listened.  Nothing.

“He wouldn’t have gone outside,” Lily said.  “He never goes outside alone.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Malcolm said, trying to say it with a little chuckle to relieve the tension but instead speaking with a tremor that seemed to alarm Lily.

She turned and rushed out of the kitchen and headed for the front door.  Malcolm followed her.

They went around the house looking everywhere Henry could possibly be, but there were few options for hiding.  The house as only a few years old.  The young maple in front and two in the back had slender trunks.  Even a little guy like Henry couldn’t hide himself behind one.  The lawn service kept everything neat.  No weeds.  No sprawling bushes a tyke could hide in.

They had worked their way to the garage at the rear of the house when Lily stopped and peered off into the distance.

“Henry wouldn’t have gone down there,” she said, pointing.

The housing development had been built on what had once been a public golf course on the west side of the city.  Malcolm and Lily’s house stood on the last row of homes, and just beyond their back yard privacy fence an old, crumbling asphalt cart path wound down the hill toward a pond fronting what had been the ninth green.  Parents warned their children not to play at the pond.  There was even a no-trespassing sign at the edge of the pond.  Kids went there anyway, of course.  But never Henry.  Henry, a tiny thing, had always been timid even by seven-year-old standards.

“He wouldn’t go down there,” Lily repeated, and Malcolm said, “No, of course not.”

Malcolm opened the gate in the privacy fence.

“Henry would never be able to open this even if he tried,” he said, and Lily said, “Of course not.  No way.”

They walked down the cart path toward the pond, Malcolm leading the way, Lily frequently turning to walk sideways to avoid brushing up against the tall weeds with her bare legs.  She’d often warned Henry against getting into weeds where chiggers and ticks lurked.  She’d read that ticks could jump five feet to attach themselves to hot-blooded flesh, but she didn’t tell Henry that.  Henry would have added leaping ticks to his other nightmares.

At the pond, they began walking counter-clockwise around the perimeter, both trying not to be so obviously intent on looking at the water, looking into the water.

The north side of the pond was covered with a green scum to a distance of a yard or two from the edge.

 “If . . .”

Malcolm had started to say that if Henry had gone into the pond there, they’d be able to tell because the green scum would be disturbed.  But it wasn’t, so he didn’t say anything.

When they finished their circuit, they agreed that Henry definitely hadn’t gone down to the pond.  They walked back up the cart path to their house, Malcolm only once or twice turning to look back over his shoulder at the pond, the green scum.

*

They went back in through the door in the garage and looked in both cars and in the dark, cobwebby space beneath Malcolm’s work bench.

They went back into the house, Lily calling out even before the door was closed behind them, “Henry!  If you’re playing hide and seek, come on out!  Mommy and Daddy can’t find you!”

“This time I’ll look downstairs and you look upstairs,” she said to Malcolm, “but I’m telling you right now, if we don’t find him, we’re calling the police.”

“Damn right we are.”

The second Malcolm walked into Henry’s room, he spotted the piggy bank lying on the Sponge Bob Square Pants bedspread.

In fact, the piggy bank had been Malcolm’s when he was a little boy.  It was about the size of a large russet potato and made of carnival glass.  When you turned it in the light, it glowed with golden and purple and green highlights.  Malcolm had loved it, and so did Henry.

He hefted the piggy bank.  Maybe it was just his imagination, but it felt a little lighter than the last time he’d put money in.  He put two quarters in every Monday and told Henry it was his allowance, give the kid a head start on learning the value of money.

Malcolm didn’t bother looking in the other rooms upstairs but took the piggy bank to show Lily.

As he started down the stairs, which rose from the foyer to the second floor, he glanced out the demilune above the front door.  There was Henry coming up the walk.

“Lily!  It’s Henry!”

She beat him to the front door.  Malcolm came out of the house right on her heels.  Henry stopped and looked up at them.

He was carrying a plastic grocery bag.  He put it down at his feet, reached in, and pulled out two cucumbers.

“I got the eggplants,” he said, “so everything’s all right now.”

*

As the years passed, the details of the incident grew fuzzier in Henry’s memory until he was no longer sure what had actually happened and what he only dreamed or imagined.

Had his mother really gone ahead and made moussaka with the cucumbers Henry had brought back from Kroger?  Then, while Henry munched happily on his fish sticks, had she and his father eaten the ersatz moussaka and pronounced it delicious?  Afterwards, chastened, had his parents really lived in peace and harmony for quite a while?

He never told anyone about the incident, not even his wife, Gina.  What would have been the point?

One night when it was Gina’s turn to cook, Henry returned from work to find that she’d made moussaka for dinner.  He’d never eaten moussaka, in fact had never so much as tasted eggplant.  He discovered he wasn’t a fan.  There was something about the texture he found off-putting.  But when Gina asked him what he thought of it, he nodded appreciatively.

“Pretty good, pretty good,” he said, reaching for the salt.  Then Gina reached for the salt, too.

– Dennis Vannatta

Author’s Note: Halfway through the writing of the first draft of “Moussaka,” it suddenly occurred to me to ask myself just where the idea for the story came from. I had no idea. Nothing about it comes from my personal experience or observation. Strange are the ways of the imagination!