Howie was not her boss, but he was the one who started the practice and hired the rest of them. She didn’t want to make him angry. She certainly didn’t want to argue with him. She tried to be patient with the patients, to look appropriately concerned when they said they had a mosquito bite that was itchier than usual or their taste buds felt weird or that head lice was a problem one could reasonably expect a family doctor to handle. She tried to stay out of Howie’s way and say yes to as much as she could, to be the doctor they had hired her to be even though she feared she was a different sort of doctor altogether. Maybe it wasn’t the perfect job, but the hours were predictable and not in the middle of the night and included time to do paperwork and take a break for lunch and call home to check in between appointments, and very few patients came in screaming or gushing blood or sporting foreign objects sticking out from various regular and sometimes brand-new orifices. Maybe it wasn’t the perfect job, but it paid well and insured them all. Could they fire her for saying no to hosting breakfast or hiring a website updater? Could they fire her for having a family that required a flexible schedule and a daughter who wasn’t quite? She doubted it. But she didn’t want to find out.

Fifty-Fifty

Eventually, Rosie realized what it had taken a six-year-old Aggie less than an hour to suss. The great beauty of living next door to the Grandersons was their houses were really close together. Thus, the adults could have dinner in one and relegate all the children to the other. It was like the paragon of kids’ tables, the ultimate Platonic realization of the dream that was making everyone under eleven have Thanksgiving in the kitchen. They could have an actual adult dinner party without worrying the cheese plate would get knocked off the coffee table by someone trying, say, to jump rope in the living room. They could have a conversation and not be interrupted by shrieking from the kitchen, worrisome crashes from upstairs, soccer games near the breakfront, requests for hammers, matches, and Ping-Pong balls, or demands for additional food or different food or the removal of food from hair/rugs/underwear. They even sent Jupiter to the Grandersons’ some nights because, though she was better behaved than the kids, more than one glass of red wine had been swept off the coffee table by the enthusiasm of her tail.

They gathered the last Saturday evening of every month. They alternated who cooked and who turned their house over to the children. They did it even when they were busy and work was crazy and life intervened. They did it even when Roo and Ben and Cayenne were old enough to babysit, and they could all have gone out to the movies instead. Rosie looked forward to it all month. When it was their turn to cook, she and Penn made elaborate, delicate dishes, too rich, too complicated, too expensive to waste on the everyday, to waste on the kids. They used their good china. They drank expensive wine. Someone went next door at five of every hour to check on the kids and make sure they hadn’t gone Lord of the Flies.

“We should call it Dual Dinner,” said Ben.

“Yes!” Rigel and Orion chorused. “We could get swords!”

“Not duel.” Ben rolled his eyes. “Dual.”

“Exactly!”

And so Dueling Dinners were born. They were also the only evening all month the adults could have a conversation and not worry the kids would listen in or spy or overhear, so it was, in fairness, more or less appropriate one night, after squash soup, crepes stuffed with sole and crabmeat, chocolate soufflés, several bottles of Chardonnay, and an actual glass apiece of port even though none of them much cared for it, that Frank giggled drunkenly, “So. What happens when Poppy hits puberty?”

Penn spilled his port all over Rosie’s grandmother’s tablecloth. Rosie thought this was unfortunate, less for the tablecloth, which was a bit overwrought faux-Victorian for her taste, and more because without the wine, how were they going to be drunk enough to have this conversation? Over the chaos of towels and seltzer and looking up what gets port out of lace, Frank slurred blanket apologies in all directions. “I’m really sorry, you guys. I didn’t know I shouldn’t ask that question. I thought maybe we were being rude not bringing it up. We didn’t want you to think we didn’t care. And we’ve sort of worried … well, we’ve sort of worried you guys wanted everyone to know and we put the kibosh on that before you even had a chance to decide.”

Penn thought but did not say: You can ask us anything. That should have been true, but he wasn’t sure it was.

Rosie thought but did not say: It was your fault. That shouldn’t have been true, but she wasn’t sure it wasn’t. She locked eyes with her husband. He felt like he was drawing breath from her lungs. She felt like he had lain down in the middle of the dining-room table and she’d opened his chest for surgery, that naked, that much of a look at what was supposed to stay inside and unseen. But surgery was familiar enough so once she began to explain, she wondered why it had ever seemed hard to her. It was clinical, medical, pharmacological, and she was a doctor. That was all. “Hormone blockers,” she said simply, and Penn grinned at her like she’d made a joke.

“Hormone blockers?” Frank and Marginny sounded like they were auditioning for a bad sitcom.

“We’ve been using these drugs for years,” Rosie the clinician explained, “to put a stop to what’s called Precocious Puberty. Sometimes we’ll see a little girl who has breast buds at six or a first-grade boy whose testes have already enlarged or who’s already sprouted pubic hair. These kids go on hormone blockers. The drug puts them on hold. It buys them time for everyone else to catch up. Then, when they reach the age of nine or ten, we take them off the blockers, and they proceed through puberty normally with everybody else.”