There is a woman left of me. Pasty but unapologetic, chattering her teeth at her husband one stream of words at a time.

I can tell they are married by the arrangement of their legs under the table: his denim knee extends into the space between her parted, oversized thighs. She shifts her mostly nude legs, issues instructions for the care of their child–a three-year-old boy squeezed between the wall and his heavy, gray-bearded father on a red picnic table bench. I only know he is theirs because he calls them Mama and Daddy.

The boy, I have learned despite not eavesdropping, has used a Port-O-John for the first time. At the park this morning. It didn’t flush. His mother washed his hands with a wet wipe. A disposable wet wipe, the brand and merits of which she illuminates in explicit and alarming detail to this man she’s married.

Either they have been married a long time or not long at all. He is quiet as she speaks, as if he knows the words will pass faster unhindered. He offeres nods and grunts at intervals when she pauses to breathe and scratch her ample and exposed arms. He is committed but noncommittal. And then there is the boy.

“Make sure to wash him before basketball camp.” I imagine the boy stretched from three feet to six, soaring through the air, his parents bending bleachers and shouting, “Defense!” or “Take it to the hoop!”

“Make sure to wipe down his legs,” she is telling her man evenly as his head droops in assent.

Her husband and I anticipate the conversation’s end. He shifts the boy away in casual increments, speaking silence to his son with his eyes. Clearly, he has done all this before. Still, the mother acts as if it will be the first time.

They pay me no attention. I do not, as I had intended upon entering this room in search of solitude, return the favor. Instead, with my peripheral vision, I observe as the boy’s head meets with a wall.

“Watch out.” It is not a cautionary statement. It is belated. It is flat. It is from the father who recognizes that we all must take small spills before we know how to mop up the big ones.

The mother, however, grows rigid with fright. Her arms fly open, her bosom a pillow collecting her son’s bruised head. The boy cries down the canyon of her cleavage. It is a small cry from a large mouth. My son makes this face. It is a false cry. The father and I know that. The mother knows it, too. But, for every mother, there is the knowledge of truth and the knowledge of what could be. She allows her skin to swallow these cries. Clings to her son as if he might crumble. As if she felt the devil knock against her own skull.

The father waits.

The mother holds on. As if the boy might grow up or be lost in just these few moments.

The father waits.

Soon, she will let him out of her sight.

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