A Small Indiscretion Read Online Free PDF

that Clara is, either. What six- and nine-year-old girls are always kind to their mother?
    I FORGOT THAT it was St. Patrick’s Day today, and when I picked the girls up from soccer practice, Polly reached up and pinched the flesh at the back of my arm.
    “Ouch,” I cried. “What was that about?”
    “It’s about you’re not wearing green,” she said bitterly. “And it’s about you didn’t tell me I was supposed to, and I got pinched.”
    “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Polly, but you shouldn’t pinch me like that. It hurt me.”
    “She’s right, though,” Clara said. “You should have told us.”
    I turned to look at Clara, suddenly angry. “You know what? I’m doing my best,” I said sharply. She blinked up at me, and I continued. “Mommies can’t always be perfect.”
    She took a step backward, away from me, and Polly burst into tears. I picked Polly up, and she laid her head on my shoulder. I reached toward Clara and held her against me, but I could feel the resistance in her. At nine, she had begun to see a truer picture of me than Polly could. She had begun to see what I saw—not beauty, but imperfections. I let her pull away from me.
    “I’m sorry I pinched you, Mommy,” Polly whispered, sounding very sorry indeed.
    “I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said.
    Mothers can’t always be perfect, but they can be much better than I was last summer.
    Y OU RETURNED HOME from your third year at Northwestern on June 9, our wedding anniversary, the day before the photo arrived. We’d planned a dual celebration in honor of our long marriage and the recent announcement that you’d been named a Northwestern STEM Scholar, making you eligible to spend your senior year studying at research institutions around the world that partnered with Northwestern. During the summer and fall, you’d be at Lawrence Berkeley working on an optical computing project. In January, you’d head to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan, to work on space weather research, specifically solar wind. Then, for the grand finale, you hoped to find a project in the area that most interested you—light-source machines.
    “Whatever those are,” I’d said to your father when we received the letter from the dean outlining the plan and informing us that tuition, travel and living expenses were to be provided through a STEM scholarship.
    The girls had spent the day making a cake, elaborately frosted on one side with a
22
, for the number of years we’d been married—close enough, your father said to me, with a wink—and on the other side with a long green painted stem (they had not understood
STEM
was an acronym) topped with a real daisy they’d picked from the backyard.
    “Did you know that the name of that flower is translated as ‘the day’s eye’ in Old English?” your father had said. “Because of the way it opens at dawn.”
    “You’re full of fun facts, aren’t you?” I said.
    “Can we watch it?” Polly asked. “Can we get up really early and go in the backyard and see?”
    “Sure,” your father said. “Sure we can.”
    I gave him a look. “Dawn? Really?”
    “Why not? It’ll be fun.”
    You’d allotted us only two nights, because your classes at Berkeley were beginning in a few days and you wanted to settle into the room you’d rented in a shared house off-campus. Over dinner, you told us you’d been lucky enough to secure a three-month stay, beginning in April, at a research institute in Oxfordshire, England, with a light-source machine.
    “What is a light-source machine?” Clara wanted to know.
    “It’s a synchrotron, technically,” you explained. “It generates infrared and ultraviolet light invisible to the naked human eye. Researchers use it to see unimaginably small things no other apparatus, much less the human eye, can see.”
    “It can generate light ten billion times brighter than the sun,” your father added.
    “Wow,” Clara said.
    “Why do