Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood by Drew Magary Read Free Book Online

about my costume.
    “What’s your costume?”
    “Oh, this? I’m a SLOW guy.”
    “A slow guy?”
    “Not, like, a retarded guy. I swear. You know how we put a sign outside our house because those asshole kids drive too fast?”
    “Not sure I saw it.”
    “Well, it’s like this little guy and he says ‘SLOW’ and he has a red cap. So that’s me.”
    “Oh! Oh, that’s very clever.”
    “Oh, thank you. And again,
not making fun of retarded people here
.”
    With every subsequent conversation, I felt compelled to explain my costume immediately, as a preventive measure. I was already socially awkward around other parents, and this added a fun new wrinkle to my discomfort. The moms fell in together and began talking shop about bedtimes and their kids’ eating habits. Moms are excellent at this sort of thing.
    Dads, on the other hand, interact like a dozen horses tied together at the head. I shook hands and stammered out a couple of empty
how you doin’
s, but I wasn’t giving it my full effort because I was still a relatively new father. And new fathers despise talking to other fathers. I withdrew. My daughter was bumbling around in her school bus outfit and I stayed by her because hanging with your kids is such an effective way to be antisocial.
    Then I noticed another dad walk up with a giant wagon filled with cold beer and I saw salvation. I didn’t know the dad well, but I had failed to bring out any beer of my own, which was an incredible oversight. I made getting beer a priority.
    But then the trick-or-treating started. The sun began to fall and you could hear joyous squeals from kids ringing out from all around the neighborhood. Little flashlights strobed around up and down the street, and I heard the older kids plotting which house to hit next. I held a flashlight out in front of my daughter, but the bus was still causing her problems and she was dragging her candy bag along the ground. My wife was busy cavorting with her friends so I was left to hunch down and make sure every step the girl took wasn’t her last. Meanwhile, the beer wagon set off in the opposite direction. I knelt down by the girl and tried to turn her around.
    “Maybe we should go this way, dear.”
    “No.”
    “There’s more candy that way.”
    “No.”
    She stopped at a nearby house that had fifty-three steps leading up to the front door. She may as well have declared her desire to scale Everest. The front stoop was tiny, almost as if it were designed so that a simple outward push of the screen door could wipe out hordes of trick-or-treaters.
    “That’s too many steps, sweetheart. The other houses have candy too.”
    “No.”
    “What if we take the bus off of you so you can climb those steps safely?”
    “No.” Gather together a hundred of the finest lawyers and you wouldn’t have as formidable a negotiating entity as a two-year-old.
    I took her hand and gingerly walked up the stairs, the beer wagon getting farther away with every step. Midway through, my daughter slipped and I held her hand tight as she dangled in the air and righted herself, as if she were hanging from a cliff. The school bus outfit continually banged against the flagstone steps and eventually I stooped down to keep it raised as the girl ascended the staircase in full. The descent looked precarious.
    We got to the top and I said a big “HI!” to our neighbor, a nice woman who held out a basket that had a handful of peanut butter cups scattered among all the Smarties and lollipops and Jolly Ranchers. The girl went straight for the shitty candy. I tried to steer her toward better options.
    “You sure you don’t want one of these peanut butter cups? Ooooh, Baby Ruth! I haven’t had one of those in ages!”
    “No.”
    “You sure? It’s chocolate. MMMMM, CHOCOLATE.”
    “No.”
    She grabbed two generic lollipops and we carefully descended the steps. I was already tired and this was only the first house. Then one of the older girls in the