She gave her son his bath and sent him shirtless, in shorts, outside to play. She watched from the kitchen window as he swung on his swing set. The heavy feeling in her stomach stayed with her until he jumped off. The boy rolled on the ground, hopped up and gave a karate kick, caught in the grip of some imaginary game.

The call about the delivery had come, and she was excited too. She’d liked the salesman who’d come by the house. He agreed that it was a wonderful thing she was doing, getting the books for her child. The encyclopedia was due any minute, and that was why she had given the boy an early bath. It was a special day.

As a child herself, she had always loved books and learning, wanted to be a writer or a teacher. For one reason or another (the birth of her son being the big one) it hadn’t worked out. She needed her “quiet time” however, her time to read, relax, and think. Her husband and son had never understood this need she had to be alone, without them.

When the white van backed into the driveway and blew its horn, she hurried out of the kitchen onto the porch and called to the boy to come in. Then she went back and opened the front door for the two tall, broad-shouldered men in green work clothes, each of whom wheeled in stacks of boxes. She had the men put them down in the hall at the base of the stairs. There were some papers to sign.

Her son’s running footsteps echoed through the house. When he came in and saw the boxes, he slapped on the tops of them, moving from one to another, like they were drums. The big men smiled down at him and one of them tousled his hair. She went off to the laundry room to get him a fresh shirt.

The front door was still open when she returned. She heard her son’s high-pitched scream. She ran outside with his favorite blue shirt in one hand and his shoes in the other. The men carried her son easily between them, holding him high above the ground. He was calling for her, bicycling his bare feet.

She shouted at the two men as they slid open the side door of the white van and put her son inside. She dropped her arms with the boy’s clothes and shoes she held and they drove off with a farewell honk. The big trees in the yard flashed the pale underside of their green leaves. Overhead, wisps of puffy clouds chased each other across the hard, blue sky.

In the house, after closing the door behind her, she put her son’s clothes and shoes aside, and started opening the cardboard boxes. The books themselves were beautiful—a deep rich black, with gold lettering on the spines.

Then she remembered about Saturday. She went back through the boxes of books until she found the volume she was looking for. While the vegetables and flowers she’d planted seemed to be doing well, there was no harm in reading up about it.

She had done her best with the garden with her limited expertise. They said that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. She sat cross-legged on the floor and read with concentration. She couldn’t wait to see the new garden tools she was getting that weekend.

For her husband.