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that somewhere, on campus, their mother hunched over a miniature table, cutting out eighty construction paper hearts for the first grade. To know in the very marrow of their bones that they’d come home to a hot dinner with a vegetable and a whole grain and a lean meat, and a father who’d play catch and never, ever tell a single lie to them.
    My phone buzzes and I glance down. My daughter Quincy’s photo lights up the screen. Her engagement photo, to be precise.
Got our proofs
. A lovely picture, the afternoon light making her long light brown hair and skin glow as if candlelit. Her fiancé Ryan’s hair is shaved to the skin on the sides and back, the top left an inch long in a high-and-tight military haircut, wearing his dress blues.
    Yes. There’s also this. As if there isn’t enough already happening. My twenty-year-old
college student
is getting married in June. Twenty. Yes, I said twenty. “Look.” I show the photo to Chase.
    He nods absently, sighing at the carpool line. “Yup, that’s Quincy.”
    I put the phone down.
    Only two and a half years earlier, Quincy had yet to meet Ryan. She was looking at college brochures with me at the kitchen counter, her face alive with fresh dreams. She trailed her fingertips along the photos. “I’ve got it all planned out, Mom. I’m definitely going to do grad school. Maybe a double MBA/engineering. That’ll get me on the executive track.”
    Her wide hazel eyes, today leaning more toward brown, as they did when she was in emotional disarray, waited for my approval. I felt the same way I had when she stood up to a playground bully twice her size in second grade. Plain old awe. I kissed her forehead. “I have no doubt you’ll achieve whatever you want.”
    I can, of course, think of dozens of objections to her marriage. Any reasonable parent can. Her fiancé is only four years into his Navy career, still deciding whether or not to stay in for the full twenty years. “The world’s too uncertain to wait, Mother,” Quincy told me. “Have some optimism,” I told her. If you’re a cynical parent, you might as well give up and move to a bunker buried in a hillside. Then again, Ryan’s already been deployed, seen action. I could understand why Quincy feels he might not be around forever.
    I have to keep my mouth shut. After all, what can I possibly say about her getting married? She’s doing what I did. Only better, because she’s already got two years of college behind her and she’s not even pregnant.
    I have to trust her. But another part of me worries we’ve messed up somehow. Overlooked some crucial parenting key, and Quincy now wants to escape our family the same way I’d wanted to escape mine.
    Parenting. It’s not for the weak.
    I peer at the sky above the middle school. Two more cars and we’re there. This takes up the biggest chunk of my morning by far. “Don’t forget your umbrella. It’s supposed to rain.” October is the month of strange weather. One day it will reach the nineties, with the desert blowing in hot Santa Ana winds. The next, a storm from up north might cause the temperature to drop twenty-five degrees and rain to fall. Clouds sit low over us today, thicker than the coastal fog that usually burns off by noon. We call this part of town inland, though it’s only fifteen minutes to the beach, in the middle of San Diego.
    Chase puts his hand on the door, ready to jump out. “Mom. I play water polo in the rain all the time. I don’t need an umbrella.”
    He’s got a point, but I don’t want to concede. I inch the car forward. “If you catch a cold, I’m going to be mad.”
    â€œThat’s not actually how you catch a cold,” Chase says. “You catch cold from a virus, not from actual cold air. Science, Mom.”
    â€œSome things science doesn’t know
. Mothers
know.” I