As usual. This afternoon, it was for a typical reason. She’d been unable to find the boys’ gis, which turned out to be exactly where she’d put them—folded in a neat stack on the dryer. It was the towels folded on top of them that had thrown her off. Now she checked her watch and hurried the boys along. “Come on, guys. This isn’t a city hike. We have to get to the dojo.” “Sensei said it’s important to be on time,” Jeremy, her youngest reminded her. “I know.” Sensei said had preceded a solid third of his sentences in the past few weeks. Most of them were the kinds of things a mother loved to hear her children mouth, but they all mainly revolved around a sense of orderliness and balance that Esther had never mastered. “We’re almost there,” she said. “See?” She pointed to a small, unassuming building sandwiched between a photographer’s studio and a quilting shop.
