Saturdays, Together

Maya asked to come the week after that, with the particular casualness teenagers use when a request actually matters to them and they're trying not to let it show.

"Can I just, like, come watch? Or actually do it, I don't know. Just — I want to see it. The actual thing, not just the fifteen-second clips."

Sam said yes before Maya had finished the sentence, and spent the drive up trying and failing to play it cool about how much this meant to her — her daughter, curious enough about the thing that had rearranged Sam's Saturdays to want to see it firsthand, rather than just tolerate it secondhand from the passenger seat of family conversation.

Maya was, predictably, better at the choreography by the end of the first class than Sam had been after four, which Sam decided to find delightful rather than annoying, mostly because Harpreet had adopted Maya within roughly ninety seconds of meeting her and was already feeding her samosas by the second water break.

It became, without either of them planning it, a thing — every other Saturday, on Sam's weekends, mother and daughter in the car together at 8:45 a.m., the drive itself becoming its own small ritual of terrible pop radio and half-finished conversations that somehow went deeper in a moving car than they ever did at the kitchen table.

One of those drives, Maya pulled up a video on her phone before they'd even left the driveway. "Okay, this is going to ruin your whole gym wardrobe, I'm sorry in advance." A guy talking fast into a ring light, explaining that most gym clothes were basically plastic — polyester, nylon, made from oil — and that the chemicals used to process them acted like hormones in the body, soaking into skin that exercise sweat had opened right up for the job.

"That's — genuinely alarming, if it's true," Sam said, pulling out of the driveway anyway, already turning something over.

"That's the part that gets me. Everyone's wearing this stuff trying to be healthy and it might be doing the opposite."

Sam didn't dismiss it, and she didn't repost it either. She did what nine months of watching bad statistics get corrected in a comments section had trained into her without her fully noticing: she looked it up properly that night, past the version with the ring light. What she found sat somewhere between the video and nothing at all. Polyester and nylon genuinely are petroleum-based, no argument there. Real manufacturing chemicals — antimony used as a catalyst in production, phthalates in some prints and stretch finishes, PFAS in a lot of "moisture-wicking" marketing claims specifically — are documented in synthetic textiles, including name-brand athletic wear, by testing organizations that had nothing to sell her. A university study had found that the oils in sweat could plausibly increase how much of that got through skin during exercise specifically, heat and moisture and friction all pointing the same direction. That part held up.

What didn't hold up so cleanly was the certainty. The scarier claims — direct links to specific diagnosed diseases, guaranteed harm from any given pair of leggings — mostly traced back to companies selling "hormone-safe" alternative activewear, which didn't make the underlying chemistry wrong, but did mean she should read their numbers the same way she'd read a wellness guru's certification program: check who benefits from you believing this completely, and see if the actual research holds up once you subtract their sales pitch from the sentence.

"So is it true or not," Maya asked, the next morning, phone-first the way she asked most things.

"Both halves are a little true, and neither half is quite what he made it sound like," Sam said, which got her exactly the face fifteen-year-olds reserve for answers with more than one syllable of nuance in them. "The chemicals are real. Nobody's proven your leggings specifically are giving anyone a specific disease. It's worth knowing about, and it's not worth panicking about — which is, unfortunately, the least shareable sentence in the world."

Dave called on a Tuesday evening, a few weeks into the new arrangement, in the specific tone of voice Sam had learned over six years of amicable co-parenting meant I have a small thing to raise and I need you to know upfront I'm not trying to start anything.

"I'm not trying to start anything," he said, which confirmed it. "It's just — the Birmingham Saturdays are landing on my weekends more than yours lately, and I miss her. That's it. That's the whole complaint."

"I didn't even realise the split had shifted," Sam said, and meant it, running the calendar in her head and realising, with a small guilty jolt, that he was right — three of the last four Pungra Saturdays had technically been his.

"I'm genuinely glad she's into it. She talks about Harpreet like she's known her for years. I just want my Saturdays back, some of them."

"That's completely fair. Let's fix it — every other week's fine, but let's actually alternate it against the custody calendar properly instead of me just grabbing whichever Saturday works for my schedule."

"That's it. That's the whole ask." A pause, and then, in the softer register he used maybe once a year: "For what it's worth — whatever this dance thing is, it's good for her. She seems lighter. I don't need to understand it to see that."

They settled it in under ten minutes, the way most things between them settled these days, and Sam hung up feeling the specific, quiet gratitude of a divorce that had, against some early odds, turned into something that functioned. Maya kept coming, just on a fairer schedule, and Dave came once, eventually, months later, to watch from the back with his arms crossed exactly the way Rachel once had — and uncrossed them by the end, exactly the same way too.