While my hostess sat across the glass kitchen table fanning away the smell of diarrhea exploding from one of two recently adopted kittens mewling on the other side of the screen door, while my six-year-old son, also on the other side of the screen door, finally took the turn he’d never been offered to mount his friend’s toy arrow in a bow, while the boy he’d come to play with, the boy named after the Hindu principal of cosmic order, abandoned my son in favor of his brother, I began wondering why I’d agreed to take a kid like mine on a playdate.