I was curled up in my favorite seat at the coffee shop reading a book when a mom ducked into the restroom half carrying, have pushing her young son ahead of her. My first thought was that he was having a potty emergency. He’d probably been engrossed in something and then suddenly realized that he had to go — that he’d had to go for a while now. I remember those moments from when my siblings were young, those sudden looks of surprised urgency, those mad dashes for the bathroom, those occasional times when no mad dash could be fast enough.

Then a minute or two later the dad and two older brothers also drifted into the restroom, the boys’ eyes wide and worried looking. And from inside the crowded little room the youngest had started to cry.

Evidently shooed out of the restroom, the two brothers were clearly at a loss about what to do with themselves while their parents were in there with their baby brother. Picking me at random, the oldest boy, maybe 7 or 8, came to tell me, “My brother just suddenly threw up. Next door. Did you know they’re having a sale next door? Well they are. 40% off. They’re going out of business.”

He went back to check on his brother, only to be shooed out of the restroom once more. He wandered down the wall toward the front door, his middle brother trailing after him. Wandered back. Came over to me again. “We didn’t know he was sick when we left this morning. And then he just threw up next door. But luckily he missed the rugs. There were two of them, right next to each other, but he threw up right in the middle of them. We didn’t know he was sick until then.”

His middle brother hung back a bit, sucking his middle fingers and looking at me silently, glancing over his shoulder at the restroom door every once in a while. From inside we could all hear the baby brother crying. Finally the two boys wandered over to a table and sat down by themselves, talking quietly to each other, waiting.

As the family left, crying youngest boy in his dad’s arms, the oldest boy told the couple sitting nearest the front door, “He’s crying because he threw up. We didn’t know he was sick.”