Come the weekend, Donna moves her stuff into his apartment. Without ever much talking about it, they fall into a routine that gets firmer day by day. Tom likes it. The only fly in the ointment, in fact, is his job. It's not the commute that bothers him. But he doesn't like not caring about Donna eight hours a day. He can deal with it, but he doesn't like it.
Finally, he digs out Rick's card and calls him. "You sure?" Rick says when he's done talking. "The pay would be peanuts next to what you're pulling down in your eighties job."
"Get serious," Tom says. "Every twenty-dollar bill I have in my wallet there turns into a five here."
Rick is silent awhile, thinking it over. At last, he says, "I'd say I've got myself a new buyer." He hesitates. "You love her a lot, don't you? You'd have to, to do something like this."
"In the sixties, I love her a lot, and she's a sixties person. If I want to stay with her, I'd better be one, too. Hell," Tom laughs, "I'm getting good on my slide rule again."
Donna's smile stretches across her entire face the first day they go into Barefoot Sounds together to work. This time, she holds the door open for him. "Come on in," she says. "The weather's fine."
"Yes," he says. "It is." She follows him in. The door closes after them.
CRYBABY
This is the one story I've written that my wife has never read. Some of you know what dealing with a colicky baby is like. Rachel, our second daughter, was one. Colicky babies can make you paranoid?you start to think they're wailing just to drive you crazy. To a writer, a paranoid thought like that can be the springboard for a story. But Laura won't look at it. Can't say I blame her.
This time, the steaks were rare enough when it started.
Pete Flowers had a potholder in his hand. He was opening the broiler door. Doug's wail went through him like the sudden malignant whine of a dentist's drill. Pete's hand jerked against the hot metal.
"Shit," he snarled, snatching it away. He put a week's worth of glare into the two long strides that got him to the kitchen sink. "You said he was really down this time."
"He was," Mary insisted. "He nursed like a champ. He burped. He was dry?you changed him yourself. And he didn't even wiggle when I put him in the crib. He didn't, Pete."
"Shit," Pete Flowers said again, softly this time. He hadn't heard everything his wife said, not over the splash of cold water on his burned hand. Doug was still crying, though. There wasn't any place in the condo where he couldn't hear that. God knows I know it, too, he thought, reaching for a dish towel. He gingerly dried his hand.
He looked so grim when he stamped past the dining room table that alarm sprang into Mary's tired blue eyes. "Where are you going?"
"To get him, where else?" He started down the hall toward the room that, up until six weeks ago, had been his cherished study. Now the books were either in boxes or shoehorned into the master bedroom.
Not, he thought, that he had done much reading in Japanese history?or anything else that took longer to go through than Bloom County?lately. He'd had to go all the way up to the assistant dean for academic affairs at San Flavio State to get his sabbatical approved a year early. He'd fought the good fight gladly, eager to take a year off to help Mary with the baby. Now he wondered how good an idea it had been.
Doug's shrieks neared the pitch only dogs can hear. His father set his jaw so hard his teeth ground together. He turned on the light in the baby's room; even in Southern California, November twilight fades to darkness by six.
The baby's head was turned toward Pete. As usual, his frustrated anger met tough sledding when he looked at his son. Doug's hair?the first, incredibly fine growth of baby hair, now being rubbed away toward temporary baldness by his crib sheets?was even fairer than Mary's, but his eyes were already darkening from infant gray-blue toward Pete's own unspectacular brown.
He picked up Doug, slid a finger inside his Huggies. (Or was one of them just a Huggie?or even a Huggy? A fine point of language he'd never reached a firm conclusion about.)
Doug was dry, and still yelling. Pete didn't know whether to be pleased or not. He wouldn't have to change him, but at least he would have known what the kid's problem was if his finger had come out dripping with liquid poop.
He hoisted Doug up on his left shoulder, patted his back. "There, there," he crooned, "there, there." Maybe Doug would burp or fart or whatever he needed to do. He didn't sound gassy, though. Pete knew that cry. He wasn't drawing up his legs either. Pete sighed. Maybe Doug was yelling because he felt like yelling, too.
Mary, bless her heart, had the steaks on the table. She'd already cut hers into bite-sized pieces, so she could eat with one hand. She held out her arms. "I'll take him, Pete."
"Thanks." He got his hand behind Doug's head to cradle it, and hissed?it was the burned hand. He guided the baby into the crook of his wife's elbow. "Got him?"
"Yes. How's your hand?"
He looked at it. "Turning red. I'll live."
"Put some Cort-Aid on it."
"After dinner." He slathered A-1 Sauce on the steak, cut off a big bite. He made a dissatisfied noise, deep in his throat. "A little too done. He timed it just right."
"I'm sorry. I should have gotten up sooner."
"Never mind." Pete tried to sound as if he meant it. He hated overcooked beef. He ate his hamburgers rare too, which faintly revolted Mary. After five years of marriage, though, she had learned he fought change hard.
The steak tasted fine to her. She dropped a green bean on Doug. She was eating righthanded because she held him in her left arm, but even after forced intensive practice she wasn't good at it.
"He's calmed down, anyhow," she said, plucking the bean off Doug's thumbsuckers anonymous T-shirt and sticking it in her mouth.
"Sure he has. Why not? His mission's accomplished?he's screwed up dinner."
Mary had a glass of Zinfandel halfway to her mouth. She put it down so hard a little splashed onto the tablecloth. "Oh, for God's sake, Pete," she said, her voice low and calm in the way that meant she'd be shouting if she weren't watching herself. "He's just a teeny tiny baby. He doesn't know what he's doing. All he knows is that something's bothering him."
"Usually he doesn't know what, though."
"Pete." This time she was a little louder: last warning.
"Yes, yes, yes." He gave in, settled down, and ate. But once lodged, the thought would not go away.
The first couple of weeks, of course, were chaos. Pete had thought he was ready. Looking back, he supposed he was, as ready as anyone could be who only knew about babies from hearsay. He started finding out how little that was even before Doug got home. Wrestling a car seat into place in the back of a two-door Toyota Tercel was an introduction of sorts.
But only of sorts. Doug had been born just past four in the morning, and seemed convinced night was day, and vice versa. That first dreadful night at home, he was awake?and yowling?almost all the time from one till five.
Even when he did catnap, it did Pete and Mary precious little good. They had the bassinet in their bedroom, and jumped every time Doug wriggled or breathed funny. Wriggling and breathing funny, Pete decided in a moment when he would have contemplated suicide had he been less tired, were about all newborns did. He soon revised that to include making frequent horrible messes.
Once was enough to teach him to keep a spare diaper over Doug's middle whenever he was changing him. "The fountains of Versailles," Mary called it; she was writing her dissertation on Voltaire. What Pete called it did not bear repeating, but then he'd had to wash his face.