"Damn right," said Ceese softly.
"What did you say?"
"Damn right, ma'am," said Ceese, loudly this time.
And Ura Lee busted out laughing. This boy was something. Or maybe holding a baby in his arms made him feel like more the equal of an adult. So he could give sass instead of just taking it.
"Is that really what it's like to have brothers?" she asked him.
"That's what it was like to have my brothers," said Ceese.
"But if you had a little brother, you wouldn't treat him like that?"
Ceese barked out a little laugh. "Miz Smitcher, I would be the best damn brother any kid ever had. But no way is my mom going to let me keep this baby, so you can forget it."
Ura Lee hadn't been thinking that at all. Hadn't crossed her mind. But now that she was thinking about it, she couldn't imagine why she had said that to him at all. How was he going to have a little brother, indeed?
Of course, one way might be to keep the child herself. Then Ceese would be the next-door neighbor. Not that they'd play much together. But when this baby was first growing up, he'd have Ceese next door as an example of a decent kind of boy. Kind of a protector maybe. Wasn't that what Ceese already was? This baby's protector?
She pulled into the hospital parking lot. For a moment she thought of taking the baby right to Emergency, but then she'd have to come out later and move her car, and it's not like the baby was choking or having respiratory difficulty or diarrhea. It was just naked and newborn and dirty, unless the doctors found something that wasn't visible to the naked eye.
Just take the stray to the vet, have him look it over to make sure it didn't have worms or the mange, and you take it home and voila! You had yourself a pet!
What in the world was she thinking? Keep the child herself! How could she possibly keep a child, what with them locking her up in a mental ward, since taking on some little lost baby would be sure proof that she'd lost her mind?
"Don't get out of the car yet," she snapped at Ceese as she brought the car to a stop in the parking space. "Let me come around and take that baby out of your arms."
"How am I going to get home?" asked Ceese.
She slammed her own door and walked around the back and opened his door. As she took the baby, she answered his question. "I'm gonna give you money for the bus."
"Then I'll tell you the bus route."
"What if I get off at the wrong stop?"
"Here's an idea: Don't get off at the wrong stop."
By now he was out of the car, tagging along behind her as she carried the baby toward Emergency. "Why can't I just stay here?"
"Because this is a working hospital and there isn't a soul to look after you."
"I could work. I know how to clean stuff. I help Mom with the housework all the time."
"You don't know how to do hospital clean, boy," said Ura Lee. "And they got people paid to do that anyway."
"Don't they have magazines? Like the doctor's office? I could read magazines."
It dawned on her that maybe this boy was really attached to the baby he'd found.
Or maybe he was just bored silly with life in the summertime, and he figured hanging around a hospital was better than walking up Cloverdale to ride down it on his skateboard.
"Tell you what," said Ura Lee. "They're going to tie me up with paperwork for an hour at least.
So I'm already missing half my shift. I'll take you home. When I got this baby admitted."
"Cool," said Ceese.
She was about to launch into a long list of warnings about don't talk and don't wander around and don't pick stuff up and for heaven's sake don't open drawers or cupboards or somebody's going to assume you looking for drugs.
Only before she said any of it, she remembered that this was a pretty good kid. Gotta give him a chance to prove he's an idiot or a criminal before you treat him like one.
This kid knew about Newton's laws of motion, which meant maybe he actually paid attention in school. Bill Cosby would be downright proud of this boy!
More than that, Ceese actually understood that coprocephalic meant "shithead." That made him so smart it was almost creepy.
She was going to have to watch this boy.
Chapter 5
It was all grown-up stuff, what Miz Smitcher was talking about with the people at the desk.
Meanwhile, there sat Ceese, holding the baby on his lap.
The kid had a diaper now, which it got right after its bath. Miz Smitcher did that herself, in about an inch of water, not ever scrubbing very hard, but still getting all the stains and dirt off the kid, right down to pulling on its little pud and washing it all over. Ceese was embarrassed at first, and Miz Smitcher must have seen how he felt, because she said, "As long as it ain't yours I'm washing, there's nothing to be embarrassed about."
Which embarrassed him way more than he already was—no doubt that's what she had in mind.
But he didn't go away, he kept watching, right through the diapering. Ceese had never seen anybody diapered before, being the baby of the family. It looked easy enough. He said so.
"That's cause we have these little sticky tabs on a paper diaper," said Miz Smitcher. "Not all that long ago, diapers were made of cloth, and you had to pin them into place, and like as not you'd stick the baby or your own finger and then there'd be screaming and cussing like you wouldn't believe. And then when the diaper's all covered with feces or soaked with urine, you got to take it to the toilet and rinse it off and then load it all into the washing machine. Up to your elbows in piss and poop, that's what it was like to have a baby in the old days. Up to about thirty years ago."
"Man," said Ceese. "Was that back when they still fed babies out of bottles, or did they already invent the tit by then?"
Oh, the glare she gave him. But he could see from the way she clenched her lips to keep from smiling that she wasn't really mad.
And when the baby was clean and diapered and in a little undershirt that looked like doll clothes, back he goes into Ceese's arms while Miz Smitcher sees to the paperwork about getting the baby turned over to state custody.
Ceese couldn't hear much from where he was, but he could see that Miz Smitcher was getting angrier the longer it took. Not only that, but three times somebody came down from wherever it was that Miz Smitcher was supposed to be on duty, telling about how they needed her up there right now.
So he got up and walked over to her, holding the baby. "Miz Smitcher, I can stay here all day if you just call my mom and tell her I'm with you. That way you can go do your shift and then they can get all their paperwork done and we can take the baby home then."
Miz Smitcher looked at him like he was insane. "I'm not taking this baby home."
The woman behind the desk said, "They'll find a foster home in a few days, it just takes time."
"Then the baby stays here in the neonate unit," said Miz Smitcher.
"But the baby isn't sick and the baby wasn't born here, so as I've told you, Ura Lee, there ain't no way in hell the hospital is going to admit that baby because who's going to pay for it?"
"Well if you're going to pay hospital rates for babysitting," said the desk lady, "why don't you just take the baby home and let this boy here babysit for you? Just till they get a foster family for it."
"Him," said Ceese.
"What?" said the desk lady.
"Baby's a him, not an it."
"Baby doesn't understand a word we're saying, so I doubt that I have offended it or negatively affected its gender-role identification process," said the desk lady.
"He's a boy," said Ceese. "He's alive. I found him."
The desk lady pursed her lips and looked at the papers on her desk.
Miz Smitcher jabbed him in the arm, but not so hard as to hurt. Ceese looked up at her. She was doing all she could to keep from grinning.
"Seems to me," the desk lady said, "this stubborn young man here has offered you the best solution. You might as well get paid for part of this day, and he seems to be quiet enough."