“Thus concludes the reading of the Holy Word,” Reverend Emmett said. “We will now sing hymn fourteen.”
The little organ wheezed out the first notes and Ian let go of Rita’s hand. But she didn’t draw away. Instead she looked directly into his face as they stood up, ignoring the hymnal he held before them.
“Listen,” she said in a low voice. “I think I might be pregnant.”
He had already opened his mouth to start singing. He shut it. The congregation went on without them: “Break Thou the bread of life …”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” she said. And then she whispered, “But I intend to be glad about this, I tell you!”
What could he say?
“Me, too, sweetheart,” he said.
They faced front again. Stammering slightly, he found his place and joined the other singers.
That was in July. By September, she was having to leave the waistband of her jeans unsnapped and she wore her loosest work shirts over them. She said she thought she could feel the baby moving now — a little bubble, she said, flitting here and there in a larking sort of way. Ian set a palm on her abdomen but it was still too early for him to feel anything from outside.
She bought a book that showed what the baby looked like week by week, and she and Ian studied it together. A lima bean. A tadpole. Then finally a person but a clumsily constructed one, like something modeled in preschool. They were thinking of Joshua for a boy and Rachel for a girl. Ian tried the names on his tongue to see how they’d work in everyday life. “Oh, and I’d like you to meet my son, Joshua Bedloe …” His son! The notion brought forth the most bewildering mixture of feelings: worry and excitement and also, underneath, a pervasive sense of tiredness. He told Rita about everything but the tiredness. That he kept to himself.
Now it seemed the household was completely taken over by women. Rita’s batty mother, Bobbeen, spent hours in their kitchen, generally seated not at the table but on it and dangling her high-heeled sandals from her toes. With her crackling, bleached-out fan of hair and snapping gum and staticky barrage of advice, she seemed electric, almost dangerous. “You’re insane to go on working when you don’t have to, Rita, stark staring insane. Don’t you remember what happened to your aunt Dora when she kept on? You tell her, Ian. Tell her to quit hauling other folkses’ junk when she’s four and a half months gone and all her pelvic bones are coming off their hinges.” But she didn’t actually mean for Ian to say anything; she didn’t leave the briefest pause before starting a new train of thought. “I guess you heard about Molly Sidney. Six months along and she phones her doctor, says, ‘Feels like somebody’s hauling rope out of way down low in my back.’ ‘Oh,’ her doctor says, That’s normal.’ Says, ‘Pay it no mind,’ and the very next night guess what.”
She could recite the most bizarre stories: umbilical cords kinked off like twisted vacuum-cleaner hoses, babies arriving with tails and coats of fur, deluges of blood in the lawn-care aisle at Ace Hardware. If Rita’s two married girlfriends were around they would tut-tut. “Hush, now! You’ll scare her!” they’d say. But their own stories were nearly as alarming. “I was in labor for thirty-three hours.” “Well, they had to tie me down on the bed.” Serenely, Rita circulated with the coffeepot. Ian retreated to the basement, where his father was repainting the family high chair. “Women!” Ian said. “They’re giving me the chills.”
“You want to close that door behind you, Ian,” his father said. “It was paint fumes caused your cousin Linley’s baby to have that little learning problem.”
In October Ian started building a cradle of Virginia cherry — a simple slant-sided box without a hood because Rita wanted the baby to be able to see the world. He obtained the materials at no cost but of course he had to contribute his own time, and so he fell into the habit of staying on in the shop after it closed. His metal rasp, zipping down the edge of a rocker slat, said careen! careen! Often he seemed to hear the other workers’ voices echoing through the empty room. “Drove a spindle wedge too hard and split the goddamn …” Bert said clearly, and Mr. Brant asked, “Why the hell you choose a plank with the sapwood showing?” Ian stopped rasping and ran a hand along the slat’s edge, trying to gauge the curve. All his years here, he had worked with straight lines. He had deliberately stayed away from the bow-backed chairs and benches that required eye judgment, personal opinion. Now he was surprised at how these two shallow U shapes satisfied his palm.
And all his years here he had failed to understand Mr. Brant’s prejudice against nails, his insistence on mortise-and-tenon and dovetails. “You put a drawer together with dovetail, it stays tight a century no matter what the weather,” Mr. Brant was fond of saying, and Ian always thought, A century! Who cares? It was not that he opposed doing a thing well. Everything that came from his hands was fine and smooth and sturdy. But you could manage that with nails too, for heaven’s sake; and if it didn’t last forever, why, he would not be there to notice. Now, though, he took special pride in the cradle’s nearly seamless joints, which would expand and contract in harmony and continue to stay tight through a hundred steamy summers and parched winters.
Early in December Rita and Ian went with Daphne and her new boyfriend, Curt, to a bar downtown that featured pinball machines. Daphne had developed a passion for pinball. Rita was beginning her seventh month and she had lately cut her work hours in half, which left her with too much time on her hands. Any outing at all struck her as preferable to staying home. This was why Ian agreed to go to the bar, even though he didn’t drink. And Rita, of course, couldn’t drink, and Curt turned out to belong to A. A. So there the three of them sat with their seltzers while Daphne, merrily sloshing her beer, toured the various games. Her favorite, she said, was the one called Black Knight 2000, which she wanted the four of them to try if only the others would give them half a chance. She hoisted herself onto a stool and glowered at the crowd. There were so many people here that Ian couldn’t even see what kind of room it was.
Curt was telling Rita about his sister’s breech baby. (Did people actively collect these tales?) He didn’t look like much, in Ian’s honest opinion — a bespectacled and bearded type in clothes too determinedly rustic. Also, something unfortunate had happened to his hair. It stuck out all over his head in rigid little cylinders. Ian said, “What …?” He leaned closer to Daphne and said, “What would you call that kind of hairdo, exactly?”
“Do you like it? I did it myself,” she said. “You braid dozens and dozens of eentsy braids and dunk them in Elmer’s glue to make them last. The only problem is when he jogs.”
“Jogs?”
“He claims they bobble against his head and bang his scalp.”
Ian snorted, but all at once he felt old. In fact he was very likely the oldest person present. He looked down at the hand encircling his glass — the grainy skin on his knuckles, the gnarled veins in his forearm. How could he have assumed that old people were born that way? That age was an individual trait, like freckles or blond hair, that would never happen to him?