Mama and Dada and Asha—which did duty for Marshall—had arrived very early. Dada arrived well before Mama did, which annoyed Kelly and amused Colin. “Happened the same way with my other three, too,” he told her. “That bugged the dickens out of Louise—oh, you bet it did.” He chuckled. “Marshall said her new rugrat did the exact same thing, so my guess is she got bugged all over again.”
“How about that?” Kelly remembered saying. From then on, she tried not to complain about how Deborah was learning to talk. Being thought of as like the first wife was nothing a sensible second wife wanted. And chances were that sooner or later, no matter how she learned them, Deborah would learn to say hard words like Constantinople and Timbuktu. From boxes, Colin had pulled out most of the Dr. Seuss titles that had also taught Kelly to read.
The biggest problem with kids was, they found ways to do dumbass things no matter how careful you were. Kelly was changing Deborah on a towel on the bed. She looked away for a split second to grab the baby powder. She looked back just in time to see Deborah, grinning from ear to ear, roll over… and off. Then she heard a thump, and then she heard a wail of surprise, pain, and fear.
She grabbed her daughter. She wondered if any of the cars would start so she could rush the baby to the ER. Then she realized Deborah wasn’t badly damaged—wasn’t, in fact, damaged at all. As soon as Mommy had her, everything was fine again.
“They’ll do it to you, all right,” Colin agreed when Kelly told the gruesome story over dinner. “Hey, I didn’t have a single gray hair—not one—before I had kids.” He ran a hand through his hair. His hairline hadn’t retreated a millimeter, but the color up there kept fading toward silver. He scowled, interrogation-room style, at Marshall. “See what you did to me?”
Kelly guessed he intimidated suspects in the interrogation room more than he did his younger son. “Yeah, right,” Marshall said. “Like, what are you blaming me for? I was third in line. By the time I came along, I bet you were already sneaking Just for Men into the bathroom.”
“Why d’you think I’m blaming you?” Colin rumbled. “I can’t get at Rob or Vanessa, but you’re right across the table from me.”
“That’s how cops decide how to arrest people, too, right?” Marshall asked helpfully.
He didn’t faze his father a bit. “A lot of the time, it is,” Colin answered. “And you know what else? A lot of the time, we grab the perp when we do it. Not always, but a lot of the time.”
From what Colin had told her of his older son, Kelly thought Rob would have yelled Death to the pigs! or some other endearment. Marshall just shrugged and shoveled another forkful of macaroni and cheese into his face.
Food was expensive, unexciting, and sometimes scarce. Kelly tended a backyard garden. So did most people who had back yards to garden in, in SoCal, throughout the USA, and in the rest of the developed world. Countries that had been hurting for food even before the eruption were worse off now. The messed-up weather disrupted their crops, and nobody was selling much grain across borders. Several small-scale wars simmered in Africa and Asia because too many countries had too many hungry citizens.
Deborah, of course, stuffed literally anything she could get her hands on into her mouth. What else were hands for but grabbing things and bringing them to your mouth? It might be food, after all.
Or it might not. Kelly discovered that the flesh of her flesh had swallowed a button when she found it as a souvenir Deborah left in her diaper. It obviously hadn’t injured the baby. The button didn’t seem hurt, either, but Kelly threw it out anyhow.
“I don’t know where she got it,” Kelly said that night, still jittery over what might have been. “I would have taken it away if I’d seen it, and I swear I kept an eye on her all the time.”
Colin took it better than she did: an advantage, no doubt, of this being his fourth time around the track, as opposed to her first. “Babies do things like that, is all,” he said. “Most of the time, everything turns out okay. They’re tough critters. If they weren’t, none of ’em’d ever live to grow up.”
“I guess.” Till she had one, Kelly’d thought of babies as hothouse flowers that would wilt if you looked at them the wrong way. What with her swan dive from the bed and the button sticking out of her poop, Deborah was changing her mother’s preconceptions. All the same, Kelly said, “But what if the button’d got stuck inside her? We would’ve had to take her to the hospital, and they might have needed to operate to get it out.”
“Purple fur,” Marshall said.
“Huh?” Kelly wasn’t sure she’d heard straight.
“Purple fur,” Marshall repeated. “From Telly Monster on Sesame Street. He worried about everything, remember? So we’d say somebody who worried about things that weren’t worth worrying about had purple fur—like you just now.”
Kelly thought anything that had to do with Deborah worth worrying about. But now she knew what purple fur meant—and (again, in an intellectual way) she understood what Marshall was talking about.
Once Deborah reached the upright position, she could grab all kinds of things she hadn’t been able to get at while she was rolling and crawling. Kelly and Colin kidproofed the house as well as they could. Anything Deborah could pick up and try to eat went on a shelf too high for her to reach. All the electrical outlets that didn’t have cords sticking out of them got plastic plugs so the baby couldn’t stick her wet fingers or anything else into them.
“This won’t be perfect, you know,” Colin said. “She’ll figure out ways to land in trouble that we can’t even imagine. They always do.”
Kelly didn’t like that. “We’re supposed to be there for them, to protect them.”
“Uh-huh.” Her husband nodded. “But sometimes that means sweeping up whatever’s broken and putting on the Band-Aids after it’s too darn late to do anything else.”
She didn’t like that, either. She wanted to make her offspring perfectly safe, invulnerable to harm. The rational part of her brain insisted she couldn’t do that, but didn’t stop her from wanting to.
Little by little, Deborah got the idea that there were things she was supposed to do and things she wasn’t. She was a good kid. Most of the time, she did what her parents wanted. Most of the time, but not always. Once in a while, she would throw things down on the ground to smash them and see how much noise they made. Or she’d try to bite the hand that kept her from doing something or going somewhere.
Kelly and Colin yelled at her to stop. The first time Colin swatted Deborah on her diapered fanny, Kelly was appalled. It created more noise than pain, but she was appalled anyhow. “She’s a person! You shouldn’t hit her!” she exclaimed. “It’ll mess her up.”
“I got walloped plenty when I was a little kid. I earned it, too,” Colin answered. “I spanked my older kids. I never hit them with a belt or hit them in the face, the way I got it sometimes—I thought that was going over the line. But they aren’t too warped, and I’m not, either. Little kids are a lot like puppies or kittens. Sometimes they need to know that doing the wrong thing means you get hurt.”
“All the child-raising books are dead against it.” Like most academics, Kelly valued expert opinions.
Colin only shrugged. “Mike Pitcavage never warmed Darren’s behind, and look what a drug-dealing son of a… gun his spoiled brat turned out to be.”
“Oh, boy,” Kelly said. “If he’d scared his kid into being a law-abiding citizen, he’d still be going out there and murdering old ladies whenever he got the urge.”