Deborah, though, hadn’t finished. “It’s a sperm whale,” she explained. “But it’s not done yet. I have to finish coloring in its sperm.”
Kelly looked at Colin. Colin looked at her. They both fought the losing battle as long as they could—say, for a second and a half. Then they lost it even harder than they had when Playboy tried to assassinate the kitty lurking in the mirror. Playboy couldn’t tell whether they were laughing at him this time. He decided not to take any chances and skulked away, his belly low to the rug.
Having lost it, Kelly and Colin couldn’t get it back. They laughed and laughed and laughed some more. Deborah decided it must be funny whether she knew why or not, so she started laughing, too.
Marshall clumped down the stairs to find out what the devil the commotion was about. He scowled with a young man’s stern severity at his ruined father and stepmother. “Some people!” he said. “You see what happens when you get into the dope with the weedkiller sprayed on it?”
“Is that what did it?” Kelly said when she could speak again—which took a while. “Oh, Jesus! I hurt myself.”
“Me, too.” Colin was holding his sides. Kelly’d never seen anyone actually do that before, but she also felt like trying it. He went on as if giving God a takeout order: “I want some new ribs, please. I went and ruined this set.”
“They’re silly!” Deborah informed her half-brother.
“Thanks for letting me know, kid. I never would’ve figured it out without you,” he said. Warily, as the cat might have, he eyed his elders. “What did happen there? Whatever it is, it knocked my train of thought right off the rails.”
Also warily, afraid of a new spasm, Kelly told him what. She and Colin got through the rerun with no more than a few extra giggles, but Marshall laughed almost as hard as they had. Playboy, who’d wondered if it might be safe to come back, turned tail and fled again.
“Wow! Oh, wow!” Marshall said when he got done cracking up. “Have to steal that some way. You couldn’t make it up.”
“That’s why we keep cats and kids around,” Colin said. “For their entertainment value.” He eyed his younger son. “You were pretty darn funny once upon a time your own self. Shame it wore off.”
“Did Grandpa think you were funny?” Marshall asked.
“He thought I was so funny, he walloped me with a belt,” Colin replied. “I gave him a standing O after that, ’cause I sure couldn’t sit down.”
“Mm.” Marshall sounded thoughtful now. “You never did that with us, did you?”
“Nope. Playing too rough, way it looks to me. A whack on the fanny is a different story. Sometimes you can’t make a kid pay attention any other way,” Colin said.
“Says you.” Kelly still wasn’t convinced, but she was less unconvinced than she had been before Deborah was born. Till she saw for herself, she’d had no idea how nutso little kids could drive you and how well they ignored anything resembling logic or common sense.
One of the reasons you swatted a little kid on the fanny, of course, was to make yourself feel better. Before she’d had her own, she would have dismissed that as a rotten reason. She still did, but less scornfully than she would have back in the days BC (Before Children, natch).
Playboy made another cautious approach. Since the grownups weren’t making loud, alarming noises, and since Deborah didn’t seem to want to ruffle his fur or yank his tail, he rolled himself back into a donut on the rug. Tail over his nose, he fell asleep. Kelly wished she could turn herself off so fast. Even tired from teaching and from riding herd on Deborah, she didn’t have the knack.
The next Tuesday—a day she didn’t have to teach at CSUDH—she walked out to get the mail after the mailwoman pedaled past: a grownup trike had replaced the old delivery van. There was a water bill, what looked like a rejection for Marshall, a flyer announcing a hardware sale, and a postcard.
The postcard was black and white. It showed a mill on a river, with New Englandy–looking houses and pines in the background. When she turned it over, the printed legend read View of Guilford, Maine. The note (which, by the postmark, had taken upwards of three weeks to cross the country) was in Rob’s spiky handwriting.
Hi Dad and other sordid family, he wrote. Maybe he meant assorted. Then again, from what Kelly had heard about him, maybe he didn’t. This will let you know that Lindsey is pregnant. So our kid will have a half-aunt (thorax or abdomen?) just a skosh older than he or she is. Pretty weird, especially if they get to meet one of these years. Hope you’re all flourishing. His scrawled signature followed.
She’d never met Rob. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles hadn’t come through L.A. after she started hanging out with Colin. She was happy for him and his wife anyway. Babies were good things.
She carried in the mail. Marshall said something foul when he saw the SASE. “I’ve got good news, too,” Kelly said.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“You’re gonna be an uncle. And Deborah will be an aunt—or a half-aunt, depending on how you look at things.” She held out the postcard.
Marshall took it. “So this is what Guilford looks like. Or what it looked like whenever they snapped that photo.” He read his brother’s note, then nodded. “Okay, you’re right. That is good news.”
“Uh-huh. I’m going to call your dad if I can,” Kelly said. Power was out, which meant the cell towers were out, which meant her cell phone was a chunk of plastic and semiconductors: useful as a paperweight, but not for talking with people. Sometimes, though—not always—landlines worked when cells didn’t. They were on a different grid, or something.
She got a dial tone when she picked up the handset. “Colin Ferguson,” said the voice on the other end of the line, and then, when he saw which number had called him, “What’s up?”
“We just got a card from Rob. He and Lindsey are going to have a baby.”
“So I’ll be a grandfather, huh?”
“That’s right. How does it make you feel?”
“Officially obsolete instead of just obsolescent,” he said. Kelly laughed—not so hard as she had about Playboy or the sperm whale, but she did. Colin always sounded like Colin. It was… she supposed… one of the things she loved about him.
Louise Ferguson flipped through James Henry’s first-grade reader and spelling book. Her mouth tightened down to a thin, hard line. You couldn’t expect little kids to read Shakespeare or Thoreau. You couldn’t expect them to spell words like unconstitutional or dystrophy, either. She understood that.
But…
Maybe her memory was playing tricks on her. People always thought they’d walked uphill both ways when they went to school, and that they’d had to shovel through snowdrifts taller than they were—this, even if they’d lived in Laguna Beach. Louise understood that, too. It was part of the recipe that cooked up old farts.
Again, but…
The little stories in the reader sure seemed dumber than the ones Rob and Vanessa and Marshall had had. And, back in the day, those had seemed dumber than the ones she recalled from her own childhood. The vocabulary was tiny. The writing was bad: clunky bad. It wasn’t interesting; it didn’t make you go on and see what happened next. They weren’t stories you’d read because you wanted to, not even if you were only six years old. The only way you’d read them was if you had to. Even the illos were hackwork.
And every story preached. Louise wasn’t racist. She wasn’t likely to have had a kid by a Mexican-American if she were. She had nothing against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgendered people. Celebrating diversity was one thing. Singing hosannas about it over and over and over one more time was something else again. It was boring, was what it was.