A Theory of Relativity Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nora a look that could’ve set paper on fire.
    “Is that what you-all think?” Lorraine asked, her jaw cast tightly to one side, “that I don’t want a baby because I have a job ?”
    “It’s none of our business,” Debbie put in, handing Nora a dish to dry. But Lorraine tore out of that kitchen—“Now you’ve done it,” Debbie said—and then she was back, towing her husband, “Tell them, Mark. Tell them. Tell them why we don’t have a baby.” Nora and Debbie were so embarrassed they wanted the linoleum to open and swallow them up. But Lorraine bullied it all out of him. How many years they’d tried to conceive a child. How they’d tried all the medical things. How they’d almost drifted past the age when they could hope to adopt one. How Lorraine wanted to adopt a baby who was blind or ill or already in first grade. “Tell them how you feel about that, Mark,” Lorraine said, in that honeyed voice of hers that could make a cuss sound like a Valentine, words that no man should have had to put up with from his wife. “Tell your family what you think.” And Mark said it. “I just don’t think I could ever really love a child who wasn’t mine.”
    Not that Nora blamed him. Not one bit. Hayes, when she’d told him about it, said the same thing. A man wanted his name carried on, and that was that.
    But then, months after they’d all forgotten about it (except for Nora, who could still burn with embarrassment at night before bed when she thought of what she’d asked), there was Georgia, like a sun shower from a blue sky. Mark ended up thinking the sun rose and set on her.
    But even after Gordie came—and despite the many weekends he’d spent on the farm with her own boys and the hopes Nora had that they’d all moved into territory with a shared border—Mark and Lorraine and their children still mostly kept themselves to themselves, as if the four of them made their own country.
    All that unease vanished, however, with the first phone call, from Mark, his voice saying that Georgia was ill. Nora had made more visits to Cleveland Avenue in the past year than in the past decade.
    It was when she reached down to pick up a get-well card that Nora found Georgia’s Florida State sweatshirt, the one she’d begun wearing Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 24
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    over her nightgowns because she was always so cold. “Look at me, Auntie,” she’d said one day, shrugging her shoulders lost inside the folds of cloth, “I’m a skinny girl. I’m more pretty and slim than I’ve ever been in my life, without even trying. When I go out, people who don’t know say, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d been that thin when my baby was ten months old . . .’ If I wasn’t practically dying, I’d be totally happy.” Nora pressed the shirt against her face. Even the sour taint of the air in this closed room couldn’t erase Georgia’s brisk scent, crisp and sassy as a pine needle crushed in your hand.
    Feeling like a disobedient child, Nora dropped the straps of her own overalls, raised up her yellow blouse and laid that sweatshirt against her skin, smoothing it down like wallpaper, tucking it down into her cotton underwear. She could simply ask Mark if she could keep it, but she would not take the chance. She would walk right out and put it in the back of her truck along with Keefer’s overnight things and the little gray flannel pallet the baby slept on, because Georgia would never use a crib; she said they were cages. Who knew when Lorraine would be up to having the baby back here?
    When she suddenly heard Gordon’s voice from the kitchen, raised, she jumped, and glanced at the videotape camera, as if she’d been caught stealing on a bank monitor.
    “Well, it’s true, Mom,” Gordon was saying, “The only way the body can experience pain is through a neurological response, and the way that the accident was . . . the car was firm but people’s bones and skulls are more fragile. There was huge