Bad Animals Read Online Free PDF

that Jonah is asking for a song—that’s good, that’s him problem-solving—it’s the way he’s asking. We can’t give in to that. We can’t reward his continued fussing. Not now, sweetheart. We’re almost home. Be consistent. Stick to the plan. Breathe. But Jonah is fussing and pleading, headed for another tantrum, when I accidentally run a stop sign. That’s when I see my wife relent. She can’t ignore me any longer. I have made it dangerous to do so. She is also tired, finally, of being the only adult in the car. She exhales and nods. The third track on Forty Licks is “Satisfaction”: more tantrum than tune, Jagger in a rawer mood, less philosophical, more animalistic, less mature, more demanding. I glance at Jonah’s suddenly beaming face in the rear-view mirror. He is giggling, out of the blue. It must be an inside joke. He has this capacity, my son, to turn on a dime, not only to forget the past, but to act as if it never existed. It is a strange gift but a gift nevertheless. One he clearly doesn’t get from me. “Shmatisfaction,” he says, giggling. Cynthia places her hand on the back of my neck. “We’ll be home soon,” she says, whispering under the clamour of Keith Richards’s unrelenting guitar riff.
    I sigh and mutter what I know she’s heard me mutter countless times before: “Then what?”

TWO
Weltschmerz
    When Cynthia learned she was pregnant, we were not married. We weren’t really a couple. We’d met just three months before on a blind date, both of us more or less clear of relationships that had ended badly—hers, a couple of months earlier; mine a couple of years. I was forty-two, she was thirty-eight, and neither of us had, by then, any expectation of becoming parents. So our subsequent decision to get married and have a child together, albeit not in that order, came as a surprise to everyone, especially us. I remember announcing our plans at the start of a long-standing poker game with some old friends, and it took me till the end of the evening to convince them the news wasn’t just another elaborate bluff.
    Despite that, the decision to go ahead and have the baby proved simple for me, which explains why I was the one who ended up making it. Cynthia wanted the baby, in theory. However, she wouldn’t have it if she was going to have to raise it on her own. On this point, she was adamant. She wasn’t going to be a single parent. In case I thought she was bluffing, she intended, she said, to go to an abortion clinic by the end of the week. This was what’s called in poker a put-up or shut-up situation. I had to ask myself: could I be counted on to stick around?
    â€œIf nothing happens, it’s not a story,” Flannery O’Connor once said, and one reason I was keen to become a father was because I was waiting for something to happen. It didn’t matter how it happened—planned, unplanned—I just wanted my life to have the kind of narrative structure and coherence it had always lacked. And abortion, whatever else you want to say about it, is a story-killer. Looking back now, I can see I was rationalizing like crazy. How else could I have told Cynthia, just a few hours after she told me she was pregnant, that everything was going to be all right? How else could I mean it? Of course, I knew nothing of the sort. But if this was a lie, it didn’t feel like one.
    If Cynthia had known me better, she would have known that what I do best is stick around. Sometimes to complain; sometimes out of inertia; occasionally to the point where a person might find herself wishing I wouldn’t. But then she didn’t know me well nor I her. So we navigated our way around our ignorance of each other and of what we were likely getting ourselves into. She cried; I consoled her. I made jokes; she reluctantly laughed. After a few hours of negotiating over a wedding date—May