Beyond Deserving Read Online Free PDF Page A

wanted a little reassurance. Even a hug would have been nice.
    The night Katie went into labor Fisher was drunk, and Katie, too embarrassed to call Ursula, took a taxi to the hospital. Fisher showed up early the next afternoon. The baby was bundled in a rolling crib by Katie’s bed, and Katie was reading Mother Jones . “A divorce would be awful,” Fisher said first thing. He hadn’t even taken a good look at the baby. “All those papers, and a judge. You’d have to do it without me.” Katie blinked. It took that long to figure him out. The marriage had meant more to him than to her. She had said she wanted to be married so he would know she didn’t mind having his baby. He had thought marriage was full of promises—and he had meant to make them! Now he felt guilty. He was laying their marriage out like a pig on an altar. And he was guilty. She couldn’t even depend on him for a ride. “Come on, look at her,” she told him, placid as a cow, ignoring his contrition and anxiety. She was not going to make a neat trade, conscience for baby. She wanted both. Besides, he did look at the baby, and he cried. Like any other father, he cried, and made promises neither of them would try to remember.

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    â€œI do love you,” she told him the next time he called. She had been at her mother’s two weeks. She didn’t have the courage to say she didn’t want to come back. She did love him, she didn’t want to go back. She could not explain it. She would write him about it. She would draw a line down the middle of a page. Write LOVE on one side, and THE REST OF IT on the other. Put it in an envelope and mail it. Hell, she could just put those titles down and he’d get the message. Getting divorced would be like that, all stamps and signatures and a great distance between them. She would stop talking to him. He would be humiliated. His worst doubts would be confirmed. He knew what he was really worth. He would go away from the people who knew them both, even Michael, and in a while she could go back if she wanted. She wanted Ursula to be her baby’s aunt. She thought it would make them closer. She would act like Fisher had never been there. If they talked about him, it would be like he was dead.
    Rhea lay propped in an infant seat on the dining room table. Sunlight streamed across the table and across her fat legs. Next to her seat, a big Tupperware bowl of rising dough glowed yellow. The wind was blowing across the bare landscape outside. A norther was due, but who could complain? The sun had been bright every day. When Katie’s mother came home for lunch, she opened the blinds in Katie’s room and pulled back the curtains. She didn’t like it that Katie wanted to be in the dark.
    One afternoon her mother brought home another baby girl about Rhea’s age. It was the child of a friend’s daughter. Katie, lying in bed, heard the strange baby’s cries. She went into the room and saw the two older women, each with a baby in her arms. The new baby was hungry. Katie’s breasts began to leak. Katie’s mother was trying to give a bottle to the infant. “Is she used to nursing?” Katie asked, taking the baby from her mother. Her mother said she thought the baby took milk both ways. “Usually my friend keeps her while her daughter works part-time, but she broke a tooth and had to go to the dentist. The little dear is all off-schedule,” she said.
    Katie took the baby over to the couch and undid her blouse to feed her. The baby took the nipple greedily. All Katie wanted to do was make the baby stop crying, but as the child sucked, Katie felt a wonderful sensation come over her. It was as if she lay in sunshine. She looked up contentedly, and saw her mother and her aunt staring at her. “Milk’s milk,” she said. It was amazing.
    That evening, as Rhea was sleeping, Katie went and sat by the crib for a long time, leaning