Every Happy Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

it’s great. “Why the hell not?” he said. “How much more time has Nance got? Might as well go out with a bang.” He got her laughing, anyway.
    She pulls up to an intersection where she waits for two young mothers with strollers to cross the street. One baby cries at a violent pitch, its mother doing her best to talk over the piercing note. The most primal unit of sound, Jill thinks, hearing the terror in it, and remembering her nursing days and how her milk would come in whenever she heard an infant, any infant, cry. Soon dribbling down her shirt like Pavlov’s ridiculous fountain. Pick up your child, she silently begs, listen to that pure need. How she wished she could have nursed Pema, soothed her in that most intimate of ways, filled her with my own blood . Nursing, no doubt, was something Pema shared with her birth mother. All Jill could do when they arrived home with Pema, who was three and some, was to try and distract her, entertain her. Inject the milk of happiness through her pores. What romantic nonsense. Besides, Les was better than she was at that kind of feeding. And Beau was better than both of them. He had his sister laughing and starry-eyed from day one. Jill made it her job to ensure Pema would be able to succeed in this culture and fulfill that unspoken promise of a better life.
    â€œAdoption is about loss,” the woman at the agency had said, which Jill, in her naive excitement, had glossed over at the time. She had been embarrassed at how badly she’d wanted a daughter. There was no logic to her feelings. A third child didn’t make financial sense. But when Annie came to them with pictures of this undernourished child living in abject squalor, her logic had been seriously depleted. She had, only days before, aced her doctoral defense. Her exhausted left brain on holiday, it was all right brain that registered that eager little face and set her hormones firing. And she’d failed to take the agency woman’s statement as a warning, if indeed it was one, that the loss could come years later.
    A right, then left onto Beachview. Les had been adopted. He was fine and he never got a letter from his birth mother. Part of Pema’s arrangement was that there wasn’t supposed to be contact, she thinks angrily. Legally she had every right to rip up the letter, pretend it never arrived.
    The family home is up ahead, the driveway obscured by the laurel hedge that’s in eternal need of clipping. Shame on her for stereotyping, but she had expected the downstairs tenants to be more fastidious. She drives down her mother’s short, steep driveway to park beside the tenants’ car. Wonders how they feel about all the geriaction upstairs. She should probably ask if the TV is being played at too obnoxious a volume.
    â€œReserve judgment,” she tells herself, checking her face in the visor mirror. As long as her mother’s happy and the house is functioning all right, that’s what matters. “A trendsetter,” Les called Nancy, and said it was sensible to pool resources when living on a pension. Suggested they might start thinking of their own future roomies.
    She gets out of the car, centres the belt buckle of her skirt and grabs her gifts. She wore a skirt and nylons, earrings, because her mother would expect her to dress for company.
    She’ll have to check out the new greenhouse covers this John fellow rigged up on the deck planters. Les might want to make some for their patio, get a head start on his basil and tomatoes. She rings the doorbell and waits.
    Through the smoked glass window alongside the door, she sees her mother’s blurred figure grow bigger, bluer as she shuffles down the hall. Is she in her robe? At one o’clock?
    â€œWho is it?” she calls.
    â€œIt’s me, Jill.”
    â€œJill?”
    â€œSurprise.”
    â€œComing,” Nancy calls again, yet it’s apparent she’s standing still.
    Oh,