Say When Read Online Free PDF

upstairs and heard the murmur of voices coming from Zoe’s room. “Someone from the PTO called,” Zoe was saying. “Daddy took the message.”
    “Okay, sweetie,” Ellen said. “I’ll get it tomorrow. Thank you. You finish your water and go back to sleep, all right?”
    Griffin moved quietly to stand outside his daughter’s door. Ellen was kneeling next to the bed, for a good-night hug. He saw the smallness of Zoe’s arms around her mother’s neck and remembered when Ellen was first handed her—streaked with blood, beaten ugly by birth, fists clenched tightly and trembling with newborn outrage. Griffin, his hands in his pockets, had leaned over to peer into Zoe’s face. “Looks like a boxer,” he’d said.
    Ellen—impervious, bedazzled, had stared into Zoe’s eyes saying, “Oh, it’s you. It’s you!” She’d wept happily, rocked her baby in an instinctive and entirely unself-conscious way. She’d kissed Zoe’s tiny forehead, stroked her hair. Griffin had watched all this, fascinated by the spontaneous emergence of a person he didn’t know. He’d felt a momentary pull of intense jealousy—to be admired by her so! When the nurses told Ellen it was time to give Zoe to them, she’d laughed and said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” She’d kept the baby beside her every moment except when she showered—and then it was only Griffin she’d let hold her. The nurses, eyebrows raised, talked about her—yes, most mothers fell in love with their babies, but this! Ellen paid no attention to them.
    Zoe had gotten a cold when she was only three weeks old. Ellen slept on the floor beside her crib at night, called the pediatrician so many times during the day that the beleaguered doctor finally called Griffin at work, begging assistance. “I think it’s that she’s afraid the baby might die,” Griffin tried to explain, but the doctor said no, he didn’t think it was that. He’d seen that before, he understood and was sympathetic to that; this was something else altogether. It seemed that Ellen didn’t want Zoe to experience any discomfort whatsoever. It wasn’t that she thought she was in grave danger: Her nose must not be stuffed. She must not cough. Apparently she wanted the world to be remade for her daughter. Really, if Mr. Griffin could not have a talk with his wife, he’d be forced to tell them to find another doctor.
    So Griffin had told Ellen she had to stop calling the pediatrician, and Ellen had burst into tears. “Well, what are doctors for?” she’d asked, and Griffin had understood that she really meant it. “They are for really sick children, Ellen,” he’d said gently, and she’d said, “Oh. All right.” Then she’d looked up at Griffin with a face full of pain and said, “She’s too important. I don’t know how to manage a love like this.”
    But she had learned. She’d gotten better. And now she was simply unequivocally there for Zoe. Zoe knew it, too, and Griffin was convinced that it was one of the reasons she was such a good kid—everybody liked Zoe, everybody said so.
    “I love you, too,” he heard Ellen say, and then she came out of Zoe’s room. She started when she saw Griffin, and then the surprise left her face and was replaced by something close to hatred. She went downstairs, and Griffin followed her. He sat at the kitchen table opposite her. “It wasn’t the PTO that called.”
    “I know. It was Peter.”
    “Mr. Points and Plugs.”
    “Peter.”
    “Ellen, we have to talk about some things.”
    She laughed. “As I’ve been saying.”
    “Where were you tonight?”
    She got up and went to the refrigerator, then closed the door without taking anything out. “Actually, mostly driving around, by myself,” she said. “I was trying to figure out what to do, what to say to you to make you understand, how to get you to sit down and just listen.”
    “Well, here I am.”
    She sat down, leaned in toward him. “Are you?”
    “Yes. I am. We need to decide what