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was never loud. I sped up my hip thrusts to keep pace and came thirty seconds later. Her being on the pill made spontaneous humps more possible. It was so convenient, I’d told Molly to get on the pill too.
    As soon as I’d shuddered to a stop, Doris rolled out of bed, and I could hear her in the bathroom.
    Maybe I dozed some after that, but I wasn’t sure. Couldn’t have been more than five minutes. The trailer’s air conditioning hummed full blast to keep it bearable. I lay there in the darkness with my eyes open, thinking the same old thoughts. What to tell Doris when I got fired. What to do when Molly left. How to feed the boy and keep him in diapers and pay the doctor when he got sick. I could think these thoughts in a circle so fast it made my stomach ache, but I never came up with any answers.
    I sat up in bed, swung my feet over the side. God, I just wanted to go to sleep. Hell.
    I got up, paused in the hall to peek through the blinds. I half expected to see a Mach 1 cruising the trailer park then felt stupid. Some guy out for a drive and I get all jumpy. I wondered if the chief had heard about my stupidity yet. I thought about calling Billy at the stationhouse but went into the boy’s room instead.
    Toby Austin Sawyer Jr. was perfect and pink. He’d kicked the blue blanket off one leg, and I saw Doris had put him in the Bob the Builder pajamas. He was the best looking boy in the world.
    * * * *
    At that moment the need to scoop him out of the crib and hold him firm against my chest nearly overcame me. Even if it woke him up. He was such a heavy little ham hock. Thick. He’d probably be a linebacker. Get a football scholarship to Harvard and be a brain surgeon. My boy.
    I didn’t pick him up. I satisfied myself with stroking his forehead. He stirred, and I jerked my hand back, but he did-n’t wake. Doris would be turbo pissed off if I woke him up.
    I pulled the rocking chair close to the crib and sat awhile looking at him. A little night light shaped like a blue fishbowl cast a soft glow on everything, all the second-hand toys and stuffed animals. Even the crib and rocking chair had come from Doris’s older sister. My folks were dead, but Doris’s mom and dad did a pretty good job bringing toys and clothes. We had enough. It was close, but we were just making it. Of course, that was probably about to change.
    Toby Junior. TJ. I got this tight, anxious feeling whenever I looked at him and thought something could go wrong or he’d get sick or any little thing might not be right somehow. Like iron fingers grabbing my chest and squeezing. I folded my arms over the edge of the crib and put my head down, sat there a while.
    The boy’s gentle breathing was like some kind of lullaby.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Our cramped living room led right into the cramped kitchen, so Doris could stand at the counter making coffee and still see the television. She had a rerun of The Real World on with the sound down almost to nothing. Some dude was yelling at the Real World kids because they were all supposed to be up early for some project thing, but they slept in instead. What the hell was the big deal?
    I said, “You’re staying up?”
    She shrugged, watching the coffee drip. “I can’t go back to sleep now.” “I’ll take a cup of that.” “When it’s finished.” “Pour me a cup now,” I told her. “It’s only halfway through. It won’t taste right.” “I don’t mind.”
    “ I mind.” She tsked , shook her head. “Damn it, who’s making this fucking coffee?”
    “There’s a cut off if you take the pot out before it’s finished. So it doesn’t spill.” I put that obnoxious patient sound in my voice, like I was talking to a little kid. “The coffee maker is designed specifically so you can do that.”
    “We’ve had this conversation already.”
    And there you pretty much had the whole marriage. We fit together good in bed, worked together nice, folding laundry together or doing the dishes, her washing and