Where Love Goes Read Online Free PDF Page A

And now she’s lost to me. I guess from now on I’ll have to call her Spud.” He was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands and the potato in his lap, making crying noises.
    “Daddy!” she yelled into his ear. “It’s okay! I’m Ursula!”
    “Don’t tease me,” he said. “Can’t you see I’m a broken man? I’ve just lost the light of my life.”
    “It’s okay,” she said, patting his shoulders. “I’m back. I never left.”
    He looked up then. “You’re here?” he said. “Is it really you? No, I must be dreaming.”
    “It’s me! It’s really me!” she cried. She jumped into his lap. He threw his arms around her.
    “Whew!” he said. “Boy, was that a close one.”
    “I would never leave you, Daddy,” she said. “You know that.”
    “What would I do without you?” he told her.
    Y ears before Joan and Tim started living together back in graduate school she had gone through a severe case of endometriosis which was supposed to have left her sterile.
    Tim was working on his dissertation at the time—a paper about the propagation of mushroom species. Joan was a performance artist, at work on a piece about the subjugation of women in Third World cultures. “Womb-an Weep” never had much of an effect on Tim, but the climactic scene—of an African tribal clitorectomy ritual—attracted the attention of an alternative theater in Knoxville, Tennessee. They invited her to come and do a residency there. Her bags were packed when she and Tim found out she was pregnant.
    It was Tim who persuaded her to have the baby. Her gynecologist agreed it was amazing that she’d gotten pregnant at all, and said it was highly unlikely that she’d ever conceive again, especially after an abortion. So Tim made her the deal: If she’d have the baby, he’d take care of it. He’d come up with the money, too. All she had to do was carry it nine months. For some reason that still surprises him she agreed.
    Ursula was breech. In the end they performed an emergency cesarean, with Joan heavily sedated. She hemorrhaged so badly she didn’t see Ursula for a whole day. Tim has always wondered if that was the beginning of Joan’s problems as a mother. She had insisted on giving the baby her own surname, but in every other way Ursula was Tim’s from the beginning.
    Joan hated nursing, said it made her feel like a cow. Tim held Ursula against his bare chest while he bottle-fed her and carried her in a Snugli while he worked on his dissertation. When she cried at night, he was the one who got up.
    It probably didn’t help Joan’s feeling about motherhood any that Ursula was, from the first, a dead ringer for her father. Where Joan was fine-boned and white-skinned, with black hair and a birdlike body, Ursula was large, pink, and solid, with big hands and thighs like a Sumo wrestler. When she was three and a half and a girl she admired in preschool started taking ballet classes, she said she wanted to take ballet, too.
    “That’s ridiculous,” Joan had said. “She’ll just make a fool of herself if she puts on a leotard and tights.”
    At the time, Joan was having an affair with a poet she’d met at a workshop that winter, but he was married and a lot older. She didn’t go to any great lengths to conceal what she was doing from Tim. He hoped it would blow over and they could work things out for Ursula’s sake, but after Frederick came Elliot, who asked her to come with him to New Zealand. Joan left when Ursula was four. Tim and Ursula have seen her twice since then. “My mommy doesn’t want me does she?” Ursula asks him.
    Tim is never sure how to answer this question. Sometimes he thinks it’s better for her to get used to the idea and let go of false hope. Other times all he knows is that her sadness is unbearable to him and he has to protect her from the truth at all costs.
    “Of course she does,” he tells her. “Mommy misses you so badly she can hardly stand it. She just can’t take care of you