Men in the Making by Bruce Machart

Author:Bruce Machart [Machart, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Friday before, Raymond had sat at the foot of the bed rubbing Tammy's feet after she sat up abruptly and turned on the lamp. She was seven months pregnant, her feet were swollen, red as if blistered, and she'd been jolted awake by the feeling that something within her had changed.

"Something stopped," she said, her eyes blinking in the sudden light of their bedroom. She said it over and over—"It feels like something just stopped"—and Raymond worked the arches of her feet with his thumbs. It was late, nearly three, and he'd only been home a few hours after working a double shift.

"Don't get yourself excited," he said. "We're supposed to keep your blood pressure down. Have you been taking those vitamins?"

"When I can get them down. You've seen them, Ray. Horse pills. They make me gag."

"Well, then, maybe you're just deficient is all."

"You don't understand," Tammy said. "This is different. Something's not right."

The rest of the night Raymond spent trying to coax her to sleep. He warmed milk and rubbed her poor, swollen toes and turned the light back off. But even in the dark he could sense that she was awake, her blue eyes streaked with the jagged red lines of panic, and after a while he gave up. He got under the sheets and pulled her head onto his chest. He pulled her nightshirt up over her waist and traced by memory his finger between the little moles on her back. He kissed her forehead and rocked her gently on his chest. "Any better?" he asked.

She was shaking, her legs moving uncomfortably against his, pulling his hairs as she kicked and tossed. "No, Raymond," and she dug her fingernails into his chest while he held her, rocking slowly.

"What do you want to do?" he asked. He kept his voice low, struggling to be patient. Because they'd been short staffed at the hospital, with the exception of a brief break between shifts, he'd been on his feet for sixteen hours straight. When he'd gotten home, he'd fallen to dreaming easily, his body limp with exhaustion, his limbs filled with the dense, liquid weight of sleep, but now pressure was building in his chest and his lower back arched with spasms. A muscle twitched in his neck. "Well, you wanna go rushing off to the emergency room because you had a bad dream or something?"

Tammy swung her legs from the bed and shut herself up in the bathroom. "I'm awake," she said. "And it's not a dream. You don't know what the hell you're talking about, Raymond."

From under the door, a thin wedge of light spilled onto the bedroom carpet. Raymond hit his pillow and rolled to his side, but he knew he wouldn't sleep. He kept picturing Tammy as she was before the pregnancy, her dark hair spilling down to the narrow of her back, the way she cradled his head between her breasts and the fronts of her thighs when he tickled her, dipping his tongue into her navel.

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