Nantucket Grand by Steven Axelrod

Author:Steven Axelrod [Axelrod, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2016-01-31T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

Wrong Place,Wrong Time

At seven-thirty in the morning on the day when he was arrested for murder, Mike Henderson was looking down at his sleeping baby, thinking, “I’ve been demoted.”

It was all right, though, because everyone else had been demoted, too. A baby changed all the family rankings, and there was nothing you could do about it. He was no longer the primary love of Cindy’s life, and he no longer had any priority access to her body. Someone else was pawing her and sucking on her nipples. The sheer amount of physical contact with the baby both satisfied and exhausted her. She had the opposite of skin hunger now; skin saturation, perhaps. Offering to touch her was like offering dessert to the winner of a pie-eating contest. For the most part, Mike didn’t even care. He was exhausted, himself. And the baby had shifted Cindy in his mind, somehow. She had become the mother of his child, the other half of a team with a daunting project to accomplish. The fact that she was his wife, the love between them, was just fuel, the gasoline in this extraordinary car with its unknowable destination. It was a vital fluid but you never really noticed it until the needle was on empty.

His parents and his in-laws had been demoted, too. They were no longer the center of a nuclear family, however scattered and distracted their grown children might be. Now there was another nuclear family, and they were peripheral to it. They were grandparents, to be used for babysitting when they were nearby, granted holiday visitation rights otherwise. Cindy was closer to her mother now, they shared some vital secret knowledge. But it also isolated them. Cindy’s mother had done a lot of things wrong, made a lot of unnecessary mistakes. Cindy’s childhood had changed. It was no longer a melodrama full of regrets. It was a cautionary tale.

But it wasn’t just their marriage and their families or even their personal histories that had tilted into the unrecognizable. Their friends had been transformed, too. The ones without children seemed to fade away; the ones with children were allies, soldiers in the same platoon, swept into the same incomprehensible battle, talking about bottles and diapers, rashes and fevers, competing for the first smile or the first squeeze of a finger. Ordinary conversation had been demoted. The old topics like films, books, town gossip, politics, national news—in fact anything but the all-consuming pulse of this new life they had brought into the world—had been relegated to the status of background noise, like the hiss of tires on a rainy street.

Mike leaned down into the crib and stroked the baby’s head, thinking, so much upset you caused, so much disruption, everyone and everything downgraded.

“Wait till the next baby comes, kid” he whispered to her. “Then it’s gonna be your turn.”

He leaned down, kissed her forehead, and went downstairs for a cup of coffee. He left it half-finished. He was in a hurry this morning.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.