Other People's Children: a Novel by Jeff Hoffmann

Other People's Children: a Novel by Jeff Hoffmann

Author:Jeff Hoffmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00


Marla

Marla checked the items on the order, closed the box, and sealed it with a shriek of packaging tape. She looked at the route and tossed the box onto the correct skid. She eyed the next order on the packing table, just binder clips and some pens, and started to build a smaller box. She fell into her rhythm, the rhythm that made the day pass quickly, a rhythm she’d found so long ago that she didn’t think about it anymore. Build the box, pack, check, seal, toss. To stay in the rhythm, she avoided eye contact with Helen across the table. They had gotten along fine in the beginning, until an argument about overtime. After that, Marla didn’t trust Helen, and working across a table from somebody that she didn’t trust—all day, every day, for seven years—it was hard not to let the stupid little annoyances accumulate like hairs in a drain. After a while, they clumped into arguments and then congealed into grudges, until the whole damn thing spilled over into hatred. Marla and Helen had learned that a couple of wrong words, a wrong look even, could send the whole day sideways, so they both did their best to ignore each other from six feet away. Marla was leaving early, but even so, she wanted to maintain that rhythm. It allowed her mind to drift to the baby.

She could barely remember Carli and Wendy when they were babies, but the smell stuck with her. That same pudding smell that caught her off guard when she carried the baby down to the recovery room to make Carli look at it. She should have gotten up into Carli’s grill right when Carli told her she was pregnant, when she started talking to Paige, before she chose the Durbins. But Marla was too pissed off. She should have gone into that diner with Carli. She could have wrecked the whole damn thing before it got started, but all she managed to do was yell at Carli.

As Carli got fat, Marla stopped looking at her. She kept her eyes glued to the TV when Carli walked by. The truth was, she had trouble enough sorting out how she felt about it herself. She was restless. Twitchy. She went for drives down by the river. She bought Wendy that sweater. That kind of shit. She even watched two episodes of The Golden Girls that one night before she snapped out of it. And she probably would have just yelled at Carli one more time when she got home from the hospital, and that would have been the end of it, if it wasn’t for Durbin.

If that asshole didn’t come over like he did, if he didn’t say what he said, she probably wouldn’t have made Carli look at the baby. And she wouldn’t have smelled that pudding when she carried the baby back to the nurses’ station. She wouldn’t have remembered the wide-open space she’d felt inside of herself that first time she held Wendy, before she left Sean, before everything got all fucked up.



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