The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux

Author:Tim Gautreaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Fourteen

She was back from the hospital in two days with an eight-pound boy, Matthew, and the company of nearly every female relative in the parish. Only her brother and old white-shoed uncle Lester, the insurance salesman/notary public, represented the men. Colette fussed at the women, trying to run them off with mock ill will. The truth was that she missed having her mother with her, and in the rare times when she was alone with the baby, she felt the lack like a newly missing tooth, a painful void of blood. Aunt Nellie, with freshly bleached hair, managed the company, showing up with baby things and fighting her sister Margaret and two other neighborhood women for the right to fool with the child. Colette would sit on the porch in the afternoons, looking down into the baby’s face, picking out her own features, her mother’s features, ignoring Paul’s chin. She liked the smell of her baby, the squiggle of his skin against hers. When his eyes would open like arched gates and look at her, she knew she was finally at the center of somebody’s world. Matthew stuck out his tongue at her. He looked as if he could eat her up, and this scared Colette: It occurred to her that she wasn’t sure what to feed him for the rest of his life.

After Christmas, not many days after the baby was born, she rode to Lafayette with Paul’s sister, Nan, a fairly tall brunette who lived in jogging shorts and talked like a tugboat captain. Paul’s capsized mind was coming back, and he knew everyone again. Much of the swelling had gone out of his face, and the doctors had managed to do careful skin grafts on his neck, cheeks, chest, and hands. Most of the burns had not left scarring. His speech was a beat too slow, and his left arm was not functioning correctly. When he wanted it to go forward, it would go back. He remembered nothing of the accident. She showed him the baby, and he didn’t seem to understand fully what it was. She told him that Tyler was in Texas, paying a lawyer every cent he owned to fight ninety-seven federal and state charges. Paul fell asleep while she was talking to him, and she was left with a deep sense of how ruined he was.

She ate at a McDonald’s with Paul’s parents and watched them dig through their clothes for money for the meal. On the drive home Colette studied idle tugboats and supply vessels listing at their landings in roadside canals and thought of the times she’d walked into an upscale restaurant and ordered whatever she wanted without looking at the prices on the menu.

January was colder than usual. She now had two babies to look after, her father and Matthew, but with the help of her aunts, she found time to shop at places like Al’s Dollar Store, looking at thin, coarsely made baby clothes, loose threads hanging from the seams as though somebody in Albania had given up in mid-stitch.

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