Supervolcano All Fall Down(49)

It really was hers. The lawyers had done their dance over title to the place, dotting every t and crossing every i and doing whatever the hell they did: probably lifting their legs and peeing on the papers till the miserable things smelled right. Whatever it was, it hadn’t come cheap. Nothing did, not in this day and age.

Up the stairs she trudged. She remembered how Teo had bounded up them, and how her heart had jumped when she heard his energetic strides. She would have loved him still if only he could have handled the idea of having a kid. She had the kid. She had the condo. She didn’t have Teo—and if he showed up now, she’d spit in his eye.

When she walked in, Marshall was holding his little half-brother. The baby’s smile at seeing his mother was so wide it almost made the top half of his head fall off. “Da-da-da-da!” he squealed.

“That’s your mama,” Marshall said. “Mama.”

“Da-da-da-da!” James Henry repeated, even louder than before.

“He’ll figure it out,” Louise said. “All of you guys went ‘dada’ before you went ‘mama,’ too.” That had made Colin proud and irked her, not that either one of them would ever have admitted it.

“Whatever.” Usually, Marshall bailed out of the condo as if his Nikes were on fire when Louise got home. That was partly because he liked babysitting no better than any other single guy his age, partly because he remained pissed off at his mother for ending the marriage that had brought him into the world. He didn’t—by the nature of things, he couldn’t—understand how dead the marriage was before Louise ended it. (That Colin hadn’t had the first clue it was dead said nothing good about him: not if you listened to Louise, anyhow.)

Today, though, Marshall didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there. Louise gradually recognized the look on his face as expectant. With a sigh, she remembered why: she was supposed to pay him today. She fumbled in her purse till she found her checkbook and a pen. She wrote rapidly, tore off the check, and handed it to him. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” He put it in the pocket of his Levi’s. That he wouldn’t help his mother for free never failed to annoy her, but he wouldn’t. If you listened to Colin, you couldn’t reasonably expect anything else, but Louise made a point of not listening to Colin.

“Wait!” she said suddenly when Marshall was already halfway to the door.

He paused. “Wazzup?”

“Let me see that check again.”

He handed it to her. She scribbled the amount in her register. She used to forget to do that about one time in five. It had driven methodical, organized Colin straight up a wall. Louise always figured she had more creative things to worry about . . . till she was on her own, and had to balance the checkbook herself instead of letting somebody else worry about it. The hassles a couple of unexpected bounced checks put her through did more to make her note every single one of them than Colin’s sarcasm had ever managed.

She gave back the check. “Now you can escape.”

“Whatever,” Marshall said again, and did just that.

Dealing with the register meant Louise had taken her eyes off James Henry for a few seconds. She couldn’t safely do that any more, not when he was crawling. He’d got something in his mouth. She grabbed him, reached in there, and pulled it out.

A little scrap of paper. It wouldn’t have hurt him even if he’d swallowed it, but you never wanted to take chances like that. Most of the time, she wouldn’t have wanted to stick her finger into somebody else’s mouth, either. A mom with a baby got used to all kinds of things she wouldn’t have wanted to do most of the time.

She nursed him. She gave him some rice cereal and some carrot goop. His diapers had got more revolting since he started eating solid food. Colin used to say a rug rat wasn’t human till it was potty-trained. Like a lot of things Colin had said, that held just enough truth to be annoying.

Louise found herself thinking of her ex-husband a lot more often than she thought about the departed father of her latest child. Yes, she’d been together with Colin a lot longer than she had with Teo, but that wasn’t it, or not all of it. Colin said and thought more interesting things than Teo.

Which mattered only so much. Teo’d been a hell of a lot better in bed and easier to get along with . . . till he freaked out when she found herself pregnant.

James Henry was trying to catch his toes and stuff them in his mouth. “I love you,” Louise told him, “but you are such a damn nuisance.”

“Da-da-da!” the baby said happily. His tummy was full. His diaper was dry. His onesie kept him warm. His mommy was there. He didn’t care about anything else in the whole wide world.