Susan stuck her tongue out at him. “Just don’t let your eyeballs stick out on stalks when you stare at the cute ones.”
She tried to sound severe, but he knew she was kidding.
They went back to his apartment. He did his best to show where she satisfied his appetites. By all the signs, he satisfied hers, too. And wasn’t that the point of the happy exercise?
Vic Moretti called back five days later. He considerately waited till Bryce was home from the DWP. “You want the position, it’s yours,” he said without preamble.
“I want it,” Bryce said.
“You sure you know what you’re getting into?” Moretti asked. Maybe he was joking, and then again maybe he wasn’t.
Bryce didn’t care . . . too much. “I know what I’m getting out of,” he replied.
Moretti paused. “Yeah, that counts, too,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Well, semester’s starting soon. It’s good to have the slot filled.”
“Good to fill it.” Bryce wondered whether he’d mean that five years—or even five weeks—from now.
* * *
James Henry Ferguson sneezed. Yellowish snot leaked from his right nostril. Dried, crusted boogers clogged the left one. He coughed and almost choked, but then didn’t quite.
“You poor thing,” Louise said. If anything was more pathetic than a sick baby, she had no idea what it could be. James Henry didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know he’d be okay again in a couple-three days. He didn’t know what a couple-three days were, or how to wait them out. All he knew was that he felt crappy.
“Mama!” he said, and started to bawl. That did nothing to improve the situation. His eyes leaked tears. His snot got runnier, which meant it oozed from both nostrils. Looked at objectively, he made a most uninspiring spectacle.
Louise wasn’t objective—nowhere close. Mothers weren’t equipped to be. If they had been, the human race would have died out long before it ever escaped from the caves.
Colin, now . . . She remembered Colin surveying a sick kid—had it been Rob or Marshall? why couldn’t she remember?—and going, “Boy, he’s an ugly little son of a gun, isn’t he?” She remembered the clinical interest in his voice, and how much it had infuriated her.
If she’d been in touch with her feelings then, she would have walked away from the marriage on the spot. And if she had, her life now would sure as hell be different. Better? Worse? She hadn’t a clue. Different she was sure of.
The other thing she was sure of was that the OTC meds she was stuffing into James Henry weren’t worth shit. She was definitely in touch with her feelings about that. It made her mad, was what it did. Back when her other kids were little, you could buy stuff that actually made snot dry up. Sure, it’d come back as soon as the dose wore off, but it went away for a while.
No more, dammit. The FDA, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the drugs that helped most kids also messed up fourteen in a million, or whatever the hell the number was. And so, to keep the fourteen in a million safe, the other 999,986 sniffled for a solid week whenever they caught a cold.
And they did catch them. Boy, did they ever! Babies and colds went together like ham and eggs. All the cold medicines on the drugstore shelves looked pretty much the way they had back when Louise was taking care of Rob and Vanessa and Marshall. Their boxes said things like SAFER THAN EVER! What that meant was, they didn’t do squat.
She cuddled James Henry. “Mama!” he said mournfully. He got snot on her shoulder even though she’d put a cloth diaper there to try to block that mucus. One more blouse she’d have to wash. At least snot didn’t stink the way spit-up did.
Her phone rang. James Henry jerked. He wasn’t as jumpy about the phone as a cat was, but he didn’t like it. The phone made her pay attention to something besides him, and he didn’t like that, either.
She fished the phone out of her purse. Marshall’s number was showing. “Hello?” Louise said.
“Yo.” That was Marshall’s way of talking, but it didn’t sound like him. It was too deep and too slow, and punctuated by a sneeze: “I better not come over there tomorrow. I’m—ah-choo!—sick.”
“So is James Henry,” Louise said. She didn’t quite remember how she’d got into the habit of always using both his first and his middle name, but she had. “Did you give him the cold, or did he give it to you?”
“Probably,” Marshall said. Again, the answer sounded like him even if the voice didn’t. Again, he sneezed. This time, he blew his nose right afterwards: a long, sorrowful honk. I wish James Henry could do that, Louise thought. Her older son went on, “Either which way, I feel like dog shit.”