The Real Macaw(22)

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” one of the mothers said. Several others tittered.

Francine shot a quick glance in their direction and then fixed her eyes on the field. Her face looked grim, but I had to admire her presence of mind. I’d have been tempted to confront the two gossiping mothers if they’d said something like that about my husband.

Then again, maybe she wasn’t angry at them. Maybe she was at least a little upset with her husband. I had a feeling she wasn’t just annoyed because his inattentiveness had contributed to the melee on the field.

I patted her arm.

“Don’t let it get to you,” I said, softly enough that the others wouldn’t hear.

She glanced up and smiled, briefly.

“I’m used to it,” she said, in a similarly quiet tone. “Of course, this whole shelter thing is making it worse than ever.” She pronounced shelter more like “shelteh,” causing me to mishear it, just for a second, as “sheltie,” and spend a few anxious moments racking my brain to recall if we had a sheltie at the house, or if there had been some kind of sheltie-related incident in town. Clearly I had dogs and cats on the brain.

“It’ll blow over,” I said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “I’ve even thought of taking some kind of speech lessons so I blend in more. Do you think maybe your husband would know someone at the drama department who could teach me how to speak more like the locals?”

“Probably,” I said. “But why would you want to? A lot of people pay good money to get rid of southern accents—why would you want to learn one? Especially since in a year or two—”

I was about to say that in a year or two, they’d probably move someplace else when her husband took another job. Probably not a tactful thing to say. What if she was hoping they’d settle down and lead the rest of their lives in Caerphilly? Or what if she was thinking, like many of the locals, that her husband might not last a few more months in his job, let alone another year or two?

“In a year or two, people will stop noticing your accent so much,” I went on, changing my course. “They won’t pretend to think of you as a native—I’ve lived in Caerphilly for years now, and they have yet to forget that I’m not from around here. To some locals, you’re an outsider for life if all four of your grandparents weren’t born in Caerphilly County. Don’t sweat it.”

“I just wish—” she began.

But whatever she was intending to say was drowned out by an abrupt howl from Josh. I began digging through the diaper bag.

“Hell of a set of lungs on that kid,” one of the mothers said. She sounded cross and superior, as if to imply that as infants, her darlings had always asked softly and politely for their meals.

“Just stop your ears for a second,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Jamie joined in.

“Can you handle both at once?” Francine asked.

“Not easily,” I said. “Would you mind doing one?”

“I’d love to!”

I handed her Josh and a bottle, and picked up Jamie to do the honors with him.

“You’re not breastfeeding!” one of the mothers exclaimed. “Don’t you realize how important breast milk is for babies’ health! You should—”

“I completely understand the importance of breast milk,” I said. “That’s why I pump as much of it as I can, divide it in half so each boy gets his fair share, and top it off with enough formula to fill them up, since by now they’re each drinking slightly more in a day than I can produce.”

“Well, that’s all right then.” The woman pulled back slightly. Had I snapped at her? My tone had sounded perfectly civil to me, but I was running on even less sleep than usual, so I wasn’t necessarily a good judge of the finer points of human interaction.

“Sorry if I snapped,” I said. “My dad’s a doctor, you know, so I get rather a lot of free medical advice from him.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“He and my cousin Rose Noire are in complete support of what I’m doing,” I said. Although Dad and Mother were only part-time residents of Caerphilly, he commanded a certain amount of respect in the county. So did Rose Noire, though in somewhat different circles—but if any of these women shared my cousin’s interests in alternative medicine, organic nutrition, and holistic child-rearing, they’d probably feel reassured.

“Oh, well that’s great, then,” the mother said. She was edging farther away from me.

Had I made things better or worse? I couldn’t tell. Either way, if I’d made her wary of publicly reproaching bottle-feeding mothers, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Not everyone had a choice about how to feed their babies. What if I was one of those mothers who couldn’t produce milk at all, or whose babies couldn’t easily feed? Or an adoptive mother? Couldn’t she imagine how someone in one of those situations would feel? Her words stung me a little, even though my only problem was that my kids outnumbered me and had healthy appetites.