Читать книгу New Beginnings - Jill Barnett, Jill Barnett - Страница 10

Mike had been working at Spreckles for a while when his son Scott made his long, difficult entrance into the world, at exactly three-thirty in the morning. Labor for March lasted more than twenty-four hours, much of that time with her acting uncharacteristically irrational, banishing him from the room one minute and the next, calling out for him to never leave her.

By the time he first held his son, looking like a small red face swamped by a blue-striped blanket, Mike was blurry-eyed, over-emotional, numb, his hands crushed by hours at her bedside, and he was sapped dry of everything, especially sleep. When asked to, he dutifully counted the fingers and toes and came up with nineteen the first time, then twenty-two.

“Count again, Mike,” March insisted.

“Look. He has one head. I’m not worried.” But Mike was worried. Nothing would ever be the same for them again.

The baby became the center of their world. Everyone’s world. He would come home from work to their apartment in Redwood City and meet his mother or mother-in-law, both of whom were there so often it seemed as if they were living with them. Both women handed out advice that often contradicted each other’s.

Already he spent a third of his life on a crusade of germ warfare, boiling everything that came into contact with anything “baby.” (He had read all the baby books himself. On occasion, March had even accused him of memorizing some of them.)

To go anywhere they needed a moving van for all the child paraphernalia. March was determined to breastfeed and had a frustrating and uncomfortable time. She cried as much as the baby at first.

All of those changes he could handle. What scared him was something else altogether. He was a father, a word that held roiling meaning for him and caused him plenty of internal anguish and self-doubt. He was responsible for his son, for his child’s life and future and happiness.

Ahead lay a world of strangers who could easily swallow his child whole if given the opportunity. Life, people, took big bites out of you. Mike felt this immense, overwhelming responsibility to protect his son from everything he knew awaited his child, and it scared the hell out of him.

Finally one night, when he paced the room with the baby so March could sleep, he made a promise to his son, and to the world in that room, and mostly to himself: he would never be distant and demanding. He wouldn’t be the thing that stood between his kids, the way his father had often put himself between Brad and him. He would definitely not come into the house one day a week to rule the roost, carve some meat, and expect those slim, atavistic moments to stand for fatherhood.

Still, every morning, Mike got up at five am, just his father had for so many years, and he went to work at a job he hated because the paycheck was good and the insurance even better. He had a family, so he did what was expected, everything Don Cantrell had said to him.

March accepted the news that she was pregnant for a second time without too much terror. Scott wasn’t even a year yet, and honestly, she was too tired to summon up any negative emotion. Again, the pregnancy was an accident, one that happened during an exhausted night when Scott was barely four months old.

A few months into her new pregnancy, Mike came to her one night. (He’d been reading the latest books again.) One of the things she had always adored about him was his ability to see even a small modicum of possibility, and to embrace it with his own Cantrell enthusiasm.

But her pregnancy was now his sudden obsession. Any day she expected him to double over with Braxton Hicks pains. On that night, after he had read somewhere that infants inside the womb could hear, Mike had come to her with a grand idea to start their baby’s education early.

“If a child can hear, what if he can learn?”

“Just what are you thinking?”

“Let’s teach him to count.”

“Great. He can help us during the contractions. I can hear him now, calling out of my uterus: One! Two! Three! Breathe…Push!”

“March. This is serious. What if it’s true? We have to try this.”

She snapped her fingers. “I have an idea. Let’s teach him algebra. Geometry? Trig? You took calculus, didn’t you? Or we could always call my dad over to teach him. Maybe by the time the baby is a toddler he will do polynomial equations with rational coefficients and even draw sketches of the seven continents.”

But despite all of her sarcasm and teasing, Mike had been undaunted. At night he read to her belly, which was fine because he often read some kind of classic literature, Call of the Wild, David Copperfield, The Grapes of Wrath, which made her fall asleep more easily. For the first three months she could have slept twenty hours a day without being read to.

She loved it when he read poetry. Mike’s deep voice reading the metaphysical poets, or Beat poets like Cohen and Ferlinghetti. It was sexy as hell. The only real argument they’d had was when Mike decided to read a popular contemporary fiction novel and for some unknown reason picked Rosemary’s Baby.

Every day there was something new. He moved the radio by the bed and played the classical stations, old standards, musical soundtracks and the Beatles. The eight-track tape player in the car had everything from Bach to Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers to Hair. One night she awoke to him hovering above her protracted stomach, counting in Spanish.

About three weeks before Phillip was born, Mike was sound asleep after one Spanish lesson, two Wagner arias, Peter, Paul, and Mary and multiplying the sevens. She was wide awake at two thirty in the morning, the baby tumbling and kicking her ribs like crazy.

Since it was partially her husband’s fault she was sleepless, she leaned over and punched him in the arm. “Quick. Mike. Wake up.”

“What?” He sat up, disoriented. “Is it the baby? Don’t move. I’ll call the doctor.”

“No…no…It’s not the baby. I want you to get the protractor, honey, and draw an isosceles triangle on my stomach, then later we can go over to the Castro District and I’ll get pi, 3.1416, tattooed right here.”

Groaning, Mike flopped back on the bed, “Funny. You wake me up for jokes.” He stretched and yawned. “You can’t sleep again, right? What time is it?” He glanced at the clock, turned and faced her. “You laugh at me, sunshine, but wait and see. This kid’s going to be Nobel Prize material.”

Months and months later, when their wonderful son Phillip finally spoke something other than baby gibberish (much later than Scott since Scott spoke for him most of the time, a fact that drove Mike crazy), Phillip’s first word was “Mama.”

For two long and wickedly hilarious months he called Mike “Mama.” To March, the only way it would have been even funnier was if the baby had called Mike “mamacita.”

Eventually, from their Nobel prodigy came his second word: “shit.” His first sentence? “You idiot,” which he shouted after March had honked the car horn and waved at a neighbor. Yes, Mike had educated Phillip. Their Pavlovian child had learned from his father that whenever you honked the horn, you had to holler out “you idiot.”

Mike had always made his skiboards in his parents’ garage. At March’s insistence, he’d applied for a patent not long after that winter so long ago, when he’d first taken her skiboarding and long before they ever got married. But with marriage and family and work, he hadn’t made a skiboard in too long for him to remember.

After Phillip was born, Mike went over to his folks’ place one day to find his dad had put all of his board materials and equipment into the shed because, “Son, you have more responsibility now. You aren’t a teenager anymore.”

No one argued with Don Cantrell, so whenever March asked Mike about his boards, he blew her off with some lie.

He came home one night from the job he hated, stepping over baby toys into an apartment that smelled like spaghetti sauce and baby powder. He tossed his tie and sport coat on the sofa in the living room and headed for the kitchen.

March met him with an icy beer in one hand, waving a letter from the Department of Commerce in the other. “We have something to celebrate. The patent came through.”

He took a sip of the beer, sat down and read the letter with mixed emotions.

“I have more news. I weaned Phillip early and took a job today.”

That got his attention. He set down the beer. “Why? I make good money. You don’t need to work.”

“Yes. I need to work, not only for me. For you, Mike.”

“You don’t have to work for me. I thought we decided that we didn’t want to farm out the kids.”

“We don’t have to. I can work from home. Dave Wilkerson, you remember him from when I was still at the Art Institute? He called last week. Would you believe he’s with the biggest ad agency in the city? Stone Morgan and they want me to do some of their graphics. Most of the time, I can work from home, but they have day care onsite—the company’s run by a woman—so when I have to go to the office, it won’t be a problem. The pay is less than you make, but it comes with full benefits and it’s enough for us to get by.”

She knelt down in front of him and put her hands on his knees. “Quit your job. You hate what you’re doing. I don’t want it sapping all the joy from you. It kills me to see you give up on the skiboards. I know you have, by the way. I can’t get you to talk about them. You’re trying to hide it. What you can’t hide is that giving up your dreams is slowly killing you.

“I talked to your mom. She told me your dad packed up all your boards and tools months and months back. You never told me, Mike. You’re supposed to talk to me. You don’t have to protect me.”

“I’m fine. Dad was right. Chasing after some dream doesn’t make practical sense with the boys.”

“It makes more sense with the boys. It’s their future. The pregnancies, the marriage and babies, all of it got in the way of what we wanted. The kids are gifts. They are certainly not a reason to turn our lives into our parents’ lives.” She gave a short laugh. “It’s not just you who is changing.” She lowered her voice. “A month ago I actually bought three Butterick patterns.”

“You? Sew?”

“Happy-Hands-At-Home March. If I start to play bridge it’s all over for me.”

He wanted to believe they could shuck everything practical and shoot for the moon. He wanted to work at a job that made him want to set the alarm clock, that made him want to work long hours and take pride in what money he made. But he was a father with two young sons. To chase his dreams felt irresponsible.

“Look, honey,” March went on. “I believe this letter is a sign. It’s telling us something. Let’s move back to the city. Get a place with space for you to work on your boards. I’ve been thinking all day. Maybe a warehouse or a place where we can live above a shop? It’s only two hours up to the mountains. We can go up to the ski resorts on weekends and you can try to sell your boards. The boys are young now. They’re not in school yet. When they are in school, that’s when we will be tied down.

“Look. I’d be willing to bet we can get some kind of exhibition meet organized with Rob and his local connections. I can see if we can get support for some kind of race, a special run. Maybe at Northstar? The resort is new. They need publicity. I can get ad sponsors. What if I could get some good sponsors through my new job? This is our time. Our chance.” She took his hands. “This may be our only chance. Do you really want to look back and think if only?”

He was acutely aware that his wife knew exactly what to say to him. She knew which buttons to push.

“We’ll do this together,” she said so easily and confidently “You can make the boards and I’ll design the graphics for them.”

Inside he was warring with himself, what he wanted to do with what he should do. What was right, what was wrong. Could it all be so easy?

“You’re too quiet. You know you want to. Say yes.”

“I don’t know, sunshine.”

“Say yes. What have we got to lose? We don’t own a house. We aren’t tied down financially. If we fail, what’s the worst that can happen? We start over. But at least you’ll have a chance to be happy, even for a while.”

“Happy with you supporting the family?”

She stood up so fast, hands on her hips, glaring. “Since when are you Mister Macho-I-Must-Be-the-Breadwinner? Why is this any different than if I were putting you through med school or law school? That’s pretty small-minded of you, Mike. Are you planning on keeping me barefoot and pregnant too?”

“Not a bad idea. We had a good time making those two.”

“Both accidents.” She grabbed the letter and waved it under his nose. “Are you, a smart and talented man with honest vision, really going to ignore fate and probably ruin our destiny?”

“Destiny, hell…I don’t want to ruin our lives.”

“You won’t. I’ve always believed in you. Don’t tell me you can’t believe in yourself, too.” She paused and leaned very close to him. “Let’s do it.”

Of everything that streamed through his head in those few moments, the most frightening was her complete and absolute faith in him. This whole thing wasn’t a lark to her. For one brief moment he wondered if he would lose her if he failed, but then thinking that way meant he didn’t have the same strength of faith in her she had in him.

Maybe because she believed in him he could let go of all of his dad’s hauntingly defeatist phrases. But then self-doubt was the worse kind of weakness, worse than anything his father had ever said.

There it all was: his dream laid out before him, door open—come this way—with all the possibilities flashing through his mind in neon letters. Races. Skiboard runs. Sports shops. Endorsements. TV. The Olympics?

He almost laughed at that last one and couldn’t even say that improbable pipe dream aloud, so he took a drink and lifted the beer in the air. “What the hell…Let’s do it.”