Page 74 of Babies for the Boss
“You need it more,” she says. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m just saying. For a man who just won a war, you look remarkably rough.”
“Wars are rough.”
“Mm.” She settles back against me. “For what it’s worth, I think you look very handsome for someone who looks terrible.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s a compliment,” she clarifies. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m going to sleep. Tomorrow, I will punish you for being such a brat.”
“Good idea,” she says, with the satisfaction of a woman who has arrived at the correct conclusion. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
I lie back. The light comes through the curtains, and my wife is beside me, and the house is quiet around us. There will be more battles because there are always more battles, and my wife is here and will not be moved, not even by me.
It is the most terrifying thing in the world. And yet, I sleep.
27
MOLLY
The burner phoneis hot pink.
This was not my choice—I requested something unobtrusive, something that would sit in a drawer and not announce itself, and what arrived via Igor’s delivery system was a phone the color of a highlighter marker with a small sticker of a cat wearing sunglasses on the back, which I can only assume is Vet’s commentary on the situation. The texts that come through it are sparse and characteristically her—short, precise, occasionally dry to the point of being arid, and always exactly what they need to be and nothing more.
Compound secure. He-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named’s Dog rehomed. His name was Pushkin. He is now living with a retired schoolteacher in Lausanne who sends photos.
The photos are excessive. I have saved all of them.
You are going to be enormous, she texted two weeks ago, after I sent her a photo of my current silhouette, which at seven months is considerable.This is good. The bigger you are, the harder it is to kidnap you.
That is the least comforting thing anyone has said to me about my pregnancy, I texted back.
You are welcome, she replied, and I laughed for longer than was strictly proportionate, because it was so completely Vet that it wrapped around the grief of her absence and made it temporarily smaller.
I’m thinking about this, sitting at the kitchen table in the Southampton mansion on a Tuesday morning in February with my coffee and my burner phone and my considerable silhouette, when the front door opens, and Carrie Ann Kohler comes through it. She has a rolling suitcase, a tote bag whose handles appear to be losing structural integrity, and the expression of a woman who has traveled from Kansas to Southampton and is still processing the conceptual distance between the two.
When she sees me, she grins as I stand up at the table. “It’s a mansion.”
“I told you it was a mansion.”
“You said big house. You said he had a big house.”
“It’s a big house.” I shrug.
“Molly.” She sets the tote bag down and looks at the entryway—the stone floors and the old wood, a space that has been cared for over many decades—with the wide green eyes that are her default setting when encountering something that exceeds her expectation. “You’re gigantic.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“There was a man at the gate.”
“There are several men at the gate, generally.”
“He had—” She lowers her voice and makes a shape with her hand that is apparently meant to indicate a firearm.
