Baby Talk Read Free Page B

clear what she had meant
by this. When he had turned to his father, whom he hadn’t seen more
than a half dozen times since elementary school, the advice Neal
got was, “Do whatever the hell you want, boy. But if you’re gonna
screw up your life by getting married, you’re on your own.” That
meant that he would no longer help Neal with his college
tuition.
    In the end, against all Neal’s better
judgment and his deepest wishes for his own life and his future, he
had finally married Annie. No fancy wedding, no honeymoon, not even
any wedding rings—he couldn’t afford them. Just a little ceremony
downtown at the Justice of the Peace. Afterwards, Neal went back to
his dorm room and slept by himself, since they didn’t even have
their own apartment then. He figured that he could make it all
work, somehow.
    But he had obviously been wrong.
    He regretted that extra millisecond of
pleasure more than he had ever regretted anything in his life.
    “I love you,” Neal muttered, as he pulled
the Snell van into the parking lot of his first delivery. “I doubt
it, Natasha. I doubt it very much.”
     
     

C HAPTER 2
     
    A little after eleven, in between two of his
deliveries, Neal stopped at a bookstore to see if he could ease his
mind about the incident with Natasha. No matter what Annie said,
Neal still couldn’t believe he had imagined it.
    He found a pretty young clerk working at the
front desk. He asked her where the baby books were located.
    “This way,” the girl said, with a knowing
smile. As Neal followed her across the store, Neal puzzled over
this. But by the time they reached the Family and Parenthood
Section, he understood.
    “The pregnancy books are right here,” the
girl told him, with another little smile.
    “I already
have
a baby,” Neal said
irritably. “I just need to look something up.”
    “Whatever,” she said, and briskly walked
away.
    “Stupid,” Neal mumbled, more to himself that
to her. Why was he so embarrassed about having a kid? He was young,
but so were a lot of fathers. But maybe he wasn’t embarrassed.
Maybe he was just angry about it.
Still
angry.
    He picked up a book called
You and Your
Newborn
and flipped through the glossary, scanning for any
entries that might point him to information about speech
development. Annie had a whole library of similar books at home,
but Neal had hardly glanced at any of them. He and Annie had
completely different opinions about the basic nature of children
and their process of evolving into adults. Annie was of the “blank
slate” school of thinking—she regarded babies as nothing more than
human computers, born ready and waiting to be programmed by their
parents and by society, with no prior personality or ability to
think or act on their own. As a result, she had an almost paranoid
attitude about every little interaction she had with Natasha,
afraid that the slightest “mistake” would screw up the poor kid for
life.
    In contrast, Neal believed that children
come into the world already possessing a certain level of mind and
spirit, with their personalities at least partially formed, and
therefore are much more self-sufficient—and self-directed—than many
people thought these days. His own mother had convinced him of this
fact. Neal and his older brother, Kevin, were total opposites. Neal
was quiet, intellectual, and somewhat introverted, whereas Kevin
was rambunctious, outgoing, and barely made it through a two-year
college. Their mother had always said this difference was evident
long before either of them were born. Neal barely moved inside his
mother’s womb, while Kevin kicked so violently that, at times, she
was afraid he might do some internal damage.
    Neal finally located a section in the book
on speech development. He read it carefully. Most babies, it said,
begin to “vocalize” between 8 and 10 months, and usually after 12
to 14 months begin to form “meaningful word combinations.” The book
went on to say, in a very