Maternity Leave (9781466871533) Read Free

ounces, twenty-one inches. You have to include the stats. People eat that shit up,” I encourage him.
    â€œAnything else? How long you were in labor? How many centimeters you were dilated? How many pints you pood?”
    â€œDon’t be a butthole.”
    â€œI don’t know what you people share with your FaceFriends.” Zach, while working with computers for a living, wants to keep his digital presence to a minimum, therefore he abstains from Facebook. Plus, he essentially hates everyone from his childhood.
    â€œFaceFriends?” I chide.
    â€œYou whippersnappers and your newfangled technologies.”
    â€œCan you imagine what the technology will be like when Sam is our age? People will be living on the moon and ordering food from their walls.”
    â€œAnd then the lion in Sam’s playroom will eat us,” Zach muses, referencing a favorite Ray Bradbury story.
    â€œWe can only dream,” I concur. “Post it.”
    2 Days Old
    â€œOne hundred fifteen likes. Wow, that’s pretty impressive. Even that girl who was a skinhead in high school liked that I had a baby.” I’m not ashamed to say I’m obsessively checking my Facebook page for little red alert bubbles every five minutes. Maybe three. Time moves at a different pace in a hospital. Or perhaps I’m just glazed from watching thirteen straight hours of Call of the Wildman, a reality show about a man sorely lacking in teeth but not in the chutzpah department. He helps people catch wild animals that wreak havoc in their homes and businesses with his bare hands. I never watched the show before, but it’s benignly entertaining, and the Turtleman, as they call him, is surprisingly clever.
    â€œWhy are you friends with an ex-skinhead when you were not actually friends with her in the first place? I would never want those fuckwads from my high school looking at my business.” Zach cuddles Sam in his arms. “You’re never going to show anyone your business, are you, Sammy? No, you’re not,” he babbles to Sam.
    â€œI like it. It’s like we were all reborn as adults or something. I mean, the ones who survived. Did you know there have already been seven deaths from my high school class? I barely knew any of them.”
    â€œAnd now you’ll never have the opportunity to look at pictures of their kids or what meals they eat.”
    â€œSpeaking of meals, I wonder if Doo is eating.” Doogan was once a plump cat whom the vet was always trying to put on a diet, but is now a slim senior who we have to make sure eats.
    â€œYour mom checked on him yesterday and said he ate about half his food. Better than none.” Doogan’s aging is something I hate to think about. Sometimes in the middle of the night I imagine his death and can’t stop myself from crying. If I ever become an actress, this is the mental trick I’ll use to help me cry on cue. Not that I want to be an actress. You never hear about middle school English teachers breaking into Hollywood at thirty-six anyway.
    â€œI hope he likes Sam. I’ll feel really guilty if he doesn’t. We’ve had seventeen years alone together.”
    â€œWhat am I, chopped liver?” Zach asks.
    â€œWhat are you, a seventy-five-year-old man named Manny? And no, you are not chopped liver, but Doogan was like my first baby, and now he’s my old baby and I’m bringing in a new baby and I don’t want it to upset him. Remember that woman I used to work with who had that crazy cat with thumbs who somehow figured out how to open their deep freezer and ate all of their ice cream bars?”
    â€œNo, but continue,” Zach laughs.
    â€œWell, they had to get rid of the cat after they brought the baby home because he kept trying to jump in her bassinet and lick her head.”
    â€œMaybe he thought she was an ice cream bar. Besides, we don’t even have a bassinet,” Zach points out.
    â€œTrue.