Pretty in Ink Read Free Page A

quiet and calm, a temporary escape from Louisa’s naked looks of need and the worry that she now wears on skin’s surface. Plus, at home I’m treated to occasional visits from a daughter who manages to escape Maria’s watchful eye and clomp-crawl her way past my door.
    “Hello, love,” I say, bending down to pull Daisy onto my lap.
    “Ma-ma.” I grin with pride at this word that she’s recently learned to say, her first. Daisy’s tiny fingers go right for the gold—a 14-carat hoop hanging from my right ear. I swat her away. Thankfully I’ve honed laser-fast reflexes during my ten months of motherhood, and so far my daughters have failed to inflict serious injury in pursuit of my baubles. My husband, Rob, believes my refusal to stop wearing dangly earrings around our babies’ grabby fingers is masochistic and insane. In truth, it’s vanity; I haven’t managed to kick the last ten pounds of baby weight, and damn it all if I’ll be denied my shiny jewelry, too.
    Maria swoops in and reaches for Daisy. “You’re not allowed in there, chica,” she says, pinning me with accusatory eyes. She’s right; I preach “Do not disturb” during office hours, but half the time I’m alone at the computer I pine for the particular company of my three squirming babies; sometimes I go so far as to snatch one up. (Inconveniently, as soon as Maria is out the door for the day and I am inundated with nothing but baby time, I long for sweet solitude.)
    My phone rings, three p.m. on the dot, my husband as reliable as a clock. “Baby,” he says. “How’s the editing?”
    “Hey, apple of my eye. Peachy as pie. How’s the designing?”
    “Fruitful. Very fruitful.” I still love this silly routine that we’ve developed over nearly a decade as partners. “I’ll pick up a rotisserie chicken on the way home. How’s it going really?”
    “Oh, I dunno. I Skyped with Louisa earlier to review page proofs, and I’m worried she’s losing her knack, like she can’t tell what’s good and what’s not, what matters and what doesn’t. Or maybe I’m just going a little crazy myself.”
    “I’m telling you, it’s too much time spent holed up with all those crazy women.” I roll my eyes, knowing what’s next. “You need some distance. I signed up for subscriptions to a few Vermont papers so we can check out the listings.”
    “Oh, goody,” I say, not bothering to mask my sarcasm.
    “Just to look, Leah. Just to dream. Picture it, you and me cozied up under a blanket with a fire going in a big old farmhouse, the girls running around some giant swatch of land, all of us planting vegetables and raising chickens—we’d have fresh eggs!”
    “Newsflash, Rob: We have fresh eggs here, from a lovely little place called Stop & Shop. No shitting chickens, either.”
    “Just think about it, OK? Imagine all that extra time you’d have with the girls.”
    I feel a pang. Rob can be good at this, and sometimes I even fall for his fantasy of what my freelance writing career out in the country would look like—batting around great ideas with enthusiastic editors, interviewing brilliant experts about fascinating topics, and pouring my heart into groundbreaking features for big, important publications. In reality I know freelancing is 90 percent hustling and churning out rehashes of the same articles over and over and 10 percent fighting against the spiral down into derangement due to lack of human interaction. Rob is lucky he can do his web design job from anywhere.
    “If we moved to Vermont, we wouldn’t have Maria,” I say. “I’d keel over and collapse within a week.”
    “Baby, you can bring Maria in your luggage. Just poke out some air holes.”
    “You are terrible,” I say, picturing our white family packing away our Colombian nanny in a suitcase and tossing it in the back of our station wagon. God, somebody’s probably done such a thing. “I have work to do. Bye, sweetheart.”
    Through my office door, I hear Maria