The Innocent Read Free Page B

with copper-plated steel plates, glossy enamel, and a gold stopper. At night spotlights would illuminate the bottle so that Jerseyites could see it from miles around.
    But no more. Now the color looked beer-bottle brown but it was really rust red. The bottle's label was long gone. Following its lead, the once-robust neighborhood around it had not so much fallen apart as slowly disintegrated. Nobody had worked in the brewery for twenty years. From the eroding ruins, one would think it would have been much longer.
    Matt stopped on the top step of their stoop. Olivia, the love of his life, did not. The car keys jangled in her hand.
    "I don't think we should," he said.
    Olivia did not break stride. "Come on. It'll be fun."
    "A phone should be a phone," Matt said. "A camera should be a camera."
    "Oh, that's deep."
    "One gizmo doing both… it's a perversion."
    "Your area of expertise," Olivia said.
    "Ha, ha. You don't see the danger?"
    "Er, nope."
    "A camera and a phone in one"- Matt stopped, searching for how to continue-"it's, I don't know, it's interspecies breeding when you think about it, like one of those B-movie experiments that grows out of control and destroys all in its path."
    Olivia just stared at him. "You're so weird."
    "I'm not sure we should get camera phones, that's all."
    She hit the remote and the car doors unlocked. She reached for the door handle. Matt hesitated.
    Olivia looked at him.
    "What?" he asked.
    "If we both had camera phones," Olivia said, "I could send you nudies when you're at work."
    Matt opened the door. "Verizon or Sprint?"
    Olivia gave him a smile that made his chest thrum. "I love you, you know."
    "I love you too."
    They were both inside the car. She turned to him. He could see the concern and it almost made him turn away. "It's going to be okay," Olivia said. "You know that, right?"
    He nodded and feigned a smile. Olivia wouldn't buy it, but the effort would count toward something.
    "Olivia?" he said.
    "Yes?"
    "Tell me more about the nudies."
    She punched his arm.
    But Matt's unease returned the moment he entered the Sprint store and started hearing about the two-year commitment. The salesman's smile looked somehow satanic, like the devil in one of those movies where a naïve guy sells his soul. When the salesman whipped out a map of the United States – the "nonroaming" areas, he informed them, were in bright red- Matt started to back away.
    As for Olivia, there was simply no quelling her excitement, but then again his wife had a natural lean toward the enthusiastic. She was one of those rare people who finds joy in things both large and small, one of those traits that demonstrates, certainly in their case, that opposites do attract.
    The salesman kept jabbering. Matt tuned him out, but Olivia gave the man her full attention. She asked a question or two, just out of formality, but the salesman knew that this one was not only hooked, lined, and sinkered but fried up and halfway down the gullet.
    "Let me just get the paperwork ready," Hades said, slinking away.
    Olivia gripped Matt's arm, her face beaming. "Isn't this fun?"
    Matt made a face.
    "What?"
    "Did you really use the word 'nudie'?"
    She laughed and leaned her head against his shoulder.
    Of course Olivia's giddiness- and nonstop beaming- was due to much more than the changing of their mobile phone service. Purchasing the camera phones was merely a symbol, a signpost, of what was to come.
    A baby.
    Two days ago, Olivia had taken a home pregnancy test and, in a move Matt found oddly loaded with religious significance, a red cross finally appeared on the white stick. He was stunned silent. They had been trying to have a child for a year- pretty much since they first got married. The stress of continuous failure had turned what had always been a rather spontaneous if not downright magical experience into well-orchestrated chores of temperature taking, calendar markings, prolonged abstinence, concentrated ardor.
    Now that was behind them.