The Misfortunes of Others Read Free

hit.”
    “How are you feeling, Missy?” Missy was his pet name for her, from his childhood. Maya was five years older and had practically raised him after their parents died. He patted her shoulder and took her hand in both of his own. “You don’t look any different.”
    Maya’s gaze softened as she looked at her reprobate younger brother, the black sheep of the family. “I feel different, Snooks. I feel really terrible most of the time. I have my good moments and my bad moments. I’m just so tired that sometimes I feel like crying. I lie on my side and look out the window at the weeping willow on the lawn, and I think things like, ‘Someday winter will come and the snow will cover the ground,’ stuff like that. My brain doesn’t seem to be working. I feel much stupider than I used to.”
    “Hormones,” her brother said sagely. “Hormones. Hormones make you stupid.”
    “I suppose so.” Maya stuffed two pillows behind her and leaned back. “It’s just that Bernard and I were so excited about this whole thing, having a baby and everything, and now that it’s happened I sometimes wish we had never started. I feel like I’m trudging uphill on a long road leading nowhere. I lie on my bed and I feel like saying, wait a minute, I didn’t know it would be like this, but I know the universe doesn’t care. Nobody cares. Everybody thinks it’s so cute when I feel bad, because I’m not really sick. I’m just pregnant. Just pregnant!” She scowled. “You and Bernard wouldn’t last a day, feeling like this.”
    Snooky looked at her thoughtfully. “You have it bad, Maya.”
    “Yes.”
    “You’ve allowed yourself to become bitter. I blame it on Bernard.”
    Maya bristled. “Bernard? Why Bernard? He’s been terrific, slaving away downstairs for me, doing all the shopping and running the house.”
    “I blame Bernard. Bernard, as you apparently have not noticed, is not a good slave. He has too independent a spirit. He is not a good cook and, even though he loves you, he has his own work and cannot wait on your every need. What he did to the shrimp tonight, Maya, no poor helpless invertebrate should have suffered.”
    Maya smiled at her brother. Looking at his face was like looking into a mirror, a younger, male reflection of her own. They had the same thin crooked nose, hazel eyes and pale skin. They had the same golden-brown hair, which Snooky wore brushed back casually and Maya wore sweeping her shoulders in a pageboy. They even shared the same aristocratic bone structure. “And you feel you can correct this situation?” she said.
    “I, Maya, am the perfect slave. If this were an eighteenth-century English mansion, I would be the butler. You will do nothing; I will do everything. I am used to that from my previous visits.”
    “You are a good cook, I’ll give you that. Not that I feel like eating anything.”
    “That will change. I have noticed that most pregnant women, after the first few months, seem to have no trouble eating.”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Come on downstairs. I have a few things to give you.”
    In the living room, a large open area with a high ceiling, exposed wooden beams and a picture window overlooking thewillow tree in the backyard, Maya sank into an overstuffed chair while Snooky opened the suitcase. It was filled to overflowing with stuffed toys, rattles and mobiles.
    “A stuffed platypus,” Snooky said, lifting it up for inspection. “You don’t get to see this every day, do you? Pink and blue matching stuffed bears. A dinosaur.” The dinosaur was an attractive forest green. “The trendiest kind of mobile. They say these black-and-white designs are good for the baby’s ocular system. I think they’re a little hallucinogenic, myself.” There was also a very charming little rattle shaped like a star, a mobile with stuffed animals that played “Send in the Clowns,” a newborn outfit covered with smiling cows, a tiny pair of socks (“the baby will be born in the