Kids These Days by Drew Perry Read Free Book Online

which was tail. Our child. On the damn television set at North Florida Fertility. That plus the underwater mouth-sound of the heartbeat. Alice reached for my hand. She was crying. I was, too. It wasn’t possible not to.
    I’d always cried at significant moments, at public ceremonies. I cried when they played the national anthem before graduations and ballgames. I cried when other people got married, even in the movies. I cried at long-distance telephone carrier commercials, back when there were long-distance telephone carriers. And now I was crying because there was another life up there in that picture, and that was more than I could process, more than I figured anybody could process, really, when or if they tried to work it through. And I knew something in me was meant to be rearranging itself, that I should be undergoing some profound reassessment of the way I saw the world—but instead I was off and gone on my own ride, through the tunnel and into the dark. I was thinking about middle-of-the-night feedings, about chicken pox, about boys sitting in the driveway, laying on the horn, waiting for my child to emerge from the house. It was like those first few seconds after a car wreck, right after you first come to, and you’re thinking, Wait. We can still undo this. We can figure something out. Alice said, “Isn’t it unbelievable?” I was not lying when I said it was.
    But I did not suddenly feel like a father. I did not have some vestigial urge to run out and stab a gazelle in the throat and drag it back to our hut for dinner. Instead, I felt what I’d been feeling all along, since we’d started talking about it, started trying: That I was powerfully, deeply alone. That the rest of the world, the world of ultrasound technicians and locksmiths and mortgage bankers still writing mortgages and center fielders holding their babies in their arms during post-game interviews—all those people knew exactly how to do this, did not flinch in the onrushing face of certain peril. They’d simply come wired with something I hadn’t. They knew they were supposed to have children, did it without batting an eye. It was what came next. You survived your twenties, you found someone who felt like she could live under the same ceilings you did without needing to kill you, and you had a kid. You had another. Everyone did it. Everyone.
    â€œWould you like to know the sex?” the tech asked. She kept clicking things, measuring lines on the screen.
    I looked at Alice. “Sure,” I said. My voice seemed too loud for the room.
    â€œWe can—”
    â€œNo,” said Alice, interrupting me. “No. We want to be surprised.”
    I said, “We do?”
    â€œI like that,” the tech said. “I wanted to be surprised, too, you know? But my husband said it was driving him crazy.”
    â€œIt’s driving us crazy,” Alice said. She looked dead ahead at the screen. “We’re just going to try to keep it a secret anyway.”
    The tech smiled at us. “Y’all are sweet,” she said.
    Another nurse came in to help Alice get cleaned up, and she took us back to the exam room, told Alice she could get dressed. I felt cut open, run over. It seemed like I couldn’t hear so well. Alice asked me questions, and I answered her. Somehow we landed in the doctor’s office. DR. VARDEN , it said on his door, underneath a suite of little multicolored plastic mailbox flags that sent some secret signal to somebody, depending on which one was flipped out. We sat together on a leather sofa. Dr. Varden wasn’t in there.
    I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to remember to expect anything. I kept looking at Alice’s stomach, checking for some kind of change, and then back up at the hundred or so framed snapshots of happy families all over Varden’s walls: Kids and parents skiing, kids and parents on