Kids These Days by Drew Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
    â€œMom, Dad, if you think of anything,
anything,
that you want to ask, call the office anytime. We have nurses on the help line twenty-four hours, seven days. Anything you think of, just call.” He pulled a desk drawer open, got out a magnet shaped like an egg. “Number’s right on there,” he said, handing it to Alice. “You two pop that up on your fridge.” The phone number ended in B-A-B-Y, spelled out in pink and blue ribbons. Alice put the magnet in her purse. “So,” he said, shaking my hand, then Alice’s. “We’ll see you in a month, OK?”
    â€œA month,” she said.
    â€œWonderful.” He walked—almost ran, he was moving so quickly—to the door, showed us into the hall. He waved when we rounded the corner. We waved back. And we must have paid at the desk, must have walked ourselves out into the blazing parking lot, must have found our car—I just don’t remember it. I know I got the AC running. I know we watched a very pregnant woman walk up the front steps to the clinic. Alice opened up the little envelope they gave us, shuffled through the ultrasound pictures. There was a CD, too. She said, “So I guess we’re having a baby.”
    I said, “It looks like we are.”
    The AC wasn’t doing much other than pushing out hot air. “That was a lot,” she said.
    â€œDr. Varden?”
    â€œHe wasn’t like that last time. He wasn’t as—He just wasn’t quite like that.” There was a drainage ditch off to the side of the parking lot. I checked for alligators. The blacktop shimmered in the heat. Alice said, “Are you alright?”
    I said, “Are you?”
    She put the photos back in their sleeve. She said, “It all just seems impossible. It’s like I can’t entirely believe it.”
    â€œRight,” I said. “It is like that.”
    â€œDid you see the way he drank the water?”
    â€œWith both hands?”
    â€œI’ve never seen an adult do that,” she said.
    â€œI don’t think I have, either.”
    Alice said she was hungry, so we got out Carolyn’s directions, figured out where the mall was from where we were. I found the interstate. Alice held the pictures in her lap, looked out the window, didn’t say much. I did not ask her what she was thinking. Back in the office, Varden was probably doing push-ups in between patients. Jumping Jacks. Flossing. Traffic on the highway was slow, but moving. I still couldn’t get used to how flat the land was everywhere you looked.
    One of the things she’d told me was that it wasn’t just that she wanted a baby, but that she wanted a
family
—she wanted me, specifically, to be a father, as much as she wanted to be a mother. She wanted
us
to have a child. I’d tried talking to friends about this back home, coded conversations out by the grill, tired parents who repeated the party line: It was hard as hell, but it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. They all said that, like they’d gone to some day camp to learn the right words:
The best thing that ever happened to us.
It was hard, though, to know if any of that was true, or if, instead, once you had somebody living full-time in the guest room, everything else was scoured so clean you couldn’t remember what your life had been before.

    â€œSalad Tong?” Alice said. “No way. That’s not even in the game.” When we played the game, it seemed like a game, and I liked that—it felt less like we were headed for a screaming infant in our laps, and more like this was all some puzzle in an in-flight magazine.
    â€œSalad Tong,” I said. “Salad Tong and Salad Shooter.” We were sitting in the food court, looking out on a long riverwalk, finishing our lunch. There was a guy outside doing airbrushed portraits on T-shirts. Inside, there were carts where you could buy perfumes, wigs,