The Birthdays by Heidi Pitlor Read Free Book Online

the right thing. He’d never acted this spontaneously before, he often mused, and fortunately they soon had the resources to fully renovate it.
    Jake imagined that when they had children, they’d bring them here and spend days on the water, canoeing or kayaking, and nights shucking clams and husking corn and telling ghost stories. He’d give them the clichéd happy childhood he never had. Most of his family vacations had involved accompanying his father on business trips to auto conventions in Detroit or Chicago, and most of what Jake could remember about such places was fighting with Daniel or Hilary in the lukewarm hotel pool. When Jake was small, he was a little afraid of the water, but Daniel loved to swim. As Jake dog-paddled around the shallow end, he’d watch his brother sprint to the end of the diving board, fly into the air in wriggling motions and land with as much weight as possible. Then Daniel would tear across the water toward Jake, pounce on top of him and hold him under the surface for what seemed like minutes. When Daniel finally let go, Jake would pop back above the water, gasping for breath, choking, streams of snot pouring from his nose, his eyes stinging. Hilary, also fearless in the water, would laugh at him and yell, “Sick! You have green snot all over your face!” and all the other kids in the pool would turn to look. He’d lunge for Daniel, who’d duck underwater and swim off, and then the whole thing would start again. His mother never stepped in and told Daniel to stop or Hilary to be quiet. His father always off at conventions, Jake remembered his mother calmly holding court on a chaise lounge beside the pool, drinking cans of Tab and chattingwith the other parents, whose kids splashed around beside them, her bobbed brown hair held back from her face by a navy blue and white scarf, her chest and stomach bulky in her navy swimsuit with its polka-dotted skirt. Completely oblivious to the torment going on right in front of her.
    Jake’s father returned to the hotel room each night, flopped across the bed and switched on the television as their mother helped them into their pajamas. He would, however, read to them before they drifted off to sleep, and sometimes tell them stories of his day, of a strange new car he’d seen that was shaped like an egg, of a salesman he’d met who had ten children, and another who’d visited every baseball park in the country. Because they didn’t see him as much, he came to seem more mysterious than Jake’s mother, more intriguing and thus important. With an unremarkable sentence or two, Joe had the power to put Jake utterly at ease. When he once pulled his father aside and told him about what had happened in the pool earlier, Joe said solemnly, “I’ll have a talk with your brother and sister, all right? Try to put it out of your mind now.” Jake nodded and, amazingly, his frustration toward his siblings completely dissolved.
    *
    Liz sat in the car as Jake carried out their bags and slid them into the trunk. Jake had forbade her from helping him pack or load the bags in the car. He doted on her these days, though she continually reassured him that she felt fine, that she wouldn’t break in half, nor would the babies. “I’m pregnant, not dying,” she said as he’d walked her to the car just now, and he replied that he was well aware of this fact, and he was. He simply enjoyed taking care of her. “I got it,” she saidas he opened the door for her and guided her forward. “I feel just fine, I promise.” A thought popped into his head:
Then perhaps you’ll be in the mood for a little something once we get to the island.
After all, it had been four days since the bleeding, longer than the doctor recommended, and eight weeks or so since the last time they’d made love, and they had to enjoy themselves now because once the pregnancy progressed and especially once the babies were born, he suspected that they wouldn’t have the opportunity or