The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “Is a C-section necessary? For your health, I mean,” Margaret said.

  “Nah,” Graham said. “Vacation planning.”

  “Oh.” Margaret looked at her plate. “Well, but what’s a little delay? Jamaica will always be there, won’t it?”

  “It will, most likely,” Katherine said, “but we already have the tickets, and not only are they not refundable, but the prices have gone up.”

  “But the stores are doing so well, Kat. You can afford a ticket that’s a little more expensive.”

  “We can, but—”

  “What about the risks?”

  “In Jamaica?” Katherine pulled the Margaret napkin from the stack. “Or do you mean travel risks? Margaret, if you paid attention you would know that terrorism has moved to the—”

  “No, I mean risks of the operation.”

  Katherine smoothed the napkin on her lap. “I have full confidence in the procedure.”

  “But do you really want to put yourself through that?”

  “Clearly I must. Why are you—?”

  “She has some kind of opinion and doesn’t want to tell you,” Graham said into his wine.

  Margaret held her napkin with both hands. “It’s just better for the—I just don’t see why it would be so tragic to postpone your vacation.”

  “We always go on the first day of spring.”

  “But you’d be surprised how much better it is for the baby—and, and for you—to have it naturally. Why not wait, just to be on the safe side?”

  Katherine winced at an inside kick to her bladder. “Because, as I explained, we already have our tickets and the plane leaves on the first day of spring.”

  Margaret ate a roasted potato cube. Katherine also ate a roasted potato cube. Graham watched them eat. Ernie slept in his chair. Katherine sipped Graham’s wine. Margaret stopped chewing. Katherine ate another potato and then reached again for the wine, only intending to taste it on her lips.

  Margaret shouted, “Will you stop that!”

  Katherine jerked her hand back, and Ernie sat straight up in his chair.

  “I know none of this is what you wanted,” Margaret said in as measured a tone as Katherine had ever heard her use, “but if you cared at all about that baby, you would want to give it the protection of essential bacteria from the walls of—”

  Katherine slammed her fork on the thick walnut table.

  “—your vagina.”

  Graham smiled and comforted Katherine with pats on her thigh.

  Ernie coughed.

  In the few seconds of ensuing silence, Bing Crosby sang uninterrupted about glistening treetops, boots, and shooting pistols.

  Ernie pushed away from the table and glided with uncanny grace to Margaret’s side, the bells on his shoes faintly jingling. He offered his hand in an invitation to dance. When Margaret shook her head, he carried on alone, hands positioned around an invisible partner he led around the adjoining living room, bells tinkling with every step.

  “All right,” Margaret said. “Well, you have to know about the potential injuries the operation itself could cause the baby.”

  “Have I.”

  “Yes!”

  “Now, Margaret, you can ease up on her,” Graham said. “She’s so risk averse I’m surprised you could get her to eat that goose. This is the first time she’s even touched alco—”

  “Graham.” Katherine squeezed his hand. They stood.

  Ernie stopped dancing.

  Katherine said, “I think we should go, now.” She brushed at her protruding belly, where dried spices from the potatoes had fallen and clung to her shirt. “That is, my dear friend Margaret, if I may be allowed to make one goddamned personal decision.”

  FIVE

  In her nearly complete avoidance of the outside world to hide her nine-month pregnancy, an avoidance Graham seemed more than happy to accommodate by taking over the majority of her store duties, Katherine sat in the kitchen and watched the falling snow.

  It was ten in the morning. The Oxford stores’ quiet hour, the only time of day she would sneak out to make her short visits, was still four hours away.

  The Daily Fact sat unread in front of her, the weekly insert removed and set aside. Typically it would have been in the trash, but to distract herself while waiting—four hours, one day, the final excruciating week—she would read every word of every issue, but not until the time of day when sitting and waiting became unbearable. She always saved the paper for last.

  For now she would watch the snow.

  It fell so predictably these days that it failed, this time, to induce the hoped-for mental escape.

  At a jab to her inside, she got up from the table and stood in one spot.

  Surely there was something to do for the store from home, before her visit. Being at home hardly had to mean she was entirely useless. She slid the phone toward her on the counter and dialed Oxford I.

  “Please check the wine labels,” she told the new clerk. “Customers turn them when they browse. They should all be face-out.”

  “Yes, Ms. Oxford.”

  “Every single one.”

  “Yep. Will do.”

  Katherine hung up. The snow continued to fall. It would be nice if there were a hard wind to blow it sideways.

  Her back hurt.

  It was a problem, really. The snow. A much larger problem than her own problem. Fatal in some cases.

  She sat to think about it.

  She and Graham, while not yet technically wealthy, were fortunate enough to find the snow only a minor nuisance, because they had invested in a truck and plow at the first forecast of heavy precipitation and lasting cold temperatures. But those without the means or the foresight to have bought their own plows had difficulty finding one for hire, the Fact had recently reported. Until now there had been no reason for anyone to create such a business. (Those who had made a quick business of it only targeted the wealthy, charging the maximum of what they believed the wealthy would be willing to pay. The wealthy were willing to pay a lot.)

  Katherine’s right leg begged to stretch. She stretched it. Next, it was the left. The right leg again, and again the left, but no matter how hard she stretched the nerves in her thighs continued to jump. She heaved herself out of her chair and paced the kitchen with her focus on the window.

  Low income neighborhoods. They suffered the most, their roads channels of chest-deep snow. This was something she had seen, herself. A trench occasionally appeared where a desperate pedestrian had burrowed a path, but it inevitably ended not far from where it had begun, the exhausted soul having given up and turned back. Where there was a cleared road in an impoverished neighborhood, it was typically a throughway carved by a plow owner who needed to get to the other side, and where it led was of no use to anyone but the driver.

  The snow stopped.

  An inch, if that, covered the car and had barely filled in the plow tracks a breezy, smiling Graham had made when he left that morning. Brightly.

  Katherine sat again. She bounced her feet to keep her legs busy and slid the Your America insert toward her. She opened it to a random—and as luck would have it, the newspaper’s most ridiculous—page. She almost turned to something else but looked at her watch and saw that only six minutes had passed.

  She read.

  This month’s contribution to the “Celebrity Voice” section (which she never, ever read) was a syndicated, single-page, self-flagellating missive by wealthy actress Greta McNeill, who began with an acknowledgement of the privileges of the wealthy before gradually twisting herself into a guilty (and impressively fallacious) confession:

  …You say we could clear your neighborhoods with our plows. We say we won’t do it because we want you to pull yourself [sic] up by your bootstraps. Do you think that’s true? Does it make you happy to believe it is? Well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t. The truth, I’m sorry to say, is that if your roads are cleared just like ours are, how can we display or even recognize our own privilege? Privilege
we worked hard for, in many cases, and that’s the gist of it. If the poor and unsophisticated can have the same luxuries we have, it can only mean we’ve failed.

  A bright orange behemoth of a plow, one not used in decades, graced the insert’s cover. The reason for that, a problem Katherine knew would receive little more than surface-level exploration in this tawdry “magazine” (really an embarrassment for an otherwise respectable publication), was less about the weather than it was about the victims of a relatively new system whose potential ramifications had not been thoroughly considered. When, six years before, the state had made the decision to eliminate road maintenance and improvement from its budget to align with the majority opinion that citizens should (and most definitely would, they were sure of it) bear the responsibility themselves, there had been a long, reliable history of dry winters. No one could have imagined the practical threat of excessive snowfall. Consequently, road access throughout the region was wildly unpredictable. Ten miles of cleared state highway ended at a wall of snow on the state line, an inconvenience first discovered by a family of three traveling sixty miles per hour until they stopped abruptly (all three died on impact). Another casualty of the impassable roadways was a Tinytown woman who died of hypothermia trying to dig her way to her job at the InSystem microchip manufacturing plant half a mile away. She had thought she was strong enough to make it to the nearest plowed stretch, one of her friends had told the Daily Fact.

  Katherine turned the page when she finished and stared down at a vodka advertisement.

  She called Oxford II and spoke with their manager, Curtis.

  “Labels, yeah. Okay. I’ll get right to it as soon as I can, Ms. Oxford, but with such a light snow this morning we’re pretty busy. Everyone’s stocking up for the next few days.”

  She knew Graham spent much of the day in the rear office, so she recommended Curtis ask him to check the labels.

  “Uh…”

  “Say what you will, Curtis, but the appearance of the store is every bit as—”

  “No, no, I—It’s not that, it’s just that he’s not here. But I’ll tell him as soon as he’s back. By then everyone’ll probably be gone anyway, so I can probably just—”

  “Back? Where did he go? Oxford I?” It seemed unlikely. Graham usually spent the second half of the day at Oxford I. Perhaps there was a problem. But she had just called Oxford I, and they would have mentioned any problems to her. She had insisted Graham tell the employees that if she were ever away from the store, it meant she had chosen to work from home, so no one should feel obliged to shield her from anything that pertained to either of the stores.

  Curtis breathed for a moment into the phone, then said, “Uh, he—He said he was taking the plow out. You know. To do some clearing. But he said if you called to tell you he’d be back soon.”

  Katherine hung up.

  It was fifteen minutes to eleven.

  She moved to the living room and turned on the TV. That insufferable Dean Stacey was talking about the Greta McNeill column, saying it had already inspired widespread protests, the most observable from the “poor and unsophisticated” readers she had effectively convinced to make an enemy of the wealthy class. The wealthy, too, were rebelling against Greta McNeill’s statement, he said. Some had already posted open letters online, and others were booking time “on this very show!” to reject her character assassination.

  “Oh!” Dean Stacey said, pressing a finger to his ear bud. “Okay, folks, I’m hearing there’s been a break-in—two? Two break-ins in Haver—Correction, two home invasions in Haverton, and—Can I just say, is this great for ratings?—and in one of the invasions, the man was—Hold on, police now reporting another home invasion in an affluent Windbury neighbor—”

  Katherine turned off the TV and called Margaret. Her neighborhood was ten miles southwest of Tinytown, nowhere near Haverton or Windbury, and, really, too far from everything for anyone but the most ambitious criminal to bother, but Katherine needed to be sure. When the ringing ended at a voicemail prompt, she hung up without leaving a message and half-jogged to the car.

  The snow had been just heavy enough that morning to create problems for the AV on fully untreated roads, so she selected the route to Oxford II, which Graham had plowed on his way to work, and reclined the seat a few taps to reduce the pressure on her pubic bone. If he was still gone when she arrived, she would follow his path, find the truck, and trade him. She had to get to Margaret.

  The truck was at the store when she parked, a layer of snow on the window and roof. She pulled her coat around her middle before going inside.

  “Ms. Oxford!” a voice said from somewhere. “My goodness, are you preg—”

  “No, no, no.” She sailed through the Cabernet aisle to the office.

  It was empty. Graham had left his keys on the desk beside a years-old photograph of the two of them on Heidelberg Castle’s windy balcony, Graham’s socked foot fitting into the impression of a shoe print created, according to legend, by a knight’s leap from a window to escape a fire. She took the keys without leaving a note. On her way out, she looked for Graham but saw only customers and Curtis, whose back was to her as he talked with a man in the imports section.

  The snow had been falling hard for several minutes by the time she reached Forest Retreat Estates. From where she parked on the street, Katherine saw a blurry Margaret walking Murphy toward the house on her solar-warmed stone path, a thick dome of white on her head. She wedged a bundle of mail under her arm before bending to scoop up Murphy’s business, and Katherine recognized a large yellow envelope. She had sent only four clippings, this time:

  Missing dog found eating scraps in restaurant kitchen

  InSystem stays mum on rumored revolutionary microchip project

  Shuttered family planning center to open as homeless children’s shelter

  Military enlistments rise as families grow and job opportunities shrink

  She had included the dog article because it would make Margaret happy. And that Margaret could still be happy, that no one had come to kidnap or kill her, was enough for Katherine. She slid her foot to the gas pedal, then returned it to the brake. Margaret was alive, yes, but without the news to warn her…. Katherine set the parking brake and left the engine running and the wipers thudding.

  Margaret opened the front door with her hair in a towel and her feet in slippers. Murphy stood beside her. She flicked her gaze at the opening in Katherine’s coat. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  Katherine got only so far into her warning before Margaret waved her hand and told her not to worry. She knew plenty. Why, that morning while she was choosing a new phone bud with a store clerk, she said, someone had painted RICH BITCH in “a really pretty yellow” on her car’s red hood. “I’m getting the whole thing painted the same yellow next week,” she clapped. “What fun!” And news of the home invasions had sneaked through Margaret’s hunt for music on her way to visit Ernie after the phone bud errand, she said as she pet Murphy’s retreating head, so she already knew to look for anything unusual in her neighborhood. Her visit to Ernie had also ended up being fortuitous for him—he had needed a ride home before the snow piled up because someone had stolen his plow.

  “He said she was nice about it, at least.” Margaret pulled the door halfway closed behind her and wrapped her thin cardigan tight around her. “She had a gun, but she didn’t use it. And she did say she was sorry. That’s what Ernie said, anyway.”

  They could afford another plow, Margaret said. They were less expensive now.

  Katherine asked where it had happened, and Margaret said it was at the Summit Street gas station. Katherine sighed through her nose. Summit Street had been in the Fact at least four times in the last month. The snow was high with no one to remove it, and people unable to free themselves from their homes were tired, restless, hungry, and frustrated.

  “Ernie was more upset about the drones,” Margaret said. “He wanted one to watch over his sites, but did you
know no one sells them again?”

  “Yes, Margaret.”

  “Well, it’s silly. If someone climbs up a tree to peep in your bedroom, they don’t take out your eyes.” She shuffled in her slippers and looked at the sky.

  Katherine looked, too. Gray flecks of fat snow dropped hard and fast and tapped soft on landing.

  “You must be looking forward to Jamaica,” Margaret said.

  “How are you managing with all this?” Katherine wiped a flake from her eyelash.

  “Isn’t it magical? It can be wonderfully inspiring to be imprisoned. I’ve written chapters and chapters.”

  Murphy’s head poked around the door and pushed it open. Behind Margaret, beyond the foyer and past the kitchen and through the dining room, the living room’s tall, wide windows overlooking the forest reflected a wood burning fire. Katherine wished she could stay. She said, “All right, then,” and started to leave.

  “You’re still doing it, then?” Margaret’s hand rested on her curved middle.

  Katherine said nothing.

  Margaret stepped toward her and hugged her shoulders. “Be safe,” she said. She stroked Katherine’s back. She whispered, “It’s almost over.”

  SIX

  Katherine returned to the truck, but the thought of leaving Margaret’s only to go home to sit again and wait again—for anything—made her want to throw herself on the ground. She needed more to do.

  As she plowed away from Forest Retreat Estates and toward the liquor store—back arched, rear end at the edge of the seat, belly dipping between her parted legs—she explored what that “more” might be.

  She dropped the plow for one of the infrequently traveled roads into Tinytown, and it occurred to her that anyone who lived south of that road would have a hard time getting to the store. She and Graham were wrong to have thought they were doing enough by plowing a three-block radius around each of the stores before opening. (Occasionally, Graham would take out the truck in the afternoon—not in the morning—to “clear random streets and help people out.” At least, that was what he told Katherine any time he came home late, pink-cheeked and smiling, his sneaking hand grazing her belly as he passed by her to take off his coat.) It was clear to Katherine now that they should have been more strategic, even more generous, with their plowing by providing access to regulars beyond the three blocks.