Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  “I mean before.” Jon had been avoiding the question since they started trying. But when they decided to adopt someone else’s child, it had gained urgency. “Was she always like that, or did it start after I was born?”

  Aunt Carol rinsed the pan again. Both sleeves had fallen into the water, but she didn’t push them back up to her elbows. She inspected the pan, rinsed it again, and then handed it to Jon. When she finally looked at him, her face was knotted up like a fist. Her voice when she spoke, though, was clear and certain.

  “Some questions are like scabs, Jon. Best if you don’t pick at them.”

  She dried her hands and then walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway, toward her bedroom. Probably to change her sweater. Jon dried the pan and tried to figure out what Aunt Carol wasn’t telling him. Scabs? What the hell did that mean?

  * * *

  Jon watched Gail set the notebook and pen on the bedside table next to her phone. She turned out the lamp and curled onto her side, facing away from him. This was when Jon usually ventured across the middle of their bed and kissed her goodnight, but he knew that they weren’t going to sleep yet. They were just waiting in the dark now.

  Jon’s fingers ached for his guitar. Music would help him wait. The strings under his fingers would help him make out the shape of the future and feel the best from the past. He remembered the day his uncle had taught him the G and D chords and patiently walked him through his first progression. Uncle Mark told Jon how hard it was when he was learning to play. He talked about practice and determination and muscle memory and calluses. He talked about strings and fingers and sounds. He helped Jon adjust his fingers on the fretboard again and again. It took Jon more than an hour to manage that first progression, and his nine-year-old fingers burned against the wire. But finally, he shifted from G to D in a way that felt just a little bit like a song, or at least part of one, and he looked up at Uncle Mark, who smiled through his beard and nodded. Jon did it again. And again. He could still feel the warm, heavy pressure of Uncle Mark’s hand on his shoulder as he bit his lip and struggled against the strings. That was the day that he started thinking of Uncle Mark as more than just an uncle. And sometime between that day and the day he met Gail, he had decided that someday he would become a father.

  But Jon also remembered that morning Gail came out of the bathroom wearing a coy smile and carrying a plastic contraption with two red lines. He squeezed her tight and giggled into her ear, but even as he released her from that embrace, before they kissed and started to plan, anxiety tugged at him—the self-doubt, the suspicion that he was trying to do something that he had no right to try. But before the fear devoured him, Gail had bled, and then again, and again. He’d spent the last four years learning to hold both the hope and the fear at once. Lately, the fear seemed to have teeth.

  It always started with the mundane. What if he dropped the baby? What if he fed it the wrong thing? What if it choked or spiked a fever, or he laid it down for a nap the wrong way and it never woke up? It helped to think that Gail would be there. Gail had read all the books and the websites; she had made lists. But inevitably he’d be left alone with the baby. And what about when it started to crawl? What if he forgot to close the gate at the top of the stairs? And, of course, it would learn to walk. What if it escaped and got hit by a car on Myrtle Avenue or just wandered off and got lost? And if all that wasn’t terrifying enough, what if something happened to Gail? What if she got hit by a car or got cancer or fell down the stairs, and it wasn’t just a few hours while she was at the gym or the store? What if he was expected to raise a child on his own, like his mother tried to do after his father left? What if the same dike that broke in her and flooded her with helplessness gave way in him? What if the terror that swamped him now was already eroding that dike, softening it, destabilizing the silt?

  Gail squirmed, kicked off the comforter, and then settled to a tense stillness. Jon blinked at the ceiling. It was almost eleven when Gail’s phone finally rang. At first, Gail didn’t move, but then she answered it, just before the fourth ring.

  “Hi, Paige,” she said, her voice pregnant with expectation.

  Paige talked, and Gail listened. Jon lay still, terribly aware that he was about to plunge toward fatherhood, or that Gail was about to dive into another tailspin. His body felt cold all over, because he wasn’t quite sure which to hope for.

  Gail

  Gail drove Carli to the twelve-week ultrasound. It was their second doctor visit together, and like the last time, Gail took her to Panera afterward. They sat at the same table between the fireplace and the front window. Snow fell on the parking lot. Gail picked at a salad, while Carli plowed through a panini with a blueberry muffin and a bear claw in reserve.

  The giddiness of that yes from Carli had quickly given over to a scramble through the paperwork and had then settled into waiting yet again. Gail had studied every dependent clause of that paperwork, and she knew how flimsy it all was. When she wasn’t calling on accounts and negotiating contracts and selling new business, she spent too much time thinking about those loopholes and escape routes that those papers mapped for Carli. She went to the doctor appointments so that she could learn about the baby’s development, so that she could hear its heartbeat. She took Carli to lunch afterward so that she could come to know her, so that she could monitor the girl’s pulse. With each visit, Carli gained a bit of weight, and her face filled out until it was almost pretty. Gail couldn’t decide whether Carli’s eyes were gray or very pale blue. She couldn’t help but stare at Carli’s freckled, upturned nose and wonder what her child would grow up to look like.

  During their first lunch, Gail had asked too many questions, and that earned her one-word answers and awkward silences. Then she talked too much—about children’s books and nursery themes and about the average composite ISAT scores for the Elmhurst school district. Carli’s eyes glazed over, and Gail felt foolish. This time, though, Gail couldn’t seem to manage words, and Carli peered at her through that stripe of blue hair.

  “What’s wrong?” Carli finally asked.

  Gail put down the fork and then picked it up again. She pushed a dried apple around the bowl. She felt like that apple slice—withered and curled in upon itself.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Gail said quietly, because nothing was wrong. Carli had avoided looking at the ultrasound monitor, but Gail couldn’t take her eyes off it. The baby looked like ET with its too-big head and sticks for arms and legs and a bump that was probably its butt. The technician said that it was about the size of a lime, and he said that everything looked normal as far as he could tell. “It’s just that I never got this far.”

  The sandwich froze halfway to Carli’s mouth. “What do you mean?”

  Gail squeezed the fork and looked out the window at the swirling snowflakes. “I was pregnant three times,” she said. “But I lost them all.”

  The first, she lost at the gym. The second time, the baby was as big as a sweet pea, and she lost it in the car, driving to a customer. She had to pull over at a Burger King to clean herself up in the bathroom and sob and wait for the cramping to stop. The third time, the baby was as big as a prune, and she lost it at home on a Saturday. That third time was the hardest, because she had made it to ten weeks and her expectations had grown faster than the fetus. She could almost feel that second heartbeat, and she had started to tell people. Once you tell people about a baby growing inside, you have to tell them when it dies, and then you have to make a list of who they told and make sure that all the people who heard about your exciting news hear about your little tragedy, so that when they see you at the Jewel they don’t ask you how you’re feeling with that sideways secret smile, because then you’re sure to sit in the parking lot and weep while the lunch meat gets warm.

  “I felt so empty. After.” She bit her lip and pushed the apple around the bowl again. “Not just the space in my gut. It was like all my hopes had drained from me, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carli sa
id, looking straight at Gail. Her eyes were still for the first time since Gail had met her. “I didn’t know.”

  Of course she didn’t know, and Gail wanted to say that it was OK, that it wasn’t her fault, that it was nobody’s fault. But she was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she might just make that noise that she had made in the Burger King bathroom, so instead she closed her eyes and squeezed her fork.

  “I finished my GED last week,” Carli said.

  Gail opened her eyes and stared at the girl, disoriented by the sudden swerve.

  “It was just four tests, and they weren’t that hard.”

  Carli was talking. About herself. To fill the silence. For Gail.

  “I’ll need it in the spring for Waubonsee.”

  Gail swallowed a smile and managed to spear a tomato. She had never thought to ask Carli about her plans for the future. “The community college?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What will you study?” Gail bit the tomato, and juice flooded her mouth.

  “I wanna be a nurse someday.”

  “I have a friend who’s a nurse,” Gail said, and for the first time she really looked at Carli, saw her as someone with a future beyond the due date, thought of her as more than just the girl who was carrying her child. “You’ll make a good nurse.”

  Carli stared at Gail for a long moment as if desperate to believe those words. When she started talking again, about semesters and prerequisites and financial aid, Gail’s mind drifted back to the hospital, to that monitor in the radiology department, to that squirming little lime.

  * * *

  The next morning, Gail arrived at work just after seven. The shop was housed in a low brick building on Central, next to where her grandparents’ house had stood before it was razed for a parking lot. The Tomassi name, in green metal letters spotted with rust, had been bolted into the masonry many decades before. No matter where her first sales call took her, Gail came by the shop every morning, to solve problems and plan with her dad, but mostly just to hear the noise.

  Gail said hello to Anna, her dad’s cousin, who invoiced the customers and answered the phones. Gail dropped her bag in her office and then pushed through the door into the shop. Both lines were already singing. Boxes, each containing the knives of a single customer, were piled high on tall rolling racks at the head of the lines. Men stood at each machine, grinding or edging or honing or buffing, passing the boxes from station to station. Blades screamed against the stones, hissed through the honer, splashed through the wash, and clattered back into boxes. The grumbling motors supplied the bass line to it all. The sound of the shop was embedded in Gail’s earliest memories. She visited often as a child. When she was a teenager, she begged her father to let her work the line, and finally, the summer after her freshman year in college, he relented.

  * * *

  Her grandfather insisted on training her himself. His hands were spotted and wrinkled and covered with scars and calluses. Black and white hair curled from his nose and his ears, and it framed a face as dark and smooth as a walnut. That first day, he wouldn’t even let Gail touch a knife. He taught her about grind lines and plunge lines and ricassos and bevels. He explained bolsters and bellies and angles and choils. He showed her all the grinds and explained their uses. Flat grinds are shaped just like you would expect, with flat sides and a small bevel at the cutting edge, and they’re used for dicing and mincing. The hollow grind features a concave curve from the spine of the blade to the cutting edge. They’re sharp but fragile, and make for a good filet knife, he explained. The convex grind is just the opposite, bulging outward before tapering to the edge. They prove sturdy and are well suited to chopping and hacking. Gail stood at his bench, listening intently, recording everything he said in her notebook.

  It wasn’t until the second week that Gail touched steel to stone. Working their way down the line, her grandfather demonstrated how to use each machine. He taught her the demands of each type of blade and how to stay safe. After she mastered the entire line, he brought her to the stand-up grinder, and her real apprenticeship began.

  It was just a large spinning stone—no guides, no guards—so it was dangerous in a way that the other machines were not. It was a mechanized version of what her family had been using to sharpen blades for generations, but now they mainly used it to fix damaged knives and to sharpen specialty blades. Gail’s grandfather taught her to feel the vibration of the steel when she applied the right pressure. He taught her to listen for the sing of a blade held at the correct angle. Eventually, he let her repair a knife by herself and then another and then a third. She gained speed and developed a feel for the steel and the scream of the stone. As she repaired blade after blade, she fell into a rhythm that felt like it had always lived in her hands. And the magic of dull, chipped blades being made right again stirred something in her belly that she never told anyone about. When she dropped a salvaged knife into the box, she looked up at her grandfather and smiled. He smiled back in a way that told her that he felt it, too.

  * * *

  Frank said hello as Gail walked by. Javier just nodded. The rest of the men remained bent to their work. Her dad’s office door stood open. He loved the sound of it all as much as Gail did. She closed the door behind her, though, so that they could hear each other talk. She moved a crescent wrench from the chair to a shelf and then sat.

  “Morning,” he said, not looking up. He usually spent his mornings scrambling to reroute the vans after a driver called in sick or helping to troubleshoot a stubborn piece of equipment that stood in the way of sharp edges. But things must have been quiet that morning because he was bent over a knife catalog, reading glasses perched on his bulbous nose. His scarred, calloused fingers turned the pages. His intelligent eyes, magnified by the lenses, darted from image to image. He ran a hand through his thinning salt-and-pepper hair and glanced up at Gail. “Thinking about ordering from that new place outside of Guangzhou.”

  “Forged steel?” Gail asked.

  He nodded. “Marchesi tells me that they’re holding up.”

  “Schmidt and Weber both renewed their contracts,” Gail said. “I told both of them that Martin will be handling their account while I’m out.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Fine,” she said. “They’re butchers. They don’t care who manages their account if their knives stay sharp. Becker’s still complaining about the cleavers, but he’d complain about the cleavers if they were made of platinum.”

  He flipped a page in the catalog and asked about the only account that mattered. “Have you heard from Subway?”

  “I did,” Gail said. “Yesterday. They said that they’ve got cheaper options.”

  “They say that every year.”

  “This year they want to trim twenty-five cents per blade.”

  That made her dad look up. “Twenty-five cents? That’s absurd.”

  They charged Subway two dollars per knife per week. Gail shrugged. “I hear those guys out of Skokie are trying to buy accounts because they’re getting ready to sell their shop. Almost two hundred stores. That’s a boatload of blades.” Gail waited for her dad to do the math, the same math she’d been doing since yesterday. “But we can’t touch that price, of course.”

  Her dad’s eyes flicked toward the closed door. Gail heard Frank laugh, probably at something Javier said. “I think we have to,” he said.

  “Dad. That would eliminate our gross margin on the account. We’d probably lose money on it.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But it would help cover our fixed costs.”

  Every asset in the building had been amortized decades ago. The vans were all leased. The only costs that really mattered were knives and labor. “All our costs are variable, Dad.”

  He looked back down at the catalog and said nothing. In her dad’s mind their costs were inextricably tied to Frank’s laugh, Javier’s jokes, and Juan’s sick mother.

  “Maybe we should pay Subway for the privilege of sharpening the
ir knives,” Gail said.

  “It’s our biggest account, Gail. See if there’s wiggle room, but we can’t lose Subway.”

  Gail’s dad usually deferred to her when it came to customers. But sometimes, when customers threatened to affect the men in the shop, he spoke in that quiet, tight-lipped way that told Gail that it might take a few days to change his mind. So she dropped it for now, but she didn’t get up. He finished scanning the page of knives, flipped to the next, and then looked at Gail. “What’s up?”

  “I went with Carli to the ultrasound yesterday.”

  He laid his glasses on the catalog and leaned back in his chair. He clasped his hands behind his head. “All good?”

  “As far as I could tell,” Gail said. She fought off a smile, but she could see from her dad’s own smile that she had failed. “I saw the baby. The head. The tiny arms. It looked like an alien.”

  “That’s great, Gail. That’s really great.” For a moment they both listened to the scream leaking through the door. “You’ve waited a long time for this.”

  “I have,” Gail said.

  He paused, and Gail could see him decide to say more. “I know that you plan to take four months,” he said. “But you should think about what you really want.”

  “I thought about it,” Gail said, trying to keep the edge off her words. “I want four months.”