Blessings by Anna Quindlen

sat up straight. “I have to give this some thought,” she said. “In the meantime, the split-rail fencing on the south side of the drive appears to be leaning. Is there anything we can do short of replacing the fence?”
    There was that crooked smile again. “I already ordered some steel supports to hammer in behind the uprights,” he said. “I’ll tie them together and we’ll get at least another couple of years out of that section.”
    “And the child?”
    “I’ll put her in the front pack.”
    “You could leave her over here from time to time. There is a back bedroom with a cradle.”
    “I can’t take the chance with Nadine,” he said. “Besides, she should really stay at my place. She’s my baby.”
    “A child needs a name, Charles.”
    “I’m working on it,” he said. “I figure most people get ninemonths to figure that out. Besides, until now I wasn’t sure I could still keep her. I just couldn’t stand to name her if I couldn’t keep her.”
    Later, as Mrs. Blessing ate her dinner at the table by the window, the sun melting orange into the pond, she remembered there was a bear somewhere upstairs, sitting on an old chair in a back bedroom that was used for children who came to visit, although none had come in years. It had been Benny’s bear when he was small. Its fur was rubbed thin on the stomach and pate, and it was stuffed with something that made it hard and not huggable. Five-year-old Meredith had been clutching it one morning after she’d been driven all night in the Cartons’ big car from Newport. Mrs. Foster had made her a cup of cocoa and some muffins. Sunny had been there, too, staying in his old room, and he had heard the car arrive and had come downstairs in a big plaid bathrobe, his golden hair every which way.
    “Was my daddy a good daddy?” Meredith had asked Lydia, and Mrs. Foster had paused just a moment as she spooned fresh whipped cream into the cocoa.
    Lydia had been trying to think of what to say when Sunny dropped down next to the little girl and put his face up close to hers. “Benny Carton was the best daddy in the whole wide world,” he said, and held her tight. Lydia had gone upstairs and wept. She did not know it, but that was what Meredith would always remember, that she had peeked into the bedroom and seen her stern and undemonstrative mother crying, and for the rest of her life, even when she was a grown woman, she would recall that moment and feel as though her childhood had held something sweet and deep. She had not known, of course, that Lydia Blessing wept for herself, and for her own lost life, and for something in Sunny’s voice that she had never heard before. Lydia had not known it, either.
    Slowly she rose from her desk chair, and went upstairs, down the hallway of closed bedroom doors, to find the bear.

 
    N adine’s daughter, Jennifer, walked across the lawn with the muscles in the front of her thighs rolling beneath the skin. She was built like a swimmer, which was what she’d been at Mount Mason High School. Her hair was black and hung halfway down her back in a loose ponytail. Skip tried not to look at her too long. At his feet the tangle of willow roots splayed into the pond, and two large-mouth bass fluttered their fins and seemed to stare up at him; back in the blackberry bramble behind him was a basket with the baby asleep inside. There hadn’t been rain for two weeks, since the storm on the Fourth of July, and he could hear the grass crunching as Jennifer Foster walked. Skip tried to sniff himself without raising his arm. Not too bad, although he thought maybe the smell of diesel fuel from the chain saw was mixed with the smell of Desitin from the baby, who had some kind of rash. Maybe Jennifer Foster didn’t know what Desitin smelled like. It actually smelled a little like diesel fuel.
    “Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
    She had a funny way of talking, as though she were older than she was. She didn’t bother