Blessings by Anna Quindlen Page B

with someone in a bar, going home with them, sleeping with them, then sleeping it off. And Chris said, “Shelly, your tits wouldn’t be so big if you weren’t so fat.” Skip waited for Shelly to throw her beer in his face, which would have at least made Chris respect her. But instead she ran into the ladies’ room and cried. Skip went home alone that night. Sometimes he wondered if it was Chris who had knocked Shelly up. Chris loved sleeping with girls he hated.
    Nadine was marching across the driveway turnaround, carrying a red-and-white striped dish towel like a flag, or a weapon maybe, like she was going to flog them with it. “You deaf?” she said.
    “I’m coming.”
    “She want to see you,” Nadine said to Jennifer, and then she turned and looked at Skip, narrowing her eyes that were already slits in her small flat face. She had the gift, or in her case the curse, of making you see yourself as she saw you. Skip could imagine the circles of sweat on his gray T-shirt, the dirt that must be smudged on his face, the grease on his hands. “She want to see you, too. She say you go to garage, take things back there, straighten up, come see her.”
    “Why?”
    “Don’t ask me,” Nadine said, waving the dish towel, heading back toward the house.
    “I imagine you know who she is, too,” Jennifer Foster said.
    He sure did. He and she had become part of a conspiracy. The instructions Mrs. Blessing had given Nadine meant that she was watching with her little birding binoculars and knew he was out with the baby, that he should settle her in the apartment before he came over to the big house. Two days before, a woman delivering some slipcovers that had been cleaned had come from town unexpectedly while Skip was working on the fences with the baby in the basket at his feet, and he had been flabbergasted by the sight of Mrs. Blessing waving him away from the house from a second-story window, her flowered scarf a bright flag of caution in her hand. “Charles,” she had said the night before, “if you must go to town you must leave her here with me. You can wait until Nadine has left for the day.”
    “What will you do if she wakes up hungry?” he said.
    “For pity’s sake, I’ve had a child of my own,” she said, but something in her pinched face told him she was wondering the same thing.
    He looked closely at all the windows facing the pond and then put the basket in the wheelbarrow. The baby was awake, staring at the sky and trying to cram her fist into her mouth. There was a star-shaped swirl of hair at the crown of her head of which he was oddly proud, and her pointed tongue moved between her lips as though she were tasting the air. She had a scratch down one cheekfrom her sharp little nails, and Skip knew that Mrs. Blessing would have something to say about that, although he’d just trimmed the nails himself, an operation that made him so nervous he’d had to start and stop a couple of times. Skip never knew how to put her down to sleep either. He had one book that said on the back so she wouldn’t die of crib death, and another, that he’d gotten at a yard sale for a quarter, that said on the stomach so she wouldn’t die inhaling her own vomit. He’d decided to alternate, although sometimes he forgot what he’d done the night, or the nap, before. Reading the books had made him wonder how anyone came out of infancy alive. Or fatherhood. They’d had one more bad night, when she wouldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat and never wanted to be put down for even a minute. Her head lurched from side to side on her thin stem of a neck, and she stopped crying only to suck noisily on the shoulder of his shirt, then on his nose. Luckily it had been a Sunday and he hadn’t missed any work, but he’d had to put her on the daybed in the back room again and walk away to get his bearings.
    “Let her cry it out,” Mrs. Blessing had said when he’d made the mistake of mentioning it the next day. “That was the