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“I wish my mother was alive,” he said.
“That’s so weird because I keep wishing mine was alive.”
“She’d be over the moon with baby David.”
“Really? No negativity?”
“None. She was a realist. We’ve talked about her before, haven’t we? She was mentally ill. Justin is angry at my dad for not getting her help. But she liked it the way she was. She wasn’t exactly a recluse, but she didn’t socialize at all. She rode, was out in the barn every day, helped my dad at the clinic, all that sort of thing, but she wouldn’t engage in conversation with anyone but us. My father liked it like that, too. They were devoted to each other.”
“Was she friends with anyone around here?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “When you’re a kid, you ignore what your parents are doing. I guess if I wanted to find out more about her, I’d dig around a little bit.”
“You should, Dave. It might help you.”
“For another time,” he said. “Today is about getting you back to work. Are you going to sit at the counter?”
“I’m not sure. That stool smarts after a while. Until I’m one hundred percent back to normal, I’ll work on the terrace until it gets too hot. Maggie works outside and swears by it.”
“Okay, great idea.”
“I can take the baby with me,” she said. “Then if he gets hungry, I can whip it out and feed him. If I’m not on a Zoom call, that is.”
“Right. It’s up to you. I stayed home to be with the baby.”
Back in the bedroom they stood over the little crib, staring at his sleeping form.
“It’s not as much work as I thought it would be,” Dave said. “Are you doing it all; is that why?”
“No, silly. You see what I do. I feed him and change his diaper. You do the same thing.”
“He hasn’t had a bad day yet, but I guess that will come in time,” Dave said, frowning. “Then we’ll get a workout. This is our rest time.”
“Now I’m worried,” Katrina said.
“Don’t worry. Enjoy this. Go, work. I’m going to clean up and do laundry. How many of his little things can you wash at a time?”
“I guess as many as you can cram into the washer. His little socks might get sucked up into the plumbing though, so put them in one of those lingerie bags.”
“The silky thing with the zipper?”
“Right. Okay, how does this look?”
She turned around to model her outfit, a white lightweight knit top that emphasized her nursing breasts and a pair of silky black pajama bottoms that could pass for trousers any day.
For her first day back to work not from a hospital bed, she looked amazing and he told her so.
“No one will believe you had a baby,” he said. “You look great.”
They adjusted the baby monitor and made sure their phones were engaged and picking up the audio.
“We can see him wherever we are in the house,” she replied.
“The monitor makes everything easy. Our parents didn’t have monitors and phones, did they?”
“Not like this. You had to drag a small monitor around with you. I remember from going to babysitting jobs with Annie.”
Kissing each other goodbye like she was leaving for the day, Dave walked her out to the terrace. It was warm but not oppressive. She set her laptop on the coffee table and decided on the lounge chair instead of the couch. There was another table out there, an old metal TV tray painted with pink and yellow roses, one of two that Dave had rescued from his father’s house when he threatened to throw the set in the trash.
