The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,75

glass. “To this new family.”

I touched his knee, grateful.

After the toast, Gabriella asked, “Whose last name will she have?”

“Mine,” my brother said. “I’ll be the adoptive father first, since I have better benefits. Then David will have to adopt her, too, but we can’t do it together, as a couple.”

That knowledge put a momentary chink in the happiness but wasn’t enough to drown the fact that they were going to be fathers. They may have to jump through extra hoops, but they were doing it.

A BABY. I DREAMED ABOUT HAVING ANOTHER BABY THAT night. In my dream, it was little, like a kitten, and slippery. It kept sliding out of my grip like a bar of wet soap.

I woke up and padded down the hall to the guest room where Vijay slept. The door was open a hand’s width (we had to leave doors open because Gerald, for whatever reason, hated a closed door and yowled and pounded with his one front paw until it was open). I stood in the doorway, my face in the opening, and listened to the sound of Vijay’s deep sleeping breaths.

The Davids would have the baby they’d dreamed of. A baby. Did I want another? Or was that only part of the Vijay fantasy? I tried to picture my life again with interrupted sleep, interrupted meals, interrupted conversation.

A vivid memory flashed into my head. In my first year of marriage, I’d already had doubts. I wore an orange wool sweater and had been riding on an early spring morning, steam rising from the leftover piles of gray snow. At that moment, with the snow mist and the itchy wool, I’d felt flawed in some way, incapable of loving anyone forever. That belief made me desolate to learn I was pregnant. Each pound I gained felt like an anchor, trapping me in my mistake.

But then . . . how do I describe it? The overwhelming, buoying love I felt for my daughter immediately. She proved that I did have it in me to love someone as long as they lived, or even after. I loved Bobby more than I ever had for making it possible for me to know this about myself.

The Davids were going to experience this love that ripped you wide open and defenseless.

This man, sleeping here in the very room where my husband had told me he was leaving—did we have it in us to love like that?

“Whatcha doing?” Vijay whispered from the darkness.

“Breathing you,” I whispered back. Breathing your intent.

“Come breathe me closer.”

So I did.

THE THIRD WEEK OF THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR, WHILE GABRIELLA and her friend Amy worked on their college application essays in my kitchen, my daughter presented me with an invitation to a baby shower for the Davids.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Our AP History class came up with the idea.”

“No,” Amy said, looking pointedly at Gabriella. “Tyler came up with the idea. It just happened to be in History.”

Gabriella looked momentarily sunburned but shrugged.

I looked down at the pink card in my hand. “You are invited to a baby shower for the impending adoption of one lucky girl by Mr. Anderson and Mr. Neumeister.”

I took a deep breath, something my ribs were allowing more and more. “How can I help?”

“We’ve got it covered,” Gabriella said. I saw this belonged to her.

“Actually, we could use some help with the food,” Amy said.

“I’ll help with food,” I said.

“You don’t cook,” Gabriella said.

I prickled but tried not to show it. “I can cook.” Of all the jobs, it had to be food?

“I’ve never seen you make anything. That’s Dad’s thing.”

Was that a dare? “I’ll do the food. I’d like to. What do you need?”

Gabriella looked skeptical, but Amy jumped in. “Mostly finger foods. You know, appetizers.”

“I can do that. How many people?”

“A hundred were invited,” Gabriella said, still fixing me in her steely gaze.

“But only sixty have RSVP’d yes so far,” Amy said.

Sixty? What had I just committed myself to? “Sixty people at a baby shower?”

“Everybody loves Mr. Anderson,” Amy said.

When Amy bent over her essay again, Gabriella said, “You can just cater it, you know.”

Well, I’d be damned if I catered it. I could do this. I could do appetizers, for God’s sake.

So what appetizers did I know how to make?

There was a recipe I loved from my childhood called “Hanky-Pankies”—a savory cheese-and-sausage mix baked on squares of toast. Mom used to make them at my parents’ postshow and posthunt cocktail parties, along with little wienies and other