denied that the ones that were whiskey bottles were whiskey bottles. She'd always told us aftershave.
"So it's all over with Carlo? Or just a vacation?"
"I don't know. Over, I think. It's taken me all this time to figure out he's not going to tell me the secret to a meaningful life." I was serious. I'd loved Carlo best when he provided me with guidance.
"I used to think the ideal husband would be Doctor Kildare."
"Carlo's an emergency-room surgeon. A man that decides which way to sew a thumb back on would have a good hold on life, wouldn't you think? I just assumed it would rub off."
"Gross," Emelina remarked.
"I think it was his eyebrows. You know how he has those kind of arched, Italian eyebrows?"
"No, I never got to meet him. He was always at the hospital."
That was true. He was shy. He could face new flesh wounds each day at work, but he avoided actual people. "Well, he had this look," I said. "He always seemed right on the verge of saying something that would change your life. Even when he was asleep he looked like that."
"But he never did?"
"Nope. It was just his eyebrows."
I did miss him, or at least I missed being attached to someone in theory. Carlo had beautiful hands and a legendary sense of direction. Even when we were in Venice, where the tourist books advise you that "part of the Venice experience is wandering the narrow strade until you find yourself lost," We wandered but never got lost. The man had a compass needle in his cerebral cortex. And for all that, he'd still in the long run declined to be the guiding star I needed. Just as my father did. My father was dying on me.
Emelina collected the plates and cups. She stood up and tied on an apron over her bathrobe, miraculously keeping the baby situated on her hip throughout the operation.
"Well, you're no worse for the wear of five children in fourteen years," I said, and she laughed, probably not believing it. Emelina was noticeably pretty. That combination particular to Grace, the pale blue eyes and black hair, never failed to be arresting, no matter how many versions of it you saw. The eyes were a genetic anomaly-in the first hours after birth, the really pure specimens of Grace's gene pool were supposed to have whitish, marblelike irises. I'd seen pictures. Doc Homer had written it up for the American Journal of Genetics, years ago.
"And John Tucker's a teenager," I said. "Are we that old?"
"I am. You're not." She started to clear the table with one hand. "Every minute in the presence of a child takes seven minutes off your life." I took the baby from her and she said, "Don't say I didn't warn you."
"They're your treasures, Em. You've got something to show for yourself."
"Oh, yeah. I know," she said.
The baby's name was Nicholas, but nobody called him anything but "the baby." I'd read somewhere that the brain organizes information in sets no larger than four-that's why Social Security and phone numbers are subdivided; possibly four children's names were the limit on parental memory. I sat in the rocker and settled nameless Nicholas on my lap, his head at my knees. My long thigh bones exactly accommodated his length.
Emelina scraped toast corners into a blue enamel pail and ran a sinkful of hot water. "I don't think I could stand to let Mason go off to kindergarten next year if it wasn't for the baby. It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't."
"I remember you saying you were calling it quits after four."
"Famous last words."
While I watched her move around the kitchen, my fingers tingled with the pleasure of stroking the baby's fine black hair. It was longer by several inches than his big brother John Tucker's; someone had taken shears to that boy with a vengeance. Probably Emelina. A woman who beheaded her own chickens would cut her kids' hair herself.
Emelina washed and rinsed the plates and set them into the wire rack to drain. I sat feeling useless, though Nicholas seemed comfortable and was falling asleep on my lap. When that happens you feel them grow heavier, as if relaxation allowed them to be flooded with extra substance. A constriction ran across my lungs. I'd come close to having a baby of my own once, but I thought of it now so rarely that the notion of myself