up at her with wide eyes, unblinking. Francie freezes, every muscle twitching.
“So,” she says in a low voice, strange to be talking to someone who can’t understand her. “So, it’s just you and me. Just the two of us, kiddo.” She sounds completely ridiculous. Has she ever used that word in her life? And then it comes back to her: Francine, her mother’s mother who she was named after (because she is not a Francesca as she pretends), Francine, the Florida diner waitress with orange hair and a pocket full of butterscotches, who died of emphysema when Francie was twelve, used to call her that. “Kiddo,” she tries it again. “Just you and me.”
OREGON OPEN ADOPTION—A place for all mothers
FRANCESCA97201
Joined: 26 Jun 1998
Posts: 17273
Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 4:22 am
Up again. Crying. Calling the hospital to find out what is wrong with him.
OREGON OPEN ADOPTION—A place for all mothers
FRANCESCA97201
Joined: 26 Jun 1998
Posts: 17274
Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 6:32 am
Sunrise. Baby sleeping. Coffee.
OREGON OPEN ADOPTION—A place for all mothers
FRANCESCA97201
Joined: 26 Jun 1998
Posts: 17275
Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 8:19 am
Hospital calling back woke baby. Crying. Outraged.
Thank you so much,
Let them interpret this however they want!
Angie and ELLE and StellaRose’sMommy, for your sympathies, soothing suggestions and sentiments that baby’s crying might be “normal newborn behavior,” but I can assure you it is NOT. After threatening to speak to her superior, I got the nurse on the L&D ward of Good Samaritan to pull the baby’s file for an answer to his tortured crying. And now I have one: my baby is suffering from withdrawal, nicotine!
CW lied to us, concealed the information that BM smoked while pregnant!!!!
Surprise, CW is not answering her phone! She got what she wanted from me, $$$ and now
Francie stops, reads the last sentence.
[BACKSPACE, DELETE]
He drank one 4 oz bottle and is asleep in the swing. Off to research nicotine withdrawal.
Francie opens a new browser window, goes to check her history to find an article titled “Prenatal Substance Abuse—The Effect on the Fetus.”
She had just looked at it that morning, was showing it to John to reassure him about the health of their baby. The history has been cleared. Her entire history, cleared. John must have done it, but he was only on her laptop for a few minutes. “Need to check my flight status,” he’d said, and Francie had gone to inventory the new diaper bag.
She feels a prickle of sweat underneath her cashmere shell sweater. Why would he clear the history?
Francie gets up and crosses the room to gaze at the baby, who has been awake for ten of the last fourteen hours, crying for three and a half of those. Her biceps throb, her lower back aches, her eyes burn. Somewhere in this city, in the rosy dawn, there is a woman who is mourning his loss, who howled as Chloe Pinter carried him off the ward to the room where Francie would sign her documents.
In the early-morning light, Francie wills herself to feel more for this unhappy baby (Angus! she thinks, his name is Angus!), and there is a flutter, a word that rises up in her chest: mine.
17
Monday, Monday
CHLOE
Dan walks into the kitchen Monday morning as Chloe is calling the office answering service, letting them know she will be using her flextime from the McAdoo adoption and staying home, but they can call if needed. She has tea brewing and a stack of bridal magazines, a deliciously empty morning stretching out ahead of her.
“Why do you do that? You basically gave her permission to call you at home.” Dan startles her, appearing in the doorway in nothing but his dark blue track pants. “She shouldn’t call you at home when you’re using flextime. Eleven bucks an hour—I’d make more than that at the car wash.”
Then why don’t you? she wonders.
A few months ago, before he got the job at the bike shop, she had asked Dan why he didn’t try modeling again, and he had said simply, “It takes a certain type of man to be a model.” End of conversation.
She looks at the clock on the microwave. “Not going in today?”
Dan fakes a yawn, sits at the table in the breakfast nook, flips through the paper to uncover the sports section. “I told you about that,” he says vaguely.
“About what?”
Dan doesn’t answer.
“Babe?”
Dan looks up. There is a flush on his cheeks, the boy whose mother is brandishing the Playboy she found under his bed. “Sorry, what, babe?”