meaningful when I heard the warning tune-up behind me.
"He's getting serious," I said, panicking. "We've got to get the bottle ready now!"
Working together we had a brand-new bottle full of brand-new formula ready in record time, and Hayden was gumming away on the nipple in blessed near-silence. While I aided and abetted, Martin checked the skinny Corinth telephone book for the address of Craig's family, the Harbors, who'd taken him in when his parents died.
"Maybe they're on their way to Lawrenceton," I said, with a wave of horror.
"Maybe they're on their way there to collect Craig's body!"
"Nope," Martin said, his eyes never leaving the columns of phone numbers. "Padgett Lanier told me Craig's brother had asked him how to ship the body back to Corinth when the autopsy was over."
I felt a tide of relief sweep over me. The people who had raised Craig for the past five years were here in Corinth. I was not thinking of the Harbors as bereaved; I was thinking of them as baby repositories. And I'd lost any shame I had about it, too.
"Here they are," Martin said absently. "Eighteen-fifty-six Gettysburg Street." He closed the phone book and returned it to the drawer with a much more cheerful air.
"Who'd want to name a street after Gettysburg?" Obviously, I was talking right off the top of my head.
Martin looked up at me, his eyebrows raised and a patient look on his face. "Oh," I said, abashed. I'm not one of those unreconstructed southerners who refers to the War of Northern Aggression, but it seemed I'd been indoctrinated to some extent. I made a face at my Yankee husband. These people probably had an Appomattox Avenue, too.
We packed all the baby's things in his diaper bag, folded up the crib for the last time, and went carefully down the stairs to our car. We hadn't had coffee yet, or breakfast, and yet that seemed secondary to getting Hayden to qualified caregivers.
Since Corinth is only a little bigger than Lawrenceton, we found the Harbors' house quickly. To my silent dismay, it seemed like a darker shadow of the place where we'd dropped off Rory the night before. This house's once-white siding was peeling, and the front yard had not a blade of grass. Martin and I avoided looking at each other. We slowly got out of the car, and I opened the back door to extract Hayden. He was sound asleep, and I pulled out Ellen Lowry's blue-and-white-striped blanket to drape over his head. A chill rain had begun to fall. Martin covered us with an umbrella. We picked our way across the yard to the door. My heart sank at the sight of the ripped shades at the two front windows. Who could have guessed, seeing the Harbors at the wedding, that this was how they lived?
Then I chided myself for my snobbery, reminded myself that children grew up healthy and cherished in the poorest of homes. But I knew it wasn't the poverty that bothered me. It was the air that the people who lived under this roof had given up. They no longer cared - about peeling paint, or the lack of bushes to soften the mean lines of the old house, or the absence of stepping stones to keep visitors' feet dry on messy days. There was not even a two-dollar doormat outside the front door to wipe my feet on.
But someone had put a big black bow on the door knocker, to show this was a house of mourning.
Martin leaned forward to rap on the wood and slid his arm around me. I leaned into its warmth, my hand absently patting Hayden's round little bottom. I hardly recognized the woman who answered the door as the same Lenore Harbor I'd met at the wedding. She'd put out a great effort then, I realized, seeing her now. Her hair had been done, her dress and shoes new. And she hadn't been smoking. A cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth now, jiggling when she spoke to us out of the other corner.
"I halfway expected you, Martin. Come on in, I guess. I haven't had a chance to clean up, I'm sure you know we've just been knocked on our butts by this news about Craig."
Her voice was raspy, but she didn't sound exactly as I'd expected. Sad, yes... but not agonized. She wasn't Craig's blood mother, of course. My heart began to sink.
I tried my hardest not to look around the room,