she noticed that her beauty was a little different from Cleo’s, more focused and angular. Elizabeth had a firm handshake and she was direct and in command, which Martha admired. When Cleo opened the presents, Elizabeth stood in the very back of the room, like a Secret Service agent watching the crowd.
Cleo got so much gear that Martha couldn’t even imagine where she was going to put it all. People had so much stuff for babies these days. There was a bouncy chair, a vibrating chair, and a swing. There were mats and mobiles and play sets. It was craziness.
But at the end of the day, when Cleo was done unwrapping her presents, sitting among the piles of her loot, she thanked Weezy, Martha, and Claire for the shower, and even started to cry a little bit. Martha felt satisfied, like she’d done a good deed. She wanted to point out to Claire that an insensitive person wouldn’t have felt that way, but she kept it to herself.
CHAPTER 18
Winter finally started to melt, and after a quick and wet spring, it became hot. The weather people kept calling it “a burst of summer,” like it was something fun, when really it was just miserable. No one was ready for the weather. People still walked outside with jackets, confused. They hit eighty degrees at the end of March and it just kept going up from there. And Cleo, who was already hot all the time anyway, became more annoyed with each day.
“Tell me there isn’t global warming,” she said to Max one morning. He was eating cereal at the little table they had in the kitchen, and he just raised his eyebrows.
“I mean, are people kidding when they try to pretend it’s not happening? Eighty-seven degrees in April? What the hell is going on here? It’s like those people that try to say the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
“I know,” Max said. He ignored her comment about Holocaust deniers. “The air conditioner isn’t doing much, is it?”
“It sounds like it’s dying,” Cleo said. They had only one air conditioner in the apartment and they kept it in the bedroom. It was an old one that Max had taken from the Coffeys’ attic, and it growled and whined as it tried to spit out cold air. If you stood directly in front of it, you could sort of feel a breeze.
“Even I’m going to the library today,” Max said. “It’s too hot to stay here.”
“Actually, I think I’m going to stay here today.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I just need to work without distraction.”
“Okay,” Max said. “But I’ll save you a seat just in case you change your mind.”
The weather was a problem for lots of reasons, the main one being that all the kids on campus stripped down like it was spring break, and Cleo, who was not ready to show her stomach to all, still wore sweaters, as if the extra layering could hide what was happening underneath. She ended up sitting in her classes, sweating and uncomfortable, trying to cool down by pulling the fabric away from her skin and fanning papers at her face. When she was alone in the apartment, she usually wore nothing more than a tank top and boxers, and she’d sit on the couch with her feet on the coffee table in front of her, hands stretched across her stomach. She sat like that for hours, not moving, just holding her stomach like that was going to stop it from getting bigger.
They opened the windows wide, in an attempt to cool the apartment down. All it did was invite every fly to come in through the screenless openings. Once they were inside, they buzzed around, too dumb to figure out how to get back out. Cleo watched them frantically fly around, hitting the blinds and the walls. Sometimes she tried to sweep them out with papers, but it didn’t help much. Always, right before they died they got especially crazy and aggressive, looping around and dive-bombing Cleo and buzzing out of control as if that last burst of energy could save them. A few hours after that happened, Cleo usually found a little black corpse on the ground, and she’d scoop it up and throw it out the window. One morning, she woke up to find a bunch of dead flies on the table. “A massacre,” she whispered, and then cleaned them up.
After Monica heard that she was pregnant, she came by the apartment. “You could have told me,” she