Hummingbirds Read Online Free Page B

her eyes, setting her hammered gaze upon Sibyl. Everyone, even Mrs. Mayhew, knows that Sibyl’s relationship with her husband has been disintegrating for a long time.
    “Oh, Christ, no. Bruce is one thing I can count on. He’s the most consistent jackass I’ve ever met.”
    Mrs. Mayhew hmphs in satisfaction and looks back down at her plan books.
    In the pause that follows, Sibyl begins to sift through her bag. She’s not looking for anything in particular, but she doesn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes at the moment. So she stares into the shifting tangle of objects and thinks about the woman in today’s newspaper who was shot in the head by a mugger because she wouldn’t give up her purse. There must be something important in here, she thinks. There must be some important wedge of myidentity that I would be willing to die for. But from here it just looks like so much confusion.
    Then she looks around the room and says, “So where’s our boy?”
    “Not here yet,” Lonnie says. “But I reminded him earlier, so he knows about it.”
    Pepper glances at the three other women, saying, “It seems so much smaller now. I mean without Maureen. Our department is perishing.”
    “How is Maureen?” Sibyl asks. “Have you spoken to her?”
    Pepper nods. “She called me last week. She seems to be doing fine.”
    “But she’s gotten into the habit,” Lonnie adds, “of using her baby and her book as metaphors for each other. She told me the baby’s growing a lot faster than the book. And that the baby is producing more dirty diapers than she is producing pages.”
    “But it is an adorable baby,” Pepper says. “Did you see the announcement?”
    “Oh god yes.” Lonnie’s hand flutters up and presses itself to her chest as though she has just had the first bite of some sumptuous dessert. “That baby is one in a million.”
    “Gorgeous,” Sibyl agrees, and then she tries to remember what the baby looked like. She is sure she received the announcement, but now she can’t recall. Did the baby have a lot of hair? That’s something people usually admire in babies.
    “And the size of that baby!” Lonnie marvels, which brings the conversation around to childbirth—Lonnie and Pepper sounding like the younger CC girls who come back from camp and want to compare their experiences.
    Then Lonnie turns to Sibyl and starts to say, “So when—” and realizes too late that it’s not the appropriate time to be asking Sibyl about her plans for children, now that her marriage is in the dumps. So she stumbles and checks herself, looking to the door and starting over with, “So when is Binhammer going to show up?”
    And it is at that exact moment that he comes around the corner and into the room, looking distracted. For a second he doesn’t seem to see anyone, and then he looks at the four women around the table and smiles. “Am I late?”
    “No, no,” Pepper says automatically, even though he is, in fact, quite late.
    “Just your regular,” Lonnie says.
    Each of the women has left a place open beside her at the conference table, and Binhammer has to decide who to sit next to. He does some quick calculations in his head and picks the seat next to Lonnie, who leans over and confides to him that he just missed a great conversation about childbirth.
    “Oh,” he says, “my favorite subject.” Then to everyone else, “Who doesn’t love a good childbirth story?”
    Pepper chuckles and makes a swatting gesture at him. “We were talking about Maureen.”
    “Oh, sure,” Binhammer says. “How is she doing? Do we have a replacement for her yet?”
    “That’s one of the things,” Mrs. Mayhew says, emerging from her rigid silence, “that we’re going to talk about today.”
    When Maureen left at the end of the previous school year to become a stay-at-home mother and novel writer, it was unclear whether it was just a temporary leave of absence or whether she was going to rely on her husband’s considerable income to