Mislaid Read Online Free Page B

would you look at that. My lord. What a sweetheart. Just look at him. Aw. Cleans up real nice.”
    “His name is Rhys,” Peggy said. “Rhys Byrd Fleming. Do you like it?”
    “But we’re christening him Harry,” Lee’s mother said.
    “Moms, drop it. This is my wife. I’m his father. This not y’all’s baby. This my baby! Yes, sir! Who’s my baby!” He took Rhys and kissed him on the cheek, then leaned down and kissed Peggy.
    “Well, we’ll be happy to help take care of him, if you need any help,” Lee’s mother said.
    “You know what,” Peggy said, “I think it’s time I tried feeding him. Could we have a little time alone?”
    “Yes, could you weigh anchor, darling?” Lee said.
    “I’ll go fix you some formula,” his mother said, looking around for supplies. “Don’t tell me you’re going to—no. I refuse to believe it.”
    “It’s the natural way,” Peggy said. “It’s good for him.”
    “You’ll be tied to that baby like a ball and chain. You can’t let him out of your sight and no one can help you with him. No self-respecting woman does that. It’s like turning yourself into an animal.”
    “I got news for you, lady. Guess where he came from.”
    “Don’t get all in a snit,” Lee said.
    “But that’s exactly it,” his mother said. “You don’t know the chemical composition. There could be anything in there. It’s unscientific.”
    “Science gave us the bomb and DDT,” Peggy said.
    “Moms,” Lee said, pushing his mother toward the door, “please just let us handle this. It will be fine. It will be right as rain. Little Rhys Byrd here is a Fleming. If anybody can survive mother’s milk, he can. She’s just, I don’t know,” he said, turning to Peggy as he looked for a word, “anxious. It’s her first grandchild.”
    “She sure acts like an expert.”
    “Well, she raised me. That’s what makes me think anyone can do it.”
    There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgment.
    She settled in with baby Byrdie. She did all the housework. She did more laundry than had ever been done before at Lee’s house, and by September you could see exactly where on the front lawn the septic system was, traced out in darker bluegrass.
    She couldn’t fit into the clothes she’d bought for school, so she wore Lee’s polo shirts. She seldom got around to washing her hair, and it seemed to be coming uncurled. Her breasts were heavy and sore. But she felt that the thing that was terribly wrong with her would soon be all right. The thing that was wrong with her was so right about Lee and Byrdie that she figured it didn’t matter. They were in perfect health and looked like they belonged in magazine advertisements for shirts and baby food, respectively. She looked like their maintenance man.
    Lee had visitors who sat by the fire and bullshitted until long after Peggy fell asleep. She didn’t know what they did after she went to bed, but she didn’t care. She was as exhausted every night as if she’d played five hours of flag football. By the time Byrdie was eight months old, he was moving around so fast she was having to chase him. You couldn’t have gates and childproofing in a house like that. There were a million things he could have killed himself on. Landings with loose rugs, big glass vases done up as lamps. Peggy spent most of her time upstairs in the playroom, keeping him cleaned and fed. She was made to bring out the baby and accept praise for her work as if she were a being of a slightly lower social class—which she was. A woman. Even if they hadn’t all been gay men and thus more or less not interested in her at all, almost blind to her existence; even if they hadbeen models of chivalry, rushing to pick up things she dropped and giving her flowers, instead of bullshitting parasites who thought they had invented crass vulgarity before inventing maudlin