Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me Read Online Free Page B

town.
    When Mary Rose and I arrived a little after 4:00 on Thanksgiving Day, Audra gave Mary Rose, Stella, and me a big flapping-hand welcome, kissing the air beside our ears.
    â€œBrooke, it’s been too long. And there’s that adorable baby. Are you sure Lyle doesn’t have any Asian in him anywhere? Little Stella looks as exotic as a little Tatar. Maybe it’s just that black hair. From what I remember of your mother’s side of the family they’re dishwater .” She swooped down on Stella and left an orange lipstick butterfly on her temple. Stella gave her that furrow-browed baby stare, the same one you see every day on displeased senators on CNN . I thought I would pop with pride. No one has more dignity than a six-month-old.
    Audra was impressively slim, with thick, highly managed auburn hair. She was one of a vanishing breed, a Lady of the House, who has never held a paying job but has worked herself silly putting food on the table every night for a passel of ingrates. Most people look at this kind of old-fashioned American woman with scorn; they should try getting a meal for five on the table every night for forty years. Audra was in her sixties now, and seemed even more frantic than I remembered. Frantic to do things right. Frantic to amuse. Frantic, of course, to look young. I don’t think she understood that unless you could make yourself look twenty-four, the Herculean regimen and hocus-pocus involved in looking a mere ten years younger wasn’t worth giving up the pleasuresof tanning and the occasional Twinkie. Or maybe she did understand. She had a waist, which she liked to emphasize by wearing wide, colorful belts.
    â€œWhere is the Sensitive Photocopier Repairman anyway?” Audra made her blue eyes twinkle. I felt my jaw clench.
    The Sensitive Photocopier Repairman was Lyle. Or what I used to call Lyle behind his back, when my love for him felt as sturdy as one of the bottom members of a human pyramid. It was cute then, cute and teasingly half accurate. Drunken tiffs, flirtations bordering on infidelity, my backing his new truck into a phone pole, anything was a match for our love. We’d met just after Audra brought me the rights to the story that eventually became Romeo’s Dagger. My life was insane with possibility. My first feature and true love, all in the same month. That my new man was fastidious to the point of pathology mattered not. It was adorable. Then, as now, every morning he went to work in a bright white button-down broadcloth dress shirt and returned home after a day of messing around the insides of copiers with nary a smudge of toner or streak of grease anywhere on him. How the sensitive part got in there, I couldn’t remember. But I didn’t like Audra using it now; it wasn’t her joke to make.
    â€œLyle had to host a plague,” I said. “He’s one of the gamemasters on an online computer game and tonight they’re having a plague. The idea was to keep people off the game over the holiday, so they thought if they had an epidemic, people would spend time with their families instead of subjecting their characters to festering pustules and dementia. But the gamemasters still have to work.”
    â€œWell, I hope he feels better,” said Audra.
    I cut a glance at Mary Rose, who looked uncharacteristically meek. I had never seen her in a dress; this one was burgundy rayon that had “special occasion” written all over it. She tucked her hair behind her ears with the tips of her fingers over and over. What she does when she’s ready to tackle a big problem, like pulling out a hedge. This was not like her. This was not like her at all.
    Somewhere around on the other side of the house, male voices could be heard, and a slapping sound, like someone beating out a wet carpet hung on the line.
    â€œThat game! ” said Audra. “A Baron tradition. Every year the kids drink too much of their father’s single