Some Assembly Required Read Online Free Page A

dentures. When Amy commented, he blew it off, saying, “Oh, we’re in the South. No one cares.”
    I would love to see this guy at church for an hour every week, but having him and Trudy, Sam, Amy, and Jax in my house is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Everyone absolutely rose to the occasion, but Amy and Trudy rubbed on each other’s nerves in such small quarters, and Ray prepared a salad big enough for a hundred people, which under the circumstances made me want to hit him—you’re using up ALL my salad vegetables, Mr. Gorilla-Glued Soles. Amy hid out in her room most of the time, often without her shirt on, still needing to feed Jax every two hours. Sam was in basic catatonia, begging for errands to do so he could get in the car and leave.
    Trudy and Ray were calm and uncomplaining about living so far from their grandson, even as it was obvious that this would be hard for them. I noted and appreciated this. Half the time we were lovely together, the six of us—SIX of us, wow. And that was some kind of miracle, that we pulled it off at all, the three grandparents tending to this marvelous baby and the two erratic young parents: keeping healthy meals coming, laundry washed and folded, sobbing baby swaddled and walked and rocked to sleep. Trudy and I moved beyond
Law & Order
, which turned out to be a gateway drug to an even more addictive new legal series on TV that wehooked into obsessively, sometimes watching two or three episodes a night. We also walked the dogs. We used them as an excuse to leave every few hours and go up the old fire road to the shady glade nearby. The poor dogs lost weight, and maybe got blisters, for all I know.
    I was so exhausted by having to have long small-talk conversations with everyone all day that I sneaked from room to room like an agent for Mossad, just trying to find a moment’s space, just trying to find, as Ram Dass put it forty years ago, my heart cave. I tiptoed past the bedrooms, through the living room, then, like Rubber Girl, stretched around the corner from the dining room, past Trudy and Ray’s bedroom in the kitchen nook, to my office.
August 1
    The six of us had a sweet last morning together. I was in a great mood, because we had pulled it off. (And because they were all leaving.) While everyone packed up, I held Jax, and tried to memorize the smell of his skin, that alert face, the dark stub of his umbilical cord. It’s a tiny, pumpkinish stem.
    They headed to Sam and Amy’s apartment on Geary, except for Trudy, who will fly back to North Carolina. The silence and space here are lovely, like a redwood forest—and I miss everyone already and have no purpose in life. I guess things will return to normal, whatever that means now.
August 2
    Sam surprised me by bursting into church alone, right as it was starting, in a religious fever of needing to escape from Amy, Jax, and Ray, who was leaving on the red-eye that night. Our pastor Veronica made a big fuss from the pulpit about Sam’s joy, and the arrival of our newest brother, and Sam promised to bring him and Amy next week. About fifteen minutes into the service, he started missing Jax in that aching physical way, almost like a nursing mother. He is so doomed. So he went and snagged Isaiah, who is a year older than Jax, and whom Sam and I refer to as his training baby—he has been holding him every Sunday for months, and watched his parents, Kim and Dominick, diaper, burp, and cuddle with him. They have promised Amy and Sam all of Isaiah’s hand-me-downs.
    Sam held Isaiah so differently from how he did even a month ago, because his hands have become the hands of a father.
    I heard him whisper to Isaiah, “Cool shoes, dude,” and then he leaned over to me, waggling his eyebrows conspiratorially, and said, “Jax will look
great
in these.”
    My heart was broken today in the best way, watching people cry with Sam about his blessing, having held him and fought for possession of him nearly twenty years ago.