Read After This for Free Online Page B

them, and
hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including
who they were—one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and
the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a
mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would
need. And soon one more.
     
He hoped the fourth would be another boy—although he would
never say so to his wife. What he had in mind most especially was a
daughter’s wedding day and the pall an absent father casts on the
scene, that sad tincture of mortality that mixes with the bright day
when the bride appears at the door of the church on the arm of an
uncle (as his own niece had done) or an older brother—it would be
Jacob, of course.
     
No equal ghost appears at the ceremony, as far as he can recall,
when it is the groom’s father who is missing.
     
Enough reason, he thought, for a man his age to wish for another
boy. But it would be another stone, nonetheless.
     
He could hear the two of them now, softly crying orders to their
men, even as they interrupted themselves to provide machine-gun fire
and exploding hand grenades, the sound of the ocean and the wind
and the occasional cry of gulls lending a certain authenticity to the
scene with their steady indifference.
     
Then his wife’s voice, startingly close and yet oddly distant,
specked with disks of black and gray as well as gold. “Pick him up and
put him on the blanket,” she said to their daughter. “He’s full of
sand.”
     
And then she stirred, moving beneath the lightly placed fingertips
of her husband’s hand. The baby moving as well, roiling like a wave
under her skin, pressing an elbow into her ribs, a heel against her hip.
     
“Thank you,” she said to her daughter and took the forgotten bear
and shook it and brushed the sand from its worn fur and then set it
carefully beside her, against her hip as if to offer it comfort, as if it
were itself some spurned youngest child. The baby turned again even
as Mary Keane glimpsed the drama of Steve Stevens (he had gone
down on his belly behind a stalk of grass as Adolf Hitler drove by) on
her daughter’s small face.
     
“Is anyone hungry yet?” she asked, and only Annie, who was
never hungry yet, said No without raising her eyes. The boys, who had
heard her, she knew they had heard her, ignored the question. Michael
was crawling up the side of the dune, his plastic machine gun raised.
Jacob—how like him—was watching his brother’s
     
progress warily, his arms encircling his small platoon of green men,
protecting them from the sliding sand. They both had heard her.
     
She looked over her shoulder at her husband. His forearm was
thrown across his eyes, his mouth was slightly open. His fingertips,
lightly, were on her back.
     
She leaned down to the bear, or leaned as much as the hump and
heft of her belly would allow. “Are you hungry?” she asked it. Her
daughter, compelled as equally by whimsy as by drama, suddenly
straightened up and turned to her mother. “He’s not answering,
either,” Mary Keane told her daughter, and they both smiled.
     
“I guess no one’s hungry,” Annie said gently, and here the mother
glimpsed some future commiseration between them, some future
understanding they would certainly share of what passed between
women while the men in the world were distracted, unheeding,
unconscious.
     
She shifted again, leaning her weight onto one thigh and then the
other as the baby offered its own counterbalance. She moved her
hands inside her coat and grasped her belly, the way she might hold a
child’s face between her hands to silence tears, or to ask, What is it,
what’s wrong?
     
She stroked her sides, the loose knit of the cotton sweater she had
confiscated from her husband’s closet ten years ago, when she was
pregnant with Michael and could bear only cotton or silk against her
skin. She felt the baby ripple under her fingers. She felt