Read Forty Signs of Rain for Free Online Page A

in his car seat while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. “Have you got your backpack
and
your lunch?”—this not always being the case—and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream that always played out the same.
    “Joey and Daddy!” Charlie would say then, or “Joe and Dad at home, here we go!” or “How about breakfast? Here—how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of
Mom’s milk.”
    This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.
    So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careening around like a human pinball. Anna had taped bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been completely unpacked.
    “Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.”
    “Ba!”
    “Yes, bottle.”
    This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna, but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main purpose here was to fulfill Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.
    He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.
    “Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.”
    “Oh hi Roy, what’s up.”
    “Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.”
    “Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.” The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the U.S. to act on certainrecommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
    “Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?”
    “I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.”
    “Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.”
    “Yeah I know. Wait just a second.”
    Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it