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was at body temperature, or almost.
    “A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?”
    “Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.”
    “Say what?”
    “I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.”
    “So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?”
    “Yes I am.”
    “How is it?”
    “It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat, and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.”
    “I bet.” Roy cackled. “Do you ever get it straight from the source?”
    “Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.”
    “Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.”
    “Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck muchharder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.”
    “He understood!”
    “Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?” he said, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.
    “Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.”
    “Come on it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean—”
    “Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!”
    “I certainly hope so.”
    “Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you ASAP. I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.”
    “That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.”
    “Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.”
    “Yeah okay but see what I did already.”
    “Sure bye.”
    “Bye.”
    Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.
    “Man, you are fast,” Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over again, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistenton pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.
    There was no denying his boys were very different. When Nick had been Joe’s age, Charlie had still found it necessary to hold him cradled in his arm, head wedged in the nook of his elbow to make him take the bottle, because Nick had had a curious moment of aversion, even when he was hungry. He would whine and refuse the nipple, perhaps because it was not the real thing, perhaps because it had taken Charlie months to learn to puncture the bottle nipples with lots of extra holes. In any case he would refuse and twist away, head whipping from side to side, and the hungrier he was the more he would do it, until with a rush like a fish to a lure he would strike, latching on and sucking desperately. It was a fairly frustrating routine, part of the larger Shock of Lost Adult Freedom that had hammered Charlie so hard that first time