Read Hot Little Hands for Free Online Page B

Wendy.
    “Hello, sweetheart,” says my grandmother.
    “Hi, everyone,” I say. “Wait, what’s Alistair doing there?”
    There’s a long silence and I picture everyone sitting at the kitchen table, nervously eyeing one another, and rolling crumbs over the tablecloth with their fingers.
    “Mum was supposed to tell you,” says Meredith. “Al and I are together now.”
    “What?”
    “I was planning to tell her in December when she comes to visit,” my mother says.
    “Oh my God,” I say.
    “Charlie!” I hear my roommates yelling in the other room. “Charlie, that really hurts!”
    “What’s the big deal?” my brother says. “I thought you were the one who broke it off.”
    “She was,” Alistair says.
    “Because I moved to America,” I say.
    “You said you were glad to be leaving him,” Meredith says.
    “Cheers for keeping the family secrets,” I tell her.
    “Why don’t you meet a nice American boy?” my grandmother asks.
    “I’m sorry,” Meredith says. “I know it’s really weird.”
    “It’s worse than that,” I say.
    “But sometimes good people just find each other,” she says.
    “Let’s talk about this when you come to visit,” my father says. “They might not even be together by then.”
    “Dad!” says Meredith. “We will be. We definitely will be.”
    “I’m gonna go now,” I say. “Bye, everyone. Bye, Nanna.”
    “Bye, sweetheart,” my grandmother says. I hang up before anyone else can speak.
    —
    On Saturday morning I take BART under the Bay to visit James and Amanda in Berkeley. They’ve moved into a new house, wooden and cozy, with a deck overlooking a backyard full of trees. Amanda is pulling a frittata out of the oven when I arrive, and James is in the living room, mixing up mimosas. When I tell them about the baby, they exchange a glance.
    “Well, if it was a boy, it’d be tall like Luke,” Amanda says.
    “And clingy and obsessive,” James says.
    “Just what the world needs,” I say.
    “How did this happen?” Amanda asks.
    “I’m an idiot.” Neither of them responds to this. I wonder what they’ll say about it later, after I’m gone.
    The three of us eat out on the deck and talk about our dissertations—a conversation that inevitably devolves into complaints about our meager stipends, the user-unfriendliness of EndNote, and the unavailability of our supervisors.
    “Do you ever think that our relationships with our supervisors are like parent–child relationships?” Amanda says, shaking hot sauce onto her eggs. “We start out feeling completely dependent on them. We don’t do anything without getting their opinion or permission.”
    “Then they let us down,” James says.
    “Then we realize they’re not perfect.” Amanda puts her bare foot on James’s lap and he covers it with his hand. “And that they have other children to deal with, too. So we resent them, and decide we don’t need them, and we strike out on our own.”
    “Yeah, but I made out with mine,” I say. “So how does that fit into the analogy?”
    “Jesus,” James says. “Professor Fursten? Really?”
    “Is that bad?”
    “When do you find time to work, with all this stuff going on?”
    “On the holidays. Everyone goes home to their families. I stay in the city and work my ass off.”
    “That’s probably ten days a year,” James says.
    “When do you two work?”
    “Monday to Friday,” says Amanda. “Nine to five.”
    “Wow, you guys are such grown-ups,” I say. “Do you want a baby?”
    “I don’t think so.” She shakes her head. “At least not one of our own.”
    “Maybe we’ll adopt one day,” says James.
    “No, I mean, do you want
this
baby? I can have it and then hand it over.”
    They laugh. “I definitely don’t want a kid right now,” Amanda says.
    “Neither do I,” James says.
    “Me neither,” I say. “First I need a calmer life. Maybe get married like you guys.”
    “You think marriage is a calmer way of life?” James