Home

She came down the stairs in her slippers and the shift she’d been wearing forever. New linoleum. It was a pleasure not to worry anymore about splinters, like when they first moved in.

The baby, Georgie, was still running a fever but he was getting better, and she could hear him settling down in his crib upstairs, murmuring, exploring sounds. Her three-year-old, Annie, was sitting on the kitchen floor playing with pots and pans. As long as she stayed away from the stove, it was all right. “I can’t be two places at once,” the woman thought. And she was still having morning sickness.

She went into the kitchen and scooped up Annie, carrying her across to the front room window. The frames were airtight, not like in their old place, and the room was warm despite the winter gray. “If you look real hard, you can almost see where Daddy works,” she said to Annie, pointing east toward the iron works.

Then something was too quiet, and she put Annie down and raced back up to Georgie’s crib.

She came down the stairs in her slippers and the shift she’d been wearing forever. Wood again, like when they bought the house. Everything stripped, including the old window frames. Carpenter’s putty on the sill; otherwise, almost nothing. Georgie was still here; that’s why she was also. She patted her belly, out of habit.