He’d been asked to leave the delivery room, first by the ob-gyn and finally by Rachel. “You could have removed her tail in the delivery room and we’d never know.” He didn’t know. “There’s no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!” She pulled down the blanket and aimed baby Sophie’s bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta Male had never seen.Ĭharlie jumped back-a lean and nimble thirty, he was-then, once he realized that the baby wasn’t loaded, he straightened the lapels on his tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. She had been a neonatal nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new father. She cried over every one, and believed that her tears and touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies, which was just fine with her. She talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no bigger than a balled-up pair of sweat socks. She spent four hours of every workday massaging preemie babies, her hands threaded through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive spark in there. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of a snake up her right calf that showed through her white nurse stockings. “I’ll still love her, even with her extra finger.” Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.” “And it’s ten and ten, we’ve all checked. Umbilical indeed! He’d kept a hard copy.) What if there are extras? Huh? Extra-credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?” (Charlie was sure he’d spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram.

Like if the kid has the minimum ten fingers and ten toes it’s all going to be fine. “They act like that’s all there is to it. He’d done it twice and kept coming up with twenty-one. “Do you want to hold her?”Ĭharlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had handed her quickly to a nurse insisting that someone more qualified than he do some finger and toe counting. “She’s breathing fine,” Rachel said, patting the baby’s back. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St.

Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below.īlessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him-him his wife, Rachel and now, newborn Sophie.

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