Baby Talk

managed to keep her weight halfway under control eating like that all those years.

Unable to resist the urge, Annie finished off the last of the chocolate milk. Maybe she had weight problems, but Natasha wouldn’t. She would be careful not to set such a bad example for her own daughter.

When she got up and opened the cabinet under the sink to throw the empty carton away, she gasped.

A little brown mouse had darted past her and then disappeared under the refrigerator.

“Damn!” Annie hissed, clutching the empty milk carton to her racing heart.

She glanced uneasily around the tiny kitchen, her skin tingling. What a poor excuse for a home! She had called the apartment manager twice already about the mice, but the lazy woman hadn’t done a thing about it. Neal had bought some little boxes of rat poison at the grocery store and left them out under the sink and behind the refrigerator, but they didn’t seem to do any good. Living in these conditions was just plain unacceptable. She would call the manager again as soon as Natasha woke up. And she would give the lady a piece of her mind!

Annie sat back down in the dinette chair, shaking. Through the doorway to the living room she could see her broken up reflection—her fat reflection—in the tile mirrors some previous tenant had glued to the wall in a vain attempt to make the tiny apartment look bigger. The tiles were supposed to look fancy—they had fake gold veins running through them to give a marble-like effect—but she thought they just looked cheap. Like everything else in the depressing place.

Annie crossed her arms on the little dinette table and set her head between them, the way she used to back in high school.

And she began to weep.

CHAPTER 3

Neal returned to the flower shop just after one o’clock to pick up his afternoon orders. Grammy was still out to lunch, but she had left his stack of delivery slips on her desk. On top was a pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT telephone message sheet, as usual. Annie called him at least once each day to tell him what to buy at the grocery store on the way home. It always humiliated him to receive such messages at work—he would never be comfortable with this “young husband” routine.

Neal didn’t bother to read the message, quickly shoving it and the rest of the stack of paper into his jacket pocket. As he began to load the van with the deliveries, Mildred appeared at her desk and gave him an odd little smile, as if they shared some juicy secret.

What was that all about? Neal thought, as he carried his next load of flowers out to the van. He glanced down at his shirt, then his pants, wondering if maybe his fly was open.

Then he remembered the pink message slip.

Maybe it hadn’t been from Annie after all. But who else could be calling him at Snell’s Flowers? He hadn’t worked there long enough to give anyone but Annie the phone number.

He dug the pink paper out of his jacket pocket. His eyes were immediately drawn down to the MESSAGE portion of the note.

As he read the words that were written there, his eyes widened.

I love you.

Neal looked back up at the FROM line.

Baby Natasha, it said, in Grammy’s precise little script.

“Holy Christ,” he said, half-choking on the words. All at once, his legs felt rubbery.

“You allright, son?” a deep voice said from behind him. It sounded far away. Neal teetered, dropping the entire stack of delivery slips on the pavement.

Old man Snell watched closely as Neal scrambled to collect the slips before the wind got hold of them. Neal snatched up the pink one and pushed it into the middle of the stack.

“I thought you were going to keel over there