Baby Talk

“I’m not ‘trying’ to blame it on her, Annie. I know she— “

“Shhh! You’re going to wake her up again.”

Neal was breathing hard, so angry he nearly forgot about his throbbing foot. He struggled to hold his voice in a whisper. “You think I left that trophy in the middle of the floor? I haven’t touched that trophy since the day it broke.”

“That’s a lie, Neal.”

Neal was taken aback by this. “Excuse me?”

“You tried to glue it back together a couple of weeks ago. Remember?”

Neal was so mad he tried to push himself up off the floor.

“What are you going to do, Neal? Shove me into the wall again?”

He became very still. Even though more than a year had passed since then, Annie just couldn’t leave it alone. He hadn’t shoved her—he had grabbed her arm to stop her from hitting him, and then she’d lost her balance! What did she expect, anyway, acting so self-righteous? It was just after they had gotten into the biggest argument ever about her pregnancy, when Neal had told her, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted her to have an abortion. She had become so angry she’d started to take a swing at him, and when he grabbed her arm to stop her, she slipped and fell against the wall, bumping her shoulder, but it was nothing serious.

“I didn’t shove you ‘against’ anything, Annie.”

“Yes you did.”

“No I didn’t, and you know it.”

Annie glared at Neal, her eyes watery.

“Anybody else probably would have shoved you, the way you acted that night. You think I’m so terrible for wanting an abortion, but...” Neal motioned around the room. “...is this how you want your kid to grow up? Living in a dump, with a father who’s a college dropout?”

“You don’t care about our child, Neal—all you care about is yourself. You can finish your degree as soon as Natasha’s old enough to go to kindergarten and I can start working again. A few years won’t make any difference.”

Neal rolled his eyes. “That’s easy for you to say.”

“You don’t know what’s important in life, Neal.” Annie started to say something else, then gave a long sigh. “I refuse to argue about this anymore—there’s no point in it. But you never should have shoved me, Neal. Never. There’s no excuse for it. You could have killed our child.”

“Our child is alive and well, in case you hadn’t noticed. You ‘could’ have burned the whole apartment building down today with your cooking accident, but that didn’t happen, did it? A million terrible things ‘could’ happen every day, but they don’t.” Neal over looked at the crib. “Not usually, anyway.”

Annie glanced at the crib, then shook her head as if she could no longer deal with him. “You’re losing it, Neal, if you think Natasha could actually climb out of her crib and put that trophy on the floor.”

“That baby is responsible,” Neal said firmly, though now he was beginning to question his grasp of reality. He groped for some sort of proof. “Look, how do you explain that blood on her forehead? You saw it. You wiped it away.”

Annie motioned to the wall. “There’s blood all over everything. Your foot slung it all over the room.” She sadly shook her head again. “I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation. I think after we take you to a regular hospital, we should take you to another kind of hosp—”

“Screw you,” Neal spat. He looked away.

Neither Neal or Annie spoke for a couple of minutes.

Annie finally broke the silence. “You have to wash out your foot.”

Neal didn’t respond. He stared at the