“I don’t know if it’s true or not. I don’t care. Davey’s just as much a person as you are. What’s this ‘fetal alcohol syndrome’ stuff anyway?”
“Use of alcohol by pregnant women has been shown to cause a range of defects in the developing fetus. There are plenty of cases in the literature.”
“ Tn the literature,’ ” she mocked, getting a little frightened. He sounded like some kind of rocket scientist or something, spouting off that way. “My, aren’t we using big words these days?”
He came over to her, a quick panther stride, snatched the glass off the cabinet—it didn’t slop for him, she saw with growing resentment—and then he was holding it under her nose, and her resentment and fright began to boil over into anger.
"It doesn’t have anything to do with ‘big words,’ Rimae. This is why Davey’s the way he is. This is the whole reason, the only reason. Because his mother drank while she was pregnant! Didn’t you know? Didn’t anybody tell you?”
Even though she didn’t feel threatened, he frightened her, and she got angry and slapped at his hand. The glass went flying, shattering against the wall. “Where the hell do you get off standing there telling me this stuff? Even if it is true, what difference does it make to me or Davey now?”
He stepped back from the intensity of her anger, back again as he saw her fighting tears, and that made her even angrier. “Get out of here, damn you. I don’t know what you came over for, but I’m in no mood to listen to it now. Go lecture somebody else.”
He couldn’t find anything to say to that, which was just as well, Rimae thought, if he was going to stay employed at her bar. Her fingers curled around the glass of the bottle, pressed tight against the slippery, sticky surface. How dare he? How dare he? How dare he stand there with that look on his face, as if he was the only person capable of understanding her son? How dare he look at her with that mixture of accusation and compassion? She stared back and ground the glass into the innocent wood of the cabinet.
His shoulders slumped—his whole body seemed to shrink in on itself all of a sudden, as if he had been defeated somehow. He turned away without another word and went out the door, closing it quietly behind him.
She would not cry. She would not cry about something she’d lived with for sixteen years, ever since she found out that her lovely baby boy, whom she had chosen and loved with all her heart, was never going to grow up, not really. She had decided then, in that doctor’s office, that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. She would take care of him just the way he was all his life, and she wouldn’t even think
about what Wickie had just said, wouldn’t even think that it might be true. Rimae Hoffman had had plenty of things to cry about her life long, and she wasn’t going to pick just one this late in the game. Davey was hers, and she never regretted it.
Past was past, and that was all there was to it. She’d take care of Davey, and Wickie Starczynski could mind his own damned business. And if he didn’t, she’d fire his ass so fast he’d never know what hit it.
At the Project, Ziggy registered a change. Recalculated a percentage. Regarded it worriedly.
Something had to be done. Soon.
But what?
As the odds for Sam increased, the odds for Al decreased, and the computer that was the product of both of them hummed in discontent.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gooshie hunched over the sports page in the Project cafeteria, absentmindedly munching a handful of tortilla chips as he scanned the scores. Little shards of baked white corn obscured the page, and he brushed them away impatiently. The cafeteria was filled with people taking a lunch break—it only held tables for thirty. The sound of conversation, eating utensils, and moving chairs made a blur of white noise.
Verbeena Beeks stood beside Gooshie’s table, carrying a tray. “Good afternoon, Gooshie. May I join you?”
The Project’s chief programmer peered up at her myopically and then heaved himself halfway to his feet. “Oh, Dr. Beeks. Of course. Please. Sit down.”
Verbeena smiled and sat opposite him, unobtrusively brushing the detritus of his snack over to his side of the table. “How’s it going?” she inquired, tapping the contents of a packet of creamer into her coffee.
Perhaps her tone was just that small bit too nonchalant; perhaps something else gave her interest away. In any case, Gooshie was no fool. He folded the newspaper away and thrust his head forward nervously. “It’s going very well, Doctor. Why?”
“Oh, no reason.” She smiled abstractedly at him, pretending far more interest in her packaged meal than it actually warranted. The little cafeteria had a couple of wall-sized
refrigerators, well stocked with frozen dinners, and lots of canned goods, but haute cuisine was beyond the Project budget. Verbeena had chosen ravioli with meat sauce; she poked at the pasta and wondered whether she might not have been better off with clam chowder.
Or if she’d stayed in her San Francisco practice, she could be dining out on Pier 39, eating fresh Alaska salmon. Was salmon in season now? She couldn’t remember.
Instead she’d taken on a professional challenge and landed in the middle of a desert in New Mexico, and she was eating defrosted ravioli under the anxious eye of a man who probably thought in binary.
Smothering a chuckle, she laid her fork aside and smiled at Gooshie. “No reason, really. Just asking.”
“But you’re a psychiatrist,” Gooshie said.
“You sound like that joke about the two psychiatrists meeting and saying ‘Good morning’ to each other, and spending the rest of the day wondering, ‘What did he really mean by that?’ ”
“Well, I was wondering.”
“Don’t worry so much, Gooshie.” Gooshie was one of those people a junior
