Read Online Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler - Free Book Online

way she had with her fingers wrapped around the crib bars, and when they came in she grew quiet and pressed her face to the bars so her little nose stuck out. She had been crying so hard that her upper lip was glassed over. She blinked and stared at them and then gave a big sloppy grin.
    “Now, what is this nonsense I’m hearing?” Agatha said sternly.
    She was trying to sound like Grandma Bedloe.Grownups had these voices they saved just for babies. If she’d wanted, she could have put on her mother’s voice. “Sweetheart!” Or Danny’s. “How’s my princess?” he would ask. Used to ask. In the olden days asked.
    Best to stick with Grandma Bedloe. “Who’s this making such a hullabaloo?”
    Daphne grinned wider, with her four new crinkle-edged teeth shining forth and her lashes all wet and sticking to her cheeks. She wore just a little undershirt, and her diaper was a brownish color—what their uncle Ian would call Not a Pretty Sight.
    “Give her her pacifier,” Thomas suggested.
    “She gets mad if you give her a pacifier when she wants a bottle.”
    “Maybe she’s not hungry yet.”
    “After her nap, she’s always hungry.”
    Daphne looked back and forth between the two of them. It seemed to be dawning on her that they weren’t going to be much help.
    “Just
try
her pacifier,” Thomas said.
    “Well, where’d it go?”
    They reached in between the bars and patted the sheet, hunting. Some places the sheet was damp, but that might have been the heat, or tears. The smell was terrible.
    “Found it!” Thomas crowed. He poked the pacifier between Daphne’s lips, but she spat it out again. Her chin began quivering and her eyebrows turned bright pink.
    “Phooey,” Thomas said. He picked up the pacifier and jammed it in his own mouth, and then he backed off till he was sitting on the edge of his bed with his arms folded tight across his chest.
    “Maybe we could feed her in her crib,” Agatha said.
    Thomas made noisy sucking sounds.
    Agatha went to the kitchen and dragged a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator. She set the jug on the table and took a cloudy nursing bottle from the jumble of unwashed dishes next to the sink.
    Daphne was back to “Oho! Oho!”
    First Agatha tried pouring very, very slowly, but milk got all over the table and soaked Thomas’s page of the coloring book. When she speeded up she did better. She replaced the nipple and carried the bottle down the hall, de-chilling it in her hands as she walked. Outside her mother’s door she paused and listened but she didn’t hear a sound. It must be a two-pill nap, or even three-pill. She went on into the children’s room.
    Daphne’s mouth was an ugly shouting square now and she was red-faced and snotty and sweaty. Thomas had his eyes squeezed shut. “Wake up,” Agatha told him roughly as she passed. She fitted the bottle between the crib bars and held it toward Daphne. “Here.”
    Daphne flailed out and the bottle went flying. Off popped the nipple. Milk splashed the decal of the rabbit in pink overalls on the headboard. “Stupid!” Agatha shouted. “Stupid fat old
baby!
”
    Daphne cried harder. “Help me reach this bottle,” Agatha told Thomas, but Thomas had pulled his bedspread up over his head. She turned back to the bottle. It lay on its side toward the rear of the crib, and every time Daphne bounced another glug of milk would spill out onto the sheet. Finally Agatha pressed the two clamps on the railing to lower it. There was Daphne, no longer fenced in, quieting slightly and hiccuping and looking interested. There was the bottle, within easy reach. Agatha found the nipple in a fold of wet sheet and put it back on, and then she tipped the bottle toward Daphne. This time, Daphne accepted it. She drank sitting up, blinking at the first cold swallow but after that making do. One hand clutched over and over onAgatha’s wrist. “Mm,” she said at each gulp. “Mm. Mm.” Agatha suddenly felt the most enormous