Read Online The Assembler of Parts: A Novel by Raoul Wientzen - Free Book Online Page B

Cassidy, you always did have a way with a baby!” she said from the seat of memory. “You made all mine laugh with your tricks.”
    “To laughing babies, then,” he said, raising his glass, “and to the ladies that bore them!” He drank down half the brown liquid in two swallows and set the tumbler on the table. To the silence that followed—no, not silence, really, for now* I can hear the gentle feet of rain on the windows and Mother clearing her throat and Ned scraping the side of his shoe on the carpet under the coffee table and Nana breathing a single deep gulp of air and slowly exhaling— Cassidy added, “Those here and those departed.” I felt his arm around me tighten, make a smaller circle. He looked across the room to the legs of water walking the glass outside. He reached for his drink, hesitated a second, and took a tiny sip. “Kate,” he said, “hold this load for me while I go get my picks from the car. Something about this wet night calls for a song.”
    His picks were in an envelope in the glove compartment of his Taurus. A pint of Seagram’s shared the space. He braced himself with two long belts. It would be the first of three trips to the vehicle that night—now for the picks, as the food was served for a new string, and when the plates were being cleared to check if he’d left the dome light on.
    During the meal I was passed like a basket of rolls from person to person. Each cradled me in an arm or held me on a lap and jiggled me while eating bites of meat or potato or carrot with a free hand. When Cassidy’s turn came, he put down his fork, tines piercing his gravy, and watched my face until it was time to hand me off. His eyes had that easy look, like a pond without a ripple or wave, and his nose was in full bloom. He played with four fingers and smiled. I sucked the other four, ever hopeful. Before he passed me on, Nana said, “Joe, would you have the time to visit their graves with me while we’re in town? We could say a little prayer and leave a nice bouquet for spring.”
    He handed me to Mother. “It’s a date,” he said in a low rumble. “Next Saturday, if it’s dry?”
    “It’ll be dry,” Nana said with finality.
    He passed on Nana’s hard sauce that went on the bread pudding. Mother limited him to two drinks. He sang for an hour before the meal and for two with the coffee. By the end, the rain had walked off the windows and the wind was blowing dry as chaff.
    Three days before they were to return to Florida, Nana and Ned accompanied Mother and me to Dr. Burke’s office for my two-month checkup. Ned drove Father’s car with both big hands at the top of the steering wheel. When he turned a corner, both elbows shot up and out, the right invariably jostling Nana’s left shoulder. She looked back to Mother. “He still does that when he drives. All the time, no matter what it is, he drives like he’s struggling with a twenty-ton monster of a machine.” Her eyebrows arched. “Even a bike, Kate, he rides like that.” She laughed and so did Mother, and Nana patted Ned’s right elbow.
    We checked in at the desk and sat in Waiting Room One. There were eight other mothers with their infants already there. Some of the babies slept, some squirmed, and some cried. They all looked overdressed. More than half had on floppy bonnets and all wore sweaters, even though the April weather was warm and sunny.
    I was dressed in a diaper, tee shirt, and pull-on sack that Nana had bought especially for doctor’s visits. The sack was big enough to fit me until I would be two years old. “Why go to the bother of dressing them up at home when all they want to do at the doctor’s is to get them naked for the weighing and the shots?” she explained to Mother in the morning as they got me ready.
    “I see your point, Ma,” Mother said with little conviction as she slipped the top back onto the gift box she had just opened, the one that contained the pretty green sweater, the matching