Read Online Waiting for Christopher by Louise Hawes - Free Book Online Page A

stared, smiling, into his half-closed eyes. “Good morning, Mister Sleepyhead,” she told him.
    The smile she got back, a dazzled, devoted grin, was worth the whole sleepless night. His first words, though, were a problem. “Mu,” he said. “Mu mik.”
    “You drank all the milk last night,” she said. “But don’t worry”—rolling him down, shimmying his jeans off, reaching for the box of diapers—“we’re going out to eat. Just you and me. Okay?”
    “‘Kay,” he agreed, letting himself be changed, wriggling only a little, staring around the narrow room, then like a swimmer stroking for shore, finding her face again. The diapers were hard to manage, the tapes kept unsticking, and Feena pulled them so tight that they nearly met at his tiny waist.
    “We’re going to play dress-up today,” she announced when she’d finished. She took the bunny jumper out of the CVS bag, slipped it on over his tee, and fastened the Velcro while he was still studying the lace border on the hem. “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked, guiding his hand so he could feel a soft velvet square in the patchwork. “And it goes perfectly with these.”
    It was less easy dividing his hair into ponytails and wrapping them with the pompoms. He twisted and chattered the whole time, so that Feena, in her hurry, tied one pompom snugly behind his left ear, the other several inches higher behind the right. When she stood back to study him, she laughed. She wanted to start over, but he was much too excited. And hungry.
    She stuffed the leftover plums into her backpack, closed the booth’s flaps, then led him outside and locked the door. The air was almost cool at this hour, a reprieve from the swampy furnace that would start up when the turquoise and purple streaks on the horizon gave way to the full-risen sun. They moved quickly, heading for the gas station to buy milk and check the morning headlines.
    The video-game fan from yesterday had been replaced by a very large woman with frosted hair and a frown line. She looked up as soon as Feena and Christy walked into the store. “Hep ya?”
    Feena tightened her grip on the baby and calculated the distance to the back of the store. “We just need some milk,” she said. She didn’t move, though, giving the woman time to turn away, busy herself with something so they could scan the morning papers in the rack under the counter.
    But the woman folded her cushiony arms and stared till Feena began to wonder if she’d called the police when she’d seen them coming. Or maybe she was a plant, waiting for backup. There were lady detectives, weren’t there? At last, just when she’d decided they didn’t need the milk that badly, that they would try another store later, the woman nodded her head toward the dairy case along the back wall of the store. “It’s over there,” she said.
    Suddenly aware she’d been holding her breath, Feena felt her whole body go loose. She headed down the aisle, plucking up a box of crackers and a can of tiny cocktail hot dogs on the way to the milk. Beside her, Christy eyed the shelves without touching anything, content to point out highlights as they went.
“Bwu,”
he said, reaching toward the picture of a little girl in an apron with a bright blue bow in her hair.
“Bwu,”
he repeated, jabbing a finger into the shirt on his own tiny chest.
    Now that they weren’t under surveillance, Feena took her time, studied the photograph, a smiling girl on the verge of devouring an impossibly huge iced cookie. “Right,” she told Christy. “You guys are wearing the same color.” She looked down at the socks she wore. “What color are these, O Wise One?”
    He beamed.
“Bwu!”
Racing to a package of doughnuts:
“Bwu!”
And a carton of cottage cheese in the case:
“Bwu!”
And an ancient, limp rubber band on the floor:
“Bwu!”
    As he crouched to retrieve the rubber band, she dropped the crackers and swooped him into her arms.
“Bwu, bwu, bwu,”
she said,