She puts her phone in her backpack and gives me grimace number three. Or is it four? Hard to keep track. “Go straight. I’ll let you know when to turn.”
A few seconds later:“Turn left now!”
I brake and turn so quickly, her backpack falls off her lap. “Damn,” she says. She picks it up, pulls out her phone to make sure it’s still okay. Up ahead is a small red-brick building with several other straggling students milling around, high-fiving each other and seemingly in no hurry to enter the building despite having missed the “tardy chime.” One guy sees Hailey and rushes over. He leans in the open car door to check me out. He’s not happy with what he sees.
“Hey,” he says to Hailey. “Where’s your hot new mama?”
Hailey might be angry and bitter, but, like Lily, she’s also quiteadvanced. She lets loose with a string of expletives I didn’t know till I was thirty.
CHAPTER 17
METCALF WAS RIGHT. Men and women—mostly women—have been taking care of babies since humans lived in caves. But I don’t remember any episode ofThe Flintstonescalled “How Wilma Stores Her Breast Milk.”
Come to think of it, I wonder how all those real prehistoric mothers managed. Did they know to keep their caves at 77 degrees Fahrenheit or below? And what about an appropriate container? Sure, a mastodon bone with the marrow scooped out would have worked. But where would they find one with a tight-fitting lid?
All those cave babies should have been doomed at birth. But lucky for them, they were on the paleo diet. They survived, then begat and kept begatting all the way into thetwenty-first century. A time when the worldwide baby-bottle-warmer-and-sterilizer market hovers at around $156 billion a year.
The Harrisons are not responsible for all of that $156 billion, of course. Just a significant chunk. A chunk that’s looming large on their kitchen counter right now:a nine-pound, fifty-ounce-capacity top-of-the-line wireless, Bluetooth-enabled Baby Brezza Formula Pro Advanced Smart Bottle and Breast Milk Warmer.A godsend for any mom who’s just too exhausted to test a few drops of milk on her wrist. With a simple flick of a switch, mom can warm a bottle of breast milkSAFELY AND EVENLY(their caps, not mine). Air bubbles? Not with this baby. Best of all, the system comes with a free app that works with your smartphone wherever you are and beeps when the bottle is ready. So even Ben could do it. Even if he was in the middle of counting cryptocurrencies.
I’m barely halfway through the Brezza manual when Amber appears, bottle in hand. “I see you’ve met our other baby,” she says, gesturing to the machine.
“Lily is cuter,” I say. Damn—I forgot to use the wordadvanced.
“I just pumped this,” she says, writing the time and date on the bottle and putting it in the refrigerator. “Lily’s sleeping now. When she gets up, use one of the earlier ones. Oh.” She blushes a little. “Sorry. Guess I don’t have to tellyouthat. Ha-ha.”
Ha-ha. Yes, she does. I think fast. “Actually,” I say, trying desperately to keep a straight face, “I’d really like youto assume I knownothing. Feel free to tell me everything so I can learn to do things the wayyouwant them done.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she says. I can tell she means it. I’m probably the only person in the world who cares what Amber wants. She gives me a one-on-one tutorial, explaining how she writes the pumping date on each bottle, never puts them in the refrigerator door, which is prone to temperature changes when the fridge is opened, and freezes any bottle more than three days old. I nod.
She thinks it’s approval. Actually, it’s gratitude.
“I’ve got to run, but Lily probably won’t get up for”—she sneaks a peek at her watch, a different one than yesterday, with more diamonds around the face—“well, at least an hour. So you’ll want to change her and feed her about eleven thirty, before you take her to class.”
Class?
“Oh. Did I forget to mention that? On Thursdays and some Fridays, she has Tumblestiltskin BabyRobics. You’ll want to bring her diaper bag, a change of clothes, wipes, an extra bottle…”
She ticks off a scavenger-hunt list of everything Lily might need in the next month or two. And then she’s gone.
Great! I’ve got an hour to snoop. I grab my purse, make a beeline to Ben’s office, and begin to rifle through the files on his desk, taking pictures of everything there and everything in his wastebasket. His top desk drawer is locked. Not a problem. Anyone with FBI training—or anyone who’s ever seen a classic crime movie—knows you can turn a paper clip into a lock-picking tool. I take a couplefrom my purse, bend the first into a tension wrench, and insert it in the lock. Then I open the second one and push it deep into the tumbler so I can—
Oh no. The unmistakable cry of a baby who doesn’t know she’s not supposed to wake up yet. I give it a moment, hoping she’ll soothe herself and fall back asleep.
No such luck.
Even worse, in the nursery, I see why she’s crying. Actually, I smell it first. Diarrhea has seeped out of her diaper onto her sheet. She’s kicked a bit of it over to the side of the crib, smearing it with her foot. Now she’s giggling. She thinks it’s funny.
Just then, my phone beeps. A text from Metcalf:Anything?
Gurgle, gurgle.That’s the sound of my blood boiling. I punch in his phone number and rehearse what I am going to say:
Are you kidding? I’ve got a five-month-old whose idea of fun is to cover her room with poop. This morning I drove a little bitch to middle school and put up with her shit. Now Amber is gone and I’ve got to figure out how to strap Lily into a car seat by myself so I can take her to baby-robics or roba-yobics or some stupid thing and—damn it!—do you have any idea what kind of day I’m having?
Oh God.
I’m starting to sound like a wife.
CHAPTER 18
