“I’m quitting the circus after just one act. My back hurts worse now. I’m not in any shape to be tumbling around.”
“Want me to try the thing?”
She winces.
“The book says it works.”
He flipped through five hundred pages to find a trick he thought he saw years ago, but couldn’t be sure. Then there it was, the end-all, be-all fix for pregnancy back pain.
“You’re not a chiropractor, Wyatt. What if something pops out of alignment?”
“I’m not popping you like bubble wrap. Trust me.”
She sighs, leaning her weight against him through their connected shoulders. “I do. Always. It’s my own body I don’t trust, it’s so broken and brittle it feels like I’ll fall apart if you look at me wrong. Maybe tonight.”
“Alright. Maybe tonight.”
* * *
“I can’t do anything right. How am I going to raise this child? I can’t even put a fitted sheet on the bed properly. I can’t even fold one. That’s not normal, Wyatt.”
If he thought things were getting better after the somersault incident, he was dead wrong, and now they’re trapped in a housekeeping disaster before bed.
“I don’t think fitted sheets are a requirement in baby raising.”
“You’re not taking this seriously,” she snaps, grabbing the other corner of the sheet to try again.
“I…am.”
“You’re not. You think I’m too stupid to do it. Admit it. Tell me I’m too dumb to put a sheet on the bed.”
He stands there with his mouth open, watching her try and fail a fourth time when the opposite corner pops up again. “Here lemme help—”
“I. Don’t. Need. Help.” She barks the words at him in a level voice that makes him think she might shank him if he tried again.
“Okay.”
“If I can’t do this, then what else will I be terrible at? First it’s sheets and then it’s diaper changing and feeding. It’s a slippery slope, and I don’t understand how you don’t see that.”
None of this connects in any possible way, but something tells him that he’d better tread carefully. “You fed and changed Emma, right? So you’ll—”
“That’s not the same. It’s not even close to the same. This baby is going to starve because of me. You might be the only one she has left after I fail her.”
He’s pretty sure it’s exactly the same, but he doesn’t dare say that. She is angry and frustrated. Disagreeing with her only makes things worse. So he goes against all his instincts and follows this convoluted line of thought as best he can.
She rips the sheet off the bed, growling when it refuses to go on the fifth time, and tosses it to the ground. Stomps on it with both feet like a bird trying to kill a snake. “Fuck this thing, fuck it, we can sleep on the mattress. Who even needs sheets? Who invented them? What’s the point?”
She pauses, looking at the trampled sheet on the floor while her anger transforms into despair.
“Addison…”
“We don’t have sheets to sleep on now. What have I done?”
“Hey, hey, we still have sheets. There’s another one in the closet, and the baby won’t starve. We won’t let that happen.”
“But how can you be sure? You can’t.” She’s full-on sobbing, grabbing a tissue from the bedside, and collapsing on the edge of the bare mattress. “This is what you’ve gotten into. This is who you’re with. I fucked this up, and it’s simple. How can you trust me with other things? I shouldn’t be allowed to have a baby at all if this is what happens with sheets. I lost the last one, Wyatt. I lost her, so how do we know that we won’t lose…fuck, fuck.”
He’s been trying to sit back and accept whatever comes out of her mouth, but he can’t agree this time when she couldn’t be more wrong. “Listen to me, this baby ain’t the same as a fitted sheet. You’re the best mother I’ve ever met. She’s lucky to have you, and what happened years ago isn’t a guarantee of what could happen now.”
