Thursday morning she called in sick, pumped extra, put in earplugs, and asked Daniel not to wake her until she woke up on her own.
That happened around noon. When the vision came, she opened her eyes and determined that he was next to her in bed, with Flora sprawled naked on his bare chest. She nudged him out of a doze and said, “Daniel. I found a solution.”
“Pray tell.”
“You get a day job, and we hire a babysitter.”
He sat upright, clutching Flora close, and said, “No, no, no.”
“Why not?”
“I am not letting some migrant worker take it out on my daughter how much she misses her kids. We don’t have anyplace to put a Dutch au pair, as much as I’d enjoy hosting one, and we can’t afford a qualified babysitter. We’d have to put her in day care, and there’s no way on God’s earth. Forget it.”
“I meant Joe.”
“Joe,” Daniel said. “Isn’t he, I don’t know, not the most literate—”
“I know she’s your daughter and everything, but she’s also a newborn. She can communicate on his level until she’s at least six.”
“What makes you think he’d do it?”
“He has some okay shifts, but he averages, like, five dollars an hour. We offer him seven, and bingo.”
“No way,” Daniel said. “He trusts everybody. If somebody came up to him on the street and asked if they could hold her, he’d just hand her over.”
“People will think he’s the dad. If I were going to fence a baby, or even liberate it for my own use, would I go after the dad? Anyway, you just invented that crime, because I’ve never heard of it—playground-based baby trafficking. Come on. People around here keep an eye out for each other. You know what they say. It takes a village to raise a child.”
“It takes a parent to raise a child. It takes a village to raise a stray cat. Joe is too trusting to be responsible for anybody.”
“Look who’s talking, the man who wants to hire a stranger! At least he’s a known quantity. And he’ll say yes, because he worships her.”
In the evening they went to see him, bearing Chinese takeout. He didn’t hesitate. Chief among the people he trusted was himself. If someone had offered him a job running the trading desk at Goldman Sachs, he would have taken that too.
He got so excited about his new opportunity that they had to remind him of the existence of the coffee shop. He said he was sure no one there would mind if he missed some shifts, and whenever he was done babysitting, he could pick up where he left off. For all they knew, he was right.
He did have a short attention span, but as Pam said, that might be an advantage. Babies have ways of getting themselves noticed. Joe’s attention span might equip him with unusual patience, by keeping him from noticing that it was the same shriek over and over.
SHE CALLED IN SICK AGAIN ON FRIDAY, AND HE CAME OVER FOR A TRIAL RUN, ARRIVING at nine in the morning. She grabbed a bottle of breast milk from the fridge and warmed it up in the microwave. After she had arranged him feeding Flora, she lay down on the couch for a nap. She didn’t want to disturb Daniel, who was asleep on the bed, having gotten home from work at seven.
Four hours later, she woke up. Joe was holding Flora and a fresh bottle, still sitting at the kitchen table. He said, “I changed her diaper.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot to show you how.”
“No problem. It’s easy, compared to regular underpants. There’s no front and back!”
Nodding affirmatively, she rushed to the bathroom, because she was having this phase where the desire to pee and peeing were sort of the same thing. Through the door, she could hear him singing a blues song to Flora:
Drink another bottle, it’s almost two o’clock
I said drink another bottle, baby, it’s almost two o’clock
You been drinking all this morning and I’ll never let you stop
On the kitchen table, squirming on her back
I said baby’s on the kitchen table, squirming on her back
I’m going to take her little pants off and show her where it’s at
Daniel turned over in bed and said, “Your song is deeply disturbing.”
“The last line needs work,” Joe said. “In blues songs ‘back’ always rhymes with ‘heart attack.’ Maybe ‘wipe her dirty crack.’”
“I think with regard to our professional relationship there should be an ironclad rule,” Daniel said. “No songs about my daughter.”
THEIR ONE CONCESSION TO JOE’S ECCENTRICITIES WAS THE PURCHASE OF A BABY carrier. Pam called strollers “traffic testers,” because of the way caregivers in New York shoved them into the street to stop the cars. They had been transporting Flora in a ten-foot-long carrying cloth that circled the torso multiple times, with an X in back and another X in front, finishing with a knot you had to tie behind your own back. Joe’s attempt to put it on might have worked as a vaudeville routine. For him they invested in a BabyBjörn. They didn’t say it aloud, but they were both ever so slightly concerned that he might forget Flora somewhere if she weren’t firmly attached to his body.
Daniel quit his night job, transitioned to Pam’s health insurance, and signed on with a temp agency in the financial district. The hours would be unpredictable, but the pay was higher than for full-time work—eighteen dollars an hour. Within a week, he had an assignment that would last a year, sitting in for an administrative assistant on maternity leave at an employee benefits consulting firm way downtown, in windy maritime Manhattan, close to Battery Park.
His new colleagues expected almost nothing from him. They seemed thrilled that he knew how to alphabetize. They came to him for help printing spreadsheets.
After work he usually took the handoff, since Pam worked later. In the morning, he headed downtown while she waited for Joe.
The familial stress level declined to near zero. Flora continued to set new benchmarks for infant cuteness. By the time she was six months old, Pam, Daniel, and Joe were in agreement that for her to get any cuter would violate natural law. Her hair had come in wavy and almost black. Her eyes were dark blue. Her face was chubby as a peach.
LIKE DANIEL, JOE TOOK HER ON LONG WALKS STRAPPED TO HIS CHEST. HE HIT ALL THE record stores at least once a week. His former coworkers at the coffee shop fawned like grandparents.
One afternoon he came home and put her on the changing table just as his beeper went off in the pocket of his coat. He left her to go to the coatrack. He was feeling around for the pager’s hard surface in a tangle of candy wrappers when he heard a thump. She was lying on the floor on her side, making a high-pitched groaning noise.
He ran downstairs to call Pam, who had called his beeper. He said, “While I was getting the beeper, Flora fell on the floor! I think she hurt herself!”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs.”
“Go back up and get her. Hail a cab to the emergency room