Bob watches it get smaller, sees his daughters looking back in fearful confusion, and when the waves subside, he paddles to the bobbing cushion and grabs onto it. Then, shoving it out in front of him, he kicks his legs and starts moving slowly in the direction of the dock and picnic grounds and his family.
The night Elaine went into labor and had the baby, Bob was with Marguerite at the Hundred Lakes Motel. It was a Thursday, October 16, and the baby, a boy weighing six pounds fourteen ounces and named Robert Raymond Dubois, Jr., was born three weeks ahead of schedule and, despite Elaine’s rapid weight gain in the last few weeks, had shown no signs of arriving prematurely, and so Bob, as he had for months, treated the forthcoming birth of his third child as an event in the distant future, almost as if it were an event in someone else’s life.
For Elaine, of course, the baby was already an active member of the family and had been since late May, when she first felt him kick against her ribs from inside. But it’s often this way, that the mother and father regard the birth of their child as taking place at dates months apart, especially after the birth of the first child and almost always when the mother and the father have made their life together one thing and their lives apart different and separate things, which has been increasingly true of Bob and Elaine since Bob discovered Marguerite Dill and, more emphatically, since the robbery.
At eight-fifteen that night, Bob telephones Elaine from the store to say that he’ll be home late, he’s going out for a drink with the Budweiser salesman. Business is light tonight anyhow, it’s a Thursday, so he may even close the store a little early. He’ll be home before midnight, he assures her, while outside in the parking lot, Marguerite waits for him in her car, the motor running, windows open to the cool fall night, tape deck playing Isaac Hayes.
Elaine whines briefly and in a thin voice, but after all, Bob, unlike most husbands, always calls her when he’s going to be late, and he’s seldom late more than once a week, and besides, he has no other friends, and, she reasons, a man needs friends, especially a man who has become, as Bob has, such a loner. Go ahead, she tells him, and have a good time, she had planned on going to bed early anyhow, she wasn’t feeling too great today. She probably shouldn’t have tried to do all the housecleaning in one day. She’s already in bed, or at least on it, with her swollen feet up, her huge belly looming in front of her, her bulging slacks unzipped at the sides to ease her thick, soft flesh. Across from the bed on the dresser, the Sony jabbers in Spanish. She flicked it on just as the phone rang and hasn’t found her program yet.
At nine-oh-eight, she chuckles at one of Gary Coleman’s smart-aleck remarks on
The phone in the store rings an even dozen times, then stops. Bob is already at the Hundred Lakes Motel, smoking marijuana for the first time in his life. He mentioned to Marguerite the last time they were together like this that she might relax if she got drunk enough, and she suggested they get high together sometime. Did she mean marijuana? Grass?
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, yeah, why not smoke a little grass? It can’t hurt you, can it?”
She was surprised he’d never tried it, she even thought it was cute, or so she said, and she promised him she’d bring a couple of joints with her the next time they went out.
Now, in the darkness of the room (which she seems to prefer, though he just once would like to leave the lights on when they are naked, but he still can’t figure out how to propose it without sounding slightly perverse), Marguerite lights the joint and sucks the smoke into her lungs noisily and passes it to Bob.
He tries to hold it casually, almost drops it, quickly recovers and inhales deeply. He likes the sucking noise she makes when she smokes, likes the odor, likes the way his thoughts suddenly soften and liquefy. His skin feels crisp and tingly, but everything enclosed by his skin feels densely soft and warm. Like oatmeal, he thinks. He giggles and tells her what he was thinking.
“More like grits,” she says. “With gravy.”
“Pancakes with hot maple syrup,” he suggests.
She says, “No, more like hushpuppies. I feel like a hushpuppy.”
“Ah,” he exclaims, he has it now. “Corned beef and cabbage.”
She laughs a long time, or what seems like a long time. “Chitlins!”
