Neighborly(61)

“I’m fine.” She wipes at her white pants, as if she’d fallen, and laughs.

I take the opportunity to walk over to Doug and weave my arm through his. He can’t shrug me off in front of his parents. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “For everything.” Might as well cover my bases. “I shouldn’t have said those things to Sadie. You were the one who said I haven’t been myself—”

“I’m not going to talk about this,” he whispers back. His expression is thunderous as he steps away from me.

Should I just be up-front about Wyatt and go ahead and confess? I could say I found the picture and have no memory of that part of the night, which is completely true. I just don’t know if he’d believe me.

He’s so brutally cold right now. I can’t imagine throwing myself on his mercy because he doesn’t appear to have any. For all Melody’s domesticity and supposed sweetness, I don’t think she has any, either. She’s so full of judgment: toward my mother, toward me.

Oh God, what if he tells his parents what I said? They’ll want him to divorce me for sure. They can congratulate themselves for having kept me off the Crayola deed. Another woman—a stronger woman, from a good family—would never have let them run the show like I did.

I stride ahead to where Melody has parked Sadie in front of the deep-purple rhododendrons. I need to continue my kill-her-with-kindness routine. “Let me get Sadie out of the stroller,” I tell Melody. “Then you can walk her around and let her touch things. She loves that.”

Melody smiles at me. Doug’s not falling for my act, but maybe she is. “That’s a great idea,” she says.

Sadie was just beginning to drowse, and she erupts when I unfasten and then lift her. “It’s OK.” I toggle her up and down, feeling the rising panic that signals a tactical mistake on my part. “You’re OK, honey. Nothing to worry about.” She disagrees heartily, and she wants everyone in the vicinity to know it. I feel my cheeks flushing.

“Put her back in the stroller,” Doug commands. “She was happy there.”

“Now that she’s out, she won’t be happy to go back in,” I counter. I spend nearly every waking minute with her; I’m the one who’d know.

“Can I take her?” Melody asks. I know that was the reason I removed Sadie from the stroller to begin with, but now it feels like handing her over would only confirm my inadequacy at comforting my own daughter. I have to pull this off. I just have to.

“I’ve got this,” I say, treating it like an offer that can be refused.

“Maybe she’s hungry,” Scott says, loud enough to be heard over Sadie. It’s his answer to everything.

“She just ate,” I nearly shout back. I walk her away from everyone, toward a spot in the center of the grass. I pat her back and hum. She’s not letting me off the hook for this one, no chance. Her cries intensify. Doug and his parents watch and then whisper, like they’re conferring on me, evaluating my fitness as a mother. I want to tell them it’s not normally like this, that Sadie loves dancing cheek to cheek with me. Even Andie commented on just how bonded Sadie and I are. But we get around Doug’s parents and I become the picture of fumbling ineptitude.

How long has it been—three minutes, an hour?

I hold her high up on my shoulder, supporting her with one arm, groping in the diaper bag with the other. Pay dirt! Her pacifier. I see Melody approaching me, and I think I’ve just got to get this pacifier in Sadie’s mouth and shut her up. I’ve got a few more seconds.

Furious, Sadie spits out the pacifier. It lands on top of the world’s neatest grass, just propped up there like a diamond ring in a velvet box. Sadie is tantruming like a baby twice her age, older, even. She’s precocious. She’s a prodigy.

“You seem very stressed,” Melody says to me.

“I’m stressed because she’s screaming. People are staring.” I don’t really mean the strangers, though a few are. I mean Melody and Scott and Doug, all three of them, conducting their referendum of me. I don’t particularly care that Sadie is disturbing the tranquility of the surroundings. It’s not like I brought her into a movie theater or to a meditation retreat. We’re in nature, sort of. Nature’s loud sometimes.

“I think you’ve been stressed for a while,” Melody says with exaggerated delicacy. “Babies pick up on that.”

It seems like she is implying that Sadie’s tantrum is my fault, that it was brought on by my stress. She’s actually blaming me. And a part of me thinks she’s right.

Melody has her sweet grandmotherly expression on. “This might be a good time for me to hold her.”

“I can comfort my own child.”

She raises an eyebrow. Then she smiles and holds out her arms. I stare at her for a long minute, but she doesn’t drop her arms. It’s a Mexican standoff, and she’s going to win. We both know it.

Doug comes over, goes into the diaper bag, and removes a bottle of milk. Without a word, he snatches Sadie out of my arms, as if to say I’ve had my time, my chance, and I’ve failed. How easily he takes her from me. It shouldn’t be that easy.

He pops the bottle in Sadie’s mouth, and she sucks gratefully. “She’s not hungry yet,” I say, despite the evidence to the contrary. “It hasn’t been long enough.”