Thiswas her plan? Sleep in the bedwiththe baby?
My anxiety shot through the roof. There was no way I would be getting any rest when all I could see was the mental image of my large frame rolling over in the middle of the night and unconsciously crushing my son’s fragile little body.
Daisy appeared to have no such concerns. By the time I reached the mattress, she was out cold, alongside the baby boy whose rosebud lips had already released her nipple.
Little stinker.
If he hadn’t stolen my spot in bed, I would have been impressed that at only two weeks old, he’d figured out how to play his mama like a fiddle.
Grabbing my pillow, I dropped it to the narrow space between the bed frame and Aspen’s cot.
As I lowered to the floor, my groan roused my miniature sleeping beauty, and she called out sleepily, “Dada?”
I rubbed her back in hopes of getting her to conk back out. “Shh, sweetheart. It’s nighttime.”
The rustling of sheets announced my failure, and Aspen climbed out of bed, making grabby hands toward me in the dark. “Dada.”
“Okay, okay.” I pulled her into my arms, settled her warm weight atop my chest, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Instantly, her breathing evened out, indicating her return to dreamland.
If there were any doubts as to whether the Sullivan kids were running the show in this household, they were laid to rest tonight.
November
With clinical precision, I manipulated the pliers in my gloved hand to remove the staples left behind on the fence post after cutting away the damaged wire that needed to be replaced. Wade was a few posts down the way, doing the same thing, the two of us working in companionable silence.
That was, until a shrill cry reached my ears, and my head whipped up.
I barely managed to stifle a groan. It was a cry that had been imprinted on my brain over the past four months.
“You hear that?” Wade called out.
My heavy sigh couldn’t be contained. “Yeah.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that sounded like—”
As if on cue, my ma crested the horizon, my red-faced, screaming son held in one arm as she trudged across the field.
The look of displeasure etched across her face brought with it a sense of foreboding. We were beyond fortunate that she watched the kids while Daisy and I were working, but I could see even from this distance she was at her wits’ end with my inconsolable infant.
She unceremoniously shoved Tripp against my chest. “I can’t do it anymore, Jett.” Exasperated, she huffed, “He won’t eat, he won’t sleep, and all he does is holler all damn day.”
Scrubbing my free hand down my face, I muttered, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
My mother shook her head. “Might want to reconsider the baptism. An exorcism might be more fitting.”
“I’ll take your suggestion under advisement.”
Wincing as Tripp’s screeching reached a new decibel, I tried passing him back to Ma.
She took a giant step backward, holding up both her hands. “Oh no, he’s your problem now.”
My jaw dropped, and a disbelieving exhale flew past my lips before I regained my bearings. “What the hell do you expectmeto do with him?” I gestured to the open land as far as the eye could see. “This isn’t a place for a baby, and we can’t afford for Daisy to quit her job just because we got saddled with an ornery infant.”
Ma cocked her hip. “You wanna know what’s gonna happen if I take him back to my house?”
I mentally braced during the short pause before she answered the rhetorical question.
“He’s gonna acquire a taste for whiskey because that’s a surefire way to get him to shut up and pass out.” Under her breath, she added, “It sure worked on every chatty man that’s ever found his way into my bed.”
