And New Dad, who introduced himself as Alex, was wonderful. He would tell her stories about being in the army, which fascinated her （a soldier in real life, and he was her father!）。 He would do that thing where he made his thumb tip look like it came apart from the rest of his finger. He would give money to her, as well as necklaces and a jewelry box. He’d kiss the top of her head, call her Sunshine in a way that made her heart soar. She found out, years later, he didn’t even know about her until that time he first showed up. Another Melinda game, she guessed.
Now, twenty years later, Iris says, “Love you, bye,” to New Dad on the phone and hits end. Alex Lionel, who lives an hour away but calls to check on her every day. “How are you feeling?” he always says. “Get some rest now while you can.” She smiles and takes the portable baby heart rate monitor she got from Amazon out of its package. She looks up at the sound of the door scraping open as Melinda walks right into the apartment without knocking.
“Cold in here,” Melinda says, holding a white box from the bakery. “Here, babe, sticky buns.” She plops the box onto the table and looks around. Melinda is always looking around. Always a small piece of green gum in her mouth. Always flipping her hair.
“I can’t eat those,” Iris says. She almost salivates. She feels an urge to rip the box open and push a whole bun into her mouth. Her favorite. She imagines the glazed pecans, the warm dough.
Melinda rolls her eyes. “Oh, they just tell you that stuff.” She looks down at the box and starts to pick at the tape with her nail. She tugs and tugs but nothing happens. “What’s that?” she asks, and zeros in on the heart rate monitor. Iris remembers Dave made coffee this morning, but she doesn’t offer any to her mother yet. Maybe in a minute. Outside, she hears car motors and an occasional horn. The hanging papier-maché angel she got from Mexico moves with the breeze from the open window. She loves springtime.
“It’s a listening device. Now I can hear Phoebe’s heartbeat whenever I want.” She turns the small white machine over to see if it needs batteries.
“Phoebe. You’re still going with that?” Melinda lifts her eyebrows. “Where’s Davey?”
“At the store.”
“Buying you a ring?”
“Please.” Iris opens the battery compartment, and there are two factory batteries already inside. Jackpot. “The stroller arrived at the baby store, so he borrowed his mom’s SUV to pick it up.” She thinks of Dave leaving that morning. Quiet Dave, with the small ponytail, who broke her rule about men in ponytails. Dave with glasses sometimes. Dave who now kisses Phoebe goodbye, too, bending to smile at Iris’s belly.
Melinda’s high heels click as she walks. Iris knows her mother thinks the apartment should be vacuumed, that the kitchen counters have too much clutter. Whatever. She’s pregnant. She’s in grad school with an internship at the hospital. She does what she can.
Melinda sniffs for a moment. She is always sniffing, ready to point out any smell: dust, garbage, the neighbor’s cat. She is a good-looking woman for sixty, but her style got stuck at some point in the late eighties. For one, her bleached hair is overprocessed. She wears clothes that are too tight, even though she’s in good shape, and today she wears jean leggings and a long-sleeved bodysuit. Dave calls it her Flashdance attire. Iris smiles. Once, in a horrible fight, Iris called Melinda trashy, which she regretted immediately. Melinda’s mascara smeared with tears as she slammed the apartment door. “Go to your father’s uptight wife then! Go see her on rich bitch lane,” Melinda had screamed.
“What are you looking for?” Iris says now.
“Scissors.”
“I can’t have a sticky bun, Mom. Please don’t.”
Melinda opens drawer after drawer, clicking her tongue with each one. She finally rummages through the junk drawer and finds the scissors with the blue handle that barely cut. “Honey, don’t believe everything they tell you. They always go with the worst-case scenario. Baby diabetes. I never heard of such bull.”
“It’s not baby diabetes. It’s gestational diabetes. The baby doesn’t have it. I do, as a side effect of pregnancy. When the baby comes, everything should be fine.”
“Tuh,” she says, and slides the scissors into the bottom of the white box. “So we’ll hear our little girl’s heart with that thing?” she says as she breaks the tape. “Imagine: I didn’t even know what you’d be or what you were doing in there. I just hoped you’d be happy. Just be happy, that’s what I kept whispering.”