She carried him to her spot at the kitchen table, latched him on, and reread the three sentences. How quickly they had flattened, lost their music. For those few words she had been rough with her son? Her eyes passed over the page again. Awful. She felt like driving the pencil through her skin. The baby sucked, his eyes shut for the long pulls and open for swallowing, unseeing the whole time. The strong tugs at her breast returned her to a more familiar self. She pressed her lips to the fuzz at his hair-line and nibbled. These animal moments of motherhood obliterated everything else briefly.
Eventually he drifted off, her nipple hanging from his lips like a cigar. She read her words several more times trying not to condemn them, straining to catch the faintest echo of what she thought she’d heard before. Just as she lifted her pencil, the doorbell rang. She glanced in its direction through the walls and shook her head. It rang again. The threat of losing any more of this precious time forced another sentence out of her. Then the doorbell was held down so long the chimes played notes she didn’t recognize.
“I’m not coming,” she said quietly.
Sharp knocks began on the thin side window, growing louder and louder until she was certain a hand would shatter through before she could reach the door. She swung it open wide.
“That’s enough!” she said in a harsh whisper. She wasn’t about to wake the baby up for this man on her porch, a man who did not hesitate to knock on glass as if it were solid steel. His knuckles, she saw, were red as he dropped them into his pocket.
“What are you selling?” Usually she would have cared—about her tone, her bathrobe, the great bulb of breast and the dark brown areola still tenuously attached to the baby’s mouth—but her anger consumed all weaker concerns.
He held out a thin paperback.
“No thanks,” she said, more civilly now, understanding the knocking was part of a religious fervor, a feeling, perhaps accurate, that this house or half of a house （their childless neighbors were rarely home, never shared the brunt of the peddling that went on during the day） needed conversion.
“I’ve come from Smything and Sons,” the man said.
“Who?”
“The publishing house.” He shook the book at her. “They’ve given me this and I’ve come to talk to you about it.”
She shifted the baby upward, hoping to cover up a little more. “Why?” She read the largest words on the cover. It was the working title of her novel, the one in the notebooks on her kitchen table. She pinched the book between her thumb and fingers but could not loosen it from the man’s grasp. “Give me that.” Then she let go. The sound of her own voice scared her. It was her voice as a small child. She even felt the slight resistance of the words in her mouth, as if language were still somewhat new. “Please,” she added.
“That’s what I’ve come to do. Will you have me in?”
She looked at his face for the first time. He was a familiar stranger, someone you know you haven’t met but could have, perhaps should have. There was a little Bing Crosby in the heart-shaped mouth, a little Walt Whitman （when he was younger and kept his beard trimmed）。 There was even a bit of Gerald Ford somewhere, maybe only because she’d recently read an article about his hidden integrity and decency. It was clear that the only way she was going to discover how there could be another novel with that name, despite the searches she’d done to make sure there wasn’t, was to let the man in.
So often, when she made a dubious decision like this, she followed it up extravagantly, as if flaunting it to her better judgment. She led him into their small living room and said, “Can I get you something to drink?”
“I’ll take a gin martini if you’ve got it.” He gave his trousers a quick tug before bending to sit in the middle of the couch. A diaper peeked out from beneath his left thigh though he didn’t notice it. He balanced the book on his gray flannel knees. She smiled, waiting for him to acknowledge his joke. A cocktail at nine thirty in the morning.
He smiled back. “On the rocks.”
“I’ve got coffee, seltzer, OJ, tap water.”
“Hmm?”
“What can I get you, really?” Her anger was back. The baby was asleep and her writing time was dwindling. Why had she let him in?
“Here, let me help you with the martini.” He nestled the paperback in the seat of the bouncy chair on the coffee table.
She followed him into the kitchen. “I’m sorry but that’s not a possibility. We don’t have any—”