Free A Good House by Bonnie Burnard

with her eyes wide open and her hands covering her mouth, Daphne nodded and tried to lift her hands away. “I want three babies,” she said. “I’m going to have three.”
    â€œThree is a very good number,” Sylvia said. “Tell me what you’ll call them.”
    â€œGirls will be Maggie or Jill or Paula,” Daphne said. “Boys will be David or Daniel or Michael.”
    â€œThose are very fine names,” Sylvia said. “I like those names a lot.”
    The next evening she called Patrick and Paul and Murray in and sat them down to tell them that they would soon have wives and children, which made them look down through their knees at their feet and shake their heads. Thinking about this talk all afternoon, she had known she would have to thread her way carefully between one son’s rage and the other’s anxious tears, and looking at them now she could see her boundaries announcing themselves in Patrick’s clenched fists, in Paul’s wet cheeks. What she wanted to say to them was, Take it slow, as slow as you can. And, Before you decide, have a good long look at the mother because a daughter usually turns out just the same or just the opposite. She wanted to say, Loud, silly girls often grow up to be loud, silly women, and sullen girls tend to stay sullen.
    Instead, she told them, “Women expect strength from men, and gentleness and absolute loyalty. And a good ear.” She said, “You will have to work hard if you expect to raise a family.” Looking just at Patrick and Paul, meaning it as a joke, she said, “You might even have to think about giving up hockey.” Then she took the deepest breath she could take. “Of course sex is fun,” she said. “Likely, you have already discovered that. But you should try to get it into your heads that with just a little extra thought, a little extra time taken, it can be something altogether different, altogether more.” She didn’t make them sit there wondering if they had to say anything back to her about any of this. She shooed them out of the room like small boys told to stay away from the creek in the spring, hoping only that she hadn’t lied to them.
    Bill had offered to set up a small bed for himself in an empty corner of the living room in case his rolling around in his sleep disturbed Sylvia or gave her discomfort. As proof of his consideration, he borrowed a foldaway cot from the McKellars down the street and wheeled it into the dining room where it stood ready, sheets and all, but Sylvia told him no, she didn’t want that, not yet. All these months they had continued to do what they could, when they could. Cooper had told them early on and pointedly to go ahead and take whatever pleasure was available to them.
    Cooper told Bill now that Sylvia was on a very high dosage, which he was more than ready to up if he became convinced she needed it. He said that death comes in different ways to different people, more ways than an average layman could imagine, and that an easy death was still possible. He said there was no reason to anticipate extraordinary pain, not with the dosage he had her on.
    Bill never did set up the cot. In the last week of July, Sylvia didn’t want to eat anything and then she began to fall into an extremely deep sleep that could last the night and through the next day and overnight and halfway through the day again. Cooper said this was the blessing of her brain’s own morphine, better than man-made.
    When she came out of these sleeps she could speak only a few necessary words, could hardly take a drink, could only breathe and listen and watch. Bill stayed home and the kids got some time off from their summer jobs and someone stayed with her in the living room every minute, often two at a time. On the last of these sleeping days and nights Bill was with her and, exhausted beyond discipline, beyond even his time overseas, he crawled in and slept