Free What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage

I mentally said good-bye to the hope of any more peace and quiet around here.
    Joyce had always loved kids and she took it hard when both of hers died the way they did, but the idea never appealed to me. I’m too selfish to be somebody’s mother. Joyce would say all that changes once you hold your own kid for the first time, but I figured, why risk it? There were plenty of people who wanted to have children and a lot who didn’t but ended up having them anyway. I never felt like my small contribution to the overpopulation of the planet was critical to anybody’s agenda, especially mine.
    Joyce had stopped by the mall to pick up what she called “a few little things for the baby,” who would be arriving via social worker on Wednesday morning. She had a bunch of tiny nightgowns and sunsuits, six receiving blankets, an infant seat, and twelve boxes of disposable diapers. She also got a small crib
(assembly required)
and a musical mobile to hang over the baby’s head that had brightly colored stars and moons twirling slowly around to the theme from
Doctor Zhivago.
    We hauled everything into the kitchen, including the crib. I mixed another drink and lit the kettle for tea while Joyce gave me the details.
    “What’s her name?” I said.
    Joyce shook her head. “She doesn’t have one yet. Eartha didn’t stay around long enough to name her, and you heard Mattie say she doesn’t care.”
    “What she said was she didn’t give a fuck.”
    “I stand corrected,” Joyce said, and the way she said it made me feel like shit. I brought her a cup of tea and hugged her.
    “I’m just being mean,” I said. “I missed you today, so I did the wife thing and attacked you as soon as you came home. Sorry!”
    “Hold it,” Joyce said. “I was a wife and I never did that.”
    “So I was just doing the asshole thing, is that what you’re telling me?”
    She laughed and drank a long swallow of her tea. “I’ve been calling her Imani. It means ‘faith’ in Swahili. What do you think?”
    I liked it. I was tired of calling her
the baby.
I was even starting to feel like it might be okay to have her here. It would mean a lot to Joyce, and this kid deserved a break if anybody ever did. Her mama’s an HIV-positive crack addict, missing in action. Her aunt is a foul-mouthed fool and her uncle is a violent woman hater. She’s batting a thousand and she’s not even two weeks old yet. Besides, I was only going to be here a couple of months before I headed out for the coast. This was Joyce’s real life. It was just a stopover on mine.
    We had cooed and oohed over the impossibly tiny baby clothes, debated the relative merits of cloth diapers, and decided to put the crib in Joyce’s room before I remembered Gerry’s visit. I handed Joyce the envelope.
    “She says you’ve been a bad girl. That’s a quote.”
    “A
bad girl?”
Joyce shook her head. “As the young people would say, this woman is
trippin’.
Was this open when she gave it to you?”
    “Mail tampering is not my style,” I said.
    She withdrew the contents of the envelope, which included a cover letter on some official-looking letterhead, a handwritten note, and about twenty or thirty pamphlets. While Joyce scanned the letter, I picked one up and read the cover:
Living with HIV: Power of Attitude.
    “What is all this?” I said.
    “I’m trying to do some AIDS education with the Sewing Circus and I sent in an announcement for the Sunday bulletin. I also sent away for some pamphlets from the state health department’s HIV clinic, which they were more than happy to send me.”
    She indicated the pile of brightly colored brochures filled with undeniably alarming statistics and photographs of bravely smiling people who always had that startled look of disbelief lurking right behind their eyes.
    “The only problem is, the Good Reverend and Mrs. Anderson think the topic is inappropriate for—” she read aloud from the handwritten note “—‘discussion within the