Free Blessings by Anna Quindlen Page A

was, standing on the front porch. She wanted him to weigh that goddamned trout and she told him she wanted him to pay for it by the pound. By the fucking pound!”
    “What’d he do?” Skip said.
    “He paid her six bucks for the goddamned fish. Which reminds me, I’m going to come out there someday and fish in that pond. I hear there are still some big browns in there. And it’s not like she’ll ever notice. We’ll go fishing, and then you can either quit, or we’ll get you fired. You got to get out of there, man. You even smell like a girl. You smell like suntan lotion or something. What are you doing, basking on the diving board?”
    It was the baby wipes, and the baby powder. Skip was thinking about how to explain away the smell when Debbie blew through the swinging door from the back room, but not before Chris narrowed his eyes and looked at Skip like he was seeing him through smoke. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Debbie, knowing she was late, pulling the letter from the back pocket of her jeans.
    Two minutes and he was out in the parking lot, the rain so heavy that he couldn’t make out his truck right away. He turnedon the interior light and ripped open the envelope like it mattered, like the old man really had something to say to him after all these years. He was amazed by the faint pulse of hope he felt in his own throat. On lined paper like the kind he used in school his father had written: “Son, We thought you would like to know that you have a baby brother. His name is Lance he eats good but doesn’t sleep all that much. Maybe you can come see him soon when he’s sleeping better. Take care of yourself and have a drink on me. Your father.”
    A ten-dollar bill fluttered from inside the letter to the floor of the truck. Skip leaned over and picked it up, then let it fall again. He started up the engine and peeled out from the parking lot onto the flooded road, his back end fishtailing. He wondered whether his father’s wife had the same baby books he had, and whether she’d found out yet that the newborn diapers were too small for most babies and cut into the soft skin of their upper thighs. He’d be goddamned if he’d tell her, or send a card. Lance Cuddy. What the hell kind of name was Lance? A soap opera name, was what.
    Lights came up on him suddenly out of the wall of water, a car heading his way, and both of them slowed down, afraid that the wind and the rain might just blow them headlong into each other. He was lucky with the lightning. It zigzagged toward the earth a minute later, when he was edging over the bridge over the big creek, and in the strange silver light he could see that someone had already blown out the guardrail on one side, so that there was a drop of ten feet or so to the creek bed. He went across at maybe five miles an hour, praying for his old bald tires not to slide on the bridge grid. He couldn’t afford to have an accident, not with the baby at home sleeping steadily toward her next bottle.
    There was a car up ahead on one side of the road, its front end an accordion pleated around the engine block, and he pulled up behind it, his brights on, and ran to the driver’s side to see if anyone was hurt. But the car was empty, empty with the emptiness of an abandoned house, and as he got back into the truck, soaked and shivering, he realized that he was at the Boatwright house, wherecars were ranged around the drive and the lawn the way some people planted petunias. The Boatwright women all looked as though they’d been inflated with a bicycle pump and encased in stretch fabrics; the Boatwright men were short and wiry and always carried shotguns and cigarettes; Boatwright kids had gray skin and bad haircuts. In grade school there had been Boatwright twins in their class, girls with big round arms and raggedy bangs. For a nickel they’d show their privates behind the athletic-field bleachers.
    As he crawled through the valley, the water running across the road in rills of mud