Free Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw

How’s my little snooky?” One of the best things about Harold is that he has absolutely no fear of appearing foolish.
    Lucky shambles over and licks the baby’s dangling foot. It takes the dog some time to get across a room now.
    Nora takes the baby from Tracy, over to the old sofa against the far wall of this big room made out of the house’s original kitchen and dining room. She settles in, making a lap for him to sit on. His smell—the sweet and sour of baby powder and spit-up milk—and his body so jam-packed with babyness combine to tumble her back into her own early days of motherhood, when holding Fern could so overwhelm her with love that she worried she might be deranged.
    She makes monkey faces for Vaughn, who has a rather funny face himself—a long nose for a baby, and eyes that droop a little at the edges, brows that sweep upward, giving him an aspect of curiosity. Then there is his thick, stand-up hair, like a fright wig. She shoots him into midair, tickling him as he goes, holding him high and dangling, but secure in her clutches. He bunches up his odd features, then smiles hugely while shouting “yayaya,” the prototype of a laugh.
    Fern glances up and across the room from stirring the pot of boiling spaghetti, and tells Nora, “He doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing.”
    “Yes, he’s miserable,” Nora says. “You can see.”
    “Yeah, well, he laughs, but then he throws up,” Fern says, nibbling a broken-off piece of Parmesan.
    Nora retreats into silence. She flips back to the beginnings of her long, unwinnable war with Fern.
     
    When she came out to herself, Nora went from fierce nerves and brooding to pure exhilaration. Up until then, everything had seemed so in its place, with Russell still a copywriter at the agency and she still working in the ombudsman’s office at the college. Of course, they didn’t know the “still” part, didn’t think of this as being merely the first part of their adulthood. The future appeared deceptively plain in front of them, looking much like their present only maybe painted a slightly different color, maybe with a room added on. Fern was just starting school, coming home with peculiar drawings, odd stories about aliens from outer space visiting her class, or coming home with nothing at all to say about an entire day. And all of this was so fiercely interesting, so preoccupying, so ongoing, each day opening directly into another. And yet, in the middle of this, for Nora to be right, to be who she really was, who she had already become, all of this would have to be overturned.
    And it was in this overturning, Nora fears, that Fern—already a mysterious child, tricky to find in the best of moments—became profoundly lost to her. A vacuum was set up between them and has persisted through the years, Fern signaling her indifference in the face of all that Nora offers, keeps offering nonetheless, in hope and in penance.
     
    “My turn,” Harold says, and takes Vaughn from Nora. He lies down on the wood floor of the kitchen, sets the baby onto his stomach, and gives him big thumbs to hold.
    Tracy joins Fern in fixing the dinner; the two of them politely help each other at the chopping block. They are no longer the giggling, silly friends they used to be. Nora suspects this is not a loss of innocence, rather simply that they are no longer smoking dope out in Tracy’s car as a prelude to encounters with adults, gliding into the house like deer emerging from the dark forest, their pupils huge. Now they are practicing at being adults. Now Tracy has a baby and Fern is studying anthropology. Nora supposes they are repositioning themselves
vis-à-vis
each other, accommodating the fact that their circumstances have set them on divergent paths. Nora still has trouble adjusting to the notion of Tracy as a mother; she has grown so used to thinking of her as the ur-bad girl with her terrible boyfriends and school suspensions. Motherhood makes her seem vulnerable for the