Free The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins

into the kitchen, sets the shopping bags down on the counter, and goes back out for the stroller. Emma begins to wail, and I begin to sweat. I need to pee. My incision throbs from carrying the car seat up the steps. But Emma’s hunger trumps all my would-be biological urgencies.
    I always wanted to be one of those effortless, French-style women who can breast-feed discreetly anywhere, but I’m not. For me, breast-feeding requires a Boppy, a footstool, a glass of water, and substantial nudity. I look around wildly, wondering if I can put Emma off eating until Brian leaves, but she is hollering the house down, and my skin is crawling. I can actually feel my blood pressure climbing as she cries. My boobs begin to leak. Brian is coming back down the hallway with the stroller now. There’s no way around it. I hike up my shirt, unsnap my nursing bra, and collapse onto the couch with Emma. It’s a minimalist couch, and it feels judgmental in this living room, like it’s afraid to touch anything else for fear of contamination. Leo and I ripped up the linoleum tile in here and replaced the subfloor before we moved in, but we haven’t installed the shiny new hardwoods yet, so the sofa is sitting on some plywood in front of a spackled and unpainted wall. The floorboards sit a few feet away, still in their boxes.
    Emma latches on like a champ, and I’m so grateful for this small, ordinary miracle. Breast-feeding is like a gift after the C-section, like evidence that my body isn’t biologically opposed to motherhood, even if my brain seems to be.
    “At least I can do this right,” I whisper to the top of her soft little head.
    Brian leans the stroller up against the counter.
    “Wow, thanks,” I say.
    He’s even managed to fold it up, which took me
days
to figure out. Brian is an engineer. I look down to make sure that my shirt is draped over as much of my boob as possible.
    “Yeah, no problem.” He looks over at us on the couch, and then snaps his head away, as if I’ve slapped him across the face.
    Brian is one of those progressive, gentlemanly types who believes in breast-feeding, but only theoretically. In practice, he is completely undone by it. He doesn’t know where to look, so he studies my kitchen ceiling. I glance down at my engorged boob. It’s bigger than Emma’s head. Disgusting. I feel a hot blush creeping up my neck.
    “The kitchen looks fantastic,” Brian says, staring at the light fixture. “The place is really coming along.”
    “Thanks,” I say, stretching my shirt halfway across Emma’s face while she tries to eat. “It’s not like yours—I wish we had the patience to restore all those great historic details. It was a mess when we moved in, needed so much work. My parents just didn’t have the energy to keep it up when they lived here.”
    “Well, it was homey,” he says kindly. “But it sure looks a lot different already.” I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that he’s
fondling
my poured-concrete countertops.
    “Well, much as I enjoyed the linoleum paradise of my childhood, those yellow appliances were ready to retire,” I say. “They limped to their deaths.”
    The kitchen was the first room we renovated after we bought this house from my parents—the only room we’ve finished, with a cork floor and a Sub-Zero, over-and-under, built-in fridge with a glass door. That fridge is so beautiful that sometimes I actually embrace it, and then I have to spritz off the leaky breast milk stains from the glass door afterward, with Windex.
    Brian opens one of those glass doors now, and deposits both of my shopping bags inside the fridge without unpacking them. He’s wearing dusty jeans and Timberland boots, and somehow he looks elegant in my immaculate new kitchen. We are a before-and-after picture: I am
before
, all sweaty, disheveled, and bloated in the unfinished living room, and Brian is
after,
standing in my flawless kitchen like some sexified, twenty-first-century