Free The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins Page A

version of a Norman Rockwell painting.
    “I really miss the grape-motif wallpaper,” Brian jokes from the kitchen. “But I guess your aesthetic has a certain appeal, too.”
    Conversation! Complete with sarcasm and humor! Hallelujah! Emma sucks noisily at my boob, and thwacks my chest with her free-flailing arm.
    “Don’t tell my mom,” I say, laughing. “She’d be heartbroken if she heard you weren’t a fan of the grape wallpaper.”
    Brian takes a break from his breast-feeding-eye-contact boycott to flash me a grin.
    “How are they settling in, in Florida?” he asks.
    “Good, they love it. I just talked to my mom this morning.”
    “They coming up for a visit soon, to meet Miss Emma?”
    And suddenly my eyes are filling up again, and I am mortified. I will not ruin this. I will not frighten my hot and kindly neighbor with my bizarre, uncomfortable tears. I will swallow them. I shake my head, glad I didn’t switch on the lamp before I sat down. It’s still light outside, but the sun has dropped behind Brian’s roof across the street.
    “No, I don’t know,” I say, and I’m encouraged by my voice, which sounds unaccountably solid. “They’re still getting used to everything. They’ll probably come in the spring, after the bad weather.”
    They moved to Florida just six months ago. At the same dinner where I told them I was expecting their first grandbaby, they made their own announcement: “We’re moving to Tampa!” Which felt, at first, infuriating, and then fortuitous. On the subway home that night, I asked Leo if we could buy their house.
    “In Queens?” he said, like I’d just suggested we should move to Libya.
    “Yes, in Queens. Where I grew up. Where lots of nice, normal, nonelitist people grew up,” I said, in my most elitist voice.
    “No, I know—Glendale is great,” Leo said.
    “There’s so much green space in Queens,” I said. “I miss that, living in Manhattan. All the trees and grass and sky.”
    “But there are dead people under that grass,” he said. It’s true that Queens has a lot of graveyards. That’s always sort of creeped Leo out. “And isn’t it kind of far?”
    “From what?”
    “You know, from Manhattan, from work. From stuff.”
    But Leo was already defeated. I was barely nine weeks pregnant then, but I’d already acquired the habit of placing my hand suggestively across my belly in an argument, to illustrate the righteousness of my position. And my position was this: I wanted out of Manhattan. I hadn’t even known until that very moment, but it was true. I wanted out of our tiny, sterile, teacup apartment. I was tired of paying $3,500 a month for eight hundred (beautiful) square feet in a glass box that we didn’t even own. We’d been talking about buying a place anyway, and now I wanted a house that had windows you could
open
in the springtime, with screens that would collect buckets of pollen and dead insects. I wanted neighbors who could annoy me horizontally instead of vertically. I wanted a weed-whacker and a garden hose.
    “I want an education for our kid that’s somewhere in between
Gossip Girl
and
Gangland
,” I told Leo, while our train rumbled north through Midtown. To his credit, he didn’t roll his eyes at me, but he did say, “I think you’re being
slightly
dramatic.”
    I didn’t care. Pregnant people are entitled to be dramatic. The suburban city was singing to my new-sprung maternal ferocity, and in the end, Leo couldn’t escape. We bought the house—my childhood house—from my parents, and now here we are, in Glendale. Or here I am, at least. And here’s Brian, standing gracefully in my new kitchen.
    “Ask your mom to bring some of her famous brownies when she comes to visit,” he says. “Are you allowed to bring brownies on airplanes now?”
    “I’ll ask her.”
    “You need anything else before I get outta here?” he asks, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets.
    Get outta here? I begin to panic. I hadn’t thought