Free How to Party With an Infant by Kaui Hart Hemmings Page B

daughter’s mouth to her breast, which still has fuel in it. She kisses her baby on the top of her head while Zoë pulls at her nipple.
    “So something happened the other day?” Georgia says. “I thought you could make a recipe out of it.”
    “Great,” Mele says. “Ready when you are.” She has no idea what Georgia inspires or what a woman like her needs. She’s never negative. She never gossips or says bad things about people, which is a barrier to them truly becoming good friends. Maybe pound cake? Basic and pure. Mele smiles, feeling guilty. Georgia is nice, and Mele needs to start valuing niceness even though it bores her so.
    Georgia begins some story about dropping off her older son at Leroy’s house in San Bruno. She talks about what time it was, what street they were on, all this pointlessness. The story’s accents are clearly in all the wrong places, but Mele watches her daughter on the purple slides while patiently wading through the junk, thinking of stews and other sludge-like recipes, and is startled when Georgia leads her to this: “And then I had to pick him up in jail all the way down in San Jose.”
    “Jail!” Mele says . Bread and water. Bruschetta!
    Zoë begins to cry, and Georgia tucks her into a sling. She stands, bounces, and begins to hum. When Zoë settles, Georgia sits back down and Mele looks away and listens.

GEORGIA’S WAR BABY
    T hey are almost to their destination. Georgia tries to find a song on the radio that matches her mood, which is nearing elation. She and her two children have made it from point A to point B without traffic, tantrums, or barf. She finds a tune, but it’s fading out. The DJ comes on and makes a joke about teenage sexting and then gang initiations, which Georgia doesn’t find amusing at all. In the past few months men have been clubbing unsuspecting women with pillowcases filled with jars of artichoke hearts. The media always says “unsuspecting,” as if any woman out there would suspect she’d get clubbed with marinated vegetables. It is truly bizarre, and a most undignified way to go to a hospital or a grave.
    She hopes to God Chris isn’t involved in a gang, but that seems too ambitious for him. Even sexting would require too much energy for a seventeen-year-old boy whose only passion seems to be sitting on the couch, watching Wheel of Fortune, and yelling things at the contestants like “Can I get a ‘Who fuckin’ cares?’ ”
    “Chris trash can?” Gabe asks. Georgia takes a quick glance back at him and his sister. His car seat straps seem a little loose.
    “No,” Georgia says. “He’s ata police station. Police keep people safe. They’re keeping Chris safe.”
    “Tickle me homo?”
    “No. Not that.”
    “Okay!” he sings. “Okay!”
    She should try to find out what he means by tickle me homo but doesn’t want to intimidate him or do anything that would restrict his imagination or keep him from talking. He’s two and nine months and hardly says anything that makes sense.
    “We’re almost there!” Georgia says. “Can you believe it? Are you doing okay back there, Zoë?”
    She turns onto a wide road lined with trees. The sky is slowly darkening. Men and women are walking out of what seems to be a courthouse. They’re all looking at their phones, every single one of them—they’re doing something important. When Chris was a baby everyone who walked out of workplaces would light up a cigarette, now it’s phones. She can’t imagine her husband, Eric, walking out of a building, holding a briefcase, wearing a suit. God, she would love that. She’d take a picture. Annie complains that her husband is always working, but how Georgia longs for that. She’s thankful he’s not here, even if he’s at the Kabuki film festival, from which he will come home angry and jealous of all the other filmmakers who use “conformist plots” and “unadventurous structures.”
    She will keep this a secret from him, not so much because it