Free The Mothers of Voorhisville by Mary Rickert

unbuttoning her shirt.
    â€œCan you hear me ?” Theresa asks.
    â€œI don’t know what he’s doing in the cornfield. It’s Dad , all right?” She pokes her nipple into the baby’s mouth.
    Theresa walks out of her daughter’s room, trying to stay calm, though she feels like screaming. She hears the baby crying and turns back, but Elli, who gives her a look as though she knew her mother had plotted this surprise return just to look at Elli’s bare breasts, is nursing him. It takes a few seconds before Theresa realizes the crying is coming from her own baby. Suddenly life has gotten so strange: her daughter nursing a baby whose father she won’t name; her husband out in the cornfield in the middle of the night; her own baby, whose lineage is uncertain, crying again, though it seems like only minutes since she fed him.
    *   *   *
    Voorhisville in June: those long hot nights of weeping and wailing, diaper changing and feeding, those long days of exhaustion and weeping, wailing, diapering, and feeding.
    Sylvia’s roses grow limp from lack of care and—just as some dying people glow near the end—emit the sweetest odor. The scent is too sweet, and it’s too strong. Everywhere the mothers go, it’s like following in the footsteps of a woman with too much perfume on.
    Emily continues baking, though she burns things now, the scorched scent mingling with the heavy perfume of roses and jasmine incense, which Shreve sets on a windowsill of the yoga studio.
    â€œI have to do something ,” she says, when the mailman comments on it. “Have you noticed how smelly it is in Voorhisville lately?”
    The mailman has noticed that all the mothers, women who had seemed perfectly reasonable just last year, are suddenly strange. He’s just a mailman; it isn’t really for him to say. But if he were to say, he’d say, Something strange is happening to the mothers of Voorhisville.
    Maddy Melvern doesn’t know any different; she thinks it’s always been this way. She stares at her son, lying on a blanket under a tree in the park. She looks away for one second to watch the mailman walk past—not that there’s anything interesting about him, because there isn’t, but that just shows how bored she is—and when she turns back to JoJo, he’s hovering over the blanket, six inches off the ground; flying. She holds him against her chest, frantic to see if anyone’s noticed, but the park is filled with mothers holding infants, or bent over strollers, tightening straps. Everyone is too distracted to notice Maddy and her flying baby. “Holy shit, JoJo,” she whispers, “you have to be careful with this stuff.” Maddy isn’t sure what would happen if anyone were to find out about JoJo’s wings, but she’s fairly certain it wouldn’t be good. Even pressed against her chest as he is, she can feel them pulsing. She eases him away from her shoulders to get a view of his face.
    He’s laughing.
    He has three dimples and a deep belly laugh. Maddy laughs with him; until suddenly she presses him tight against her heart. “Oh my God, JoJo,” she says. “I love you.”
    Tamara Singh has just secured little Ravi in the stroller—not wanting to hurt him, of course, but making sure the straps are tight enough to keep him from flying—when she sees Maddy Melvern laughing with her baby. It just goes to show , Tamara thinks, that you never can tell . Who would have guessed that the teenage unwed mother, the girl who’d done everything wrong, could be so happy, while Tamara, who’d done only one single wrong thing (the illicit sex thing), would be so miserable?
    What is love? Tamara thinks as she stares at little Ravi, crying again, hungry for more. She parks the stroller by a bench and unbuttons her blouse. Well, this is love, she thinks—sitting there in the park, filling his