a bullfighter who had done it all a thousand times.
Then Amy caught a whiff of her charming offspring. She was amazed that Ty had him in the crook of his arm, nestled against his chest, that Jamey wasn’t being held at arm’s length like a bomb about to go off.
“I don’t expect you to deal with that,” she said.
“Oh, really?” He raised that dark slash of a brow at her. “Who do you expect to deal with it?”
That silenced her. Who did she expect to deal with it? Her hand felt as if it was on fire. It actually hurt so bad that she felt nauseous. She was not sure she could do a one-handed diaper change, even if she could fight through the haze of physical pain. And then there was the question of infection.
Ty set Jamey down on the baby blanket, still spread out on the kitchen floor. “Where’s his stuff? You’ll have to give me step-by-step instructions.”
She directed Ty to the diaper bag, watched him set it down on the floor and get down on his knees between the baby and the bag.
“Prepare yourself,” she said. “This is not going to be pretty.”
Ty leveled a look at her. “Lady, I’ve been up to my knees in all kinds of crap since I was old enough to walk. I’ve watched animals being born, and I’ve watched them die. And I’ve seen plenty of stuff in between that wasn’t anything close to pretty. So if you think there’s anything about what’s about to happen that would faze me, you’re about as wrong as you can get.”
“I’m just saying men aren’t good at this.”
“Look, there are things a man wants to be good at.”
Did his eyes actually linger on her lips as he said that before he turned his attention to the diaper bag?
“In my world,” he informed her, digging through the bag, “a man wants to be good at throwing a rope. He wants to be good at riding anything that has four legs. He wants to be good at turning a green colt into a reliable cow horse.”
His words were drawing rather enticing pictures in her mind.
“He wants to be good at starting a fire with no matches and wet wood. He wants to be good with his fists if he’s backed into a corner and there is no other way out. He wants to be good at tying a fly that will call a trout out of a brook.”
“This—” he gestured at her son, lying down, legs flaying the air and releasing clouds of odor “—is not something any man aspires to be good at. The question is, can he get the job done?”
“I may have stated it wrong. I simply meant it’s not something men do well.”
“Are you going to be grading me on this?”
Suddenly, Amy needed to share it, as if it was a secret burden she had carried alone for too long. She suddenly needed another person’s perspective.
“My late husband, Edwin, changed Jamey’s diaper twice. Twice. Both times it was a production. Clothes peg on the nose, gagging, brown blotches on the walls, the floor, the baby and his Hugo Boss shirt. The diaper was finally on inside out and backward to the declaration of ‘good enough.’”
Edwin’s efforts, she remembered, had always been good enough. Hers, not so much. She had asked him to do less and less. Amy had hoped for something else. In her marriage. And especially with the baby. Shared trials. Magical moments. Much laughter.
The pain of the remembered disappointment felt nearly as bad as the pain in her hand.
Ty glanced at her sharply, as if he was seeing something she had not intended for him to see.
“Twice?” he said. “And the baby was three months old when he died?”
She nodded.
“And he managed to be put out both times?”
She nodded again. “But he was a CEO of a corporation,” she said. “Strictly white collar.”
“I got that at the Hugo Boss part,” he said drily. “And you know what? His perception of his own importance is a damn poor excuse.”
She had wanted this perspective. Needed desperately to know it wasn’t her, expecting too much, being unreasonably demanding.
But now that she had it, she felt a guilty need to defend her husband.
“He was a busy, important man. I’m afraid he had better things to do than change a diaper.”
She remembered asking Edwin to do it. Insisting. Getting that look. All she had wanted was for him to empathize with her life. She had wanted him to be more hands-on with the baby. She had wanted him to appreciate what she did every day. Maybe she wasn’t even sure what she had wanted.
But whatever it was, Edwin’s annoyed look down at his shirt, and his Are you happy now? had not been it.
Ty rocked back on his heels and looked at her hard. She felt as if every lonely night she had spent in her marriage was visible for him to see.
“You know what?” he said, his voice a growl of pure disgust, “I’m beginning to really dislike Edwin.”
Her sense of guilt deepened. Why had she brought this up? “He was not a bad person because he didn’t like changing diapers,” she said. “That would make a huge percentage of the world’s population bad people.”
“It’s not about the diapers,” he said quietly. “It’s about what you said earlier, too. As if you having an accident and burning your hand made you stupid. It’s about him making you feel like you were less than him.”
She was stunned by that. Her relationship with Edwin had never been defined quite so succinctly.
She had been so alone with her feeling of deficiency, questioning herself.
“He’s dead,” she reminded Ty primly, the only defense left that she could think of.
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t automatically elevate him to sainthood.”
She thought of the shrine being built in his parents’ living room. In conversation, the new and improved version of Edwin was what her in-laws insisted on remembering and immortalizing.
And her guilt intensified at how relieved she was that someone—anyone—could see something else.
She changed the subject abruptly, feeling as if she was going to throw herself at him all over again. It was just wrong to be feeling this much kinship over a diaper change, of all things.
He rummaged through the bag, held up a diaper for her inspection. At her nod, he said, “Check.”
He laid out her whole checklist of items in a neat line on the blanket: baby wipes, petroleum jelly, baby powder and the diaper.
“Isn’t that how soldiers take apart weapons?” she asked.
“Precisely,” he said, pleased by the analogy.
“Okay.
