Chapter 16: Night Shift

"How did you know?" I said.

"The NICU fed them at eleven, two and five." He held out the bottles. "I couldn't sleep anyway. I sat in the bait shop and watched the clock."

Charlie stopped screaming long enough to look at the towel.

"You mixed these?"

"I watched the nurses for six weeks. I measured them twice." He hesitated. "Three times."

I took Gus's bottle and stuck it in Gus's mouth.

The silence was so sudden that Libby woke up on the nursery floor and yelled, "What happened?"

Leo stood on the step.

He didn't come in.

He was waiting for me to say it.

"Get in here," I said. "Take Charlie."

He took Charlie.

By two-thirty all three were fed and burped and asleep.

Leo was asleep too, sitting up on my couch, with June on his chest and his mouth open.

I put a blanket over both of them and went to bed.

After that, we split the nights.

I took eleven.

He took two.

We both took five, because five was when everybody was awake whether they liked it or not.

He moved a toothbrush into my downstairs bathroom.

He didn't move anything else.

He slept on the couch and went back to the bait shop every afternoon to shower and nap and pretend he had somewhere to be.

We were both so tired we got stupid.

One morning I found him trying to put a diaper on Gus's head.

"It was dark," he said.

"It's eight in the morning."

"It felt dark."

One night I fell asleep standing at the counter and woke up with my face in a bag of bread.

Leo had taken a picture.

He showed it to Libby.

Libby made it the background on the nursery's computer.

Libby came every evening after closing to give us an hour.

She called it the Hutchins Relief Shift.

She'd sit on the nursery floor with Charlie on her knees and tell him dirty jokes in a sweet voice.

"He doesn't understand them," I said.

"He's laughing."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Texted Me Divorce, So I Took 20 Million and Vanished from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.