“I’m sure.”
“Did you see the doctor?” A stream of perspiration was making its way down the side of his cheek, directly in front of his ear.
“Abe!” she scolded. “Of course I did!”
Abe sat down on the couch. He put his head down and tried to breathe.
“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you happy?”
His head was still down. “I’m happy, I’m happy,” he muttered. “It’s good.”
“Then why do you look like you’re having a heart attack?”
Slowly, he lifted his head and looked at her. “I’m just surprised, is all. It’s a big shock. It’s enough to give anybody a heart attack if you want to know the truth.”
Helen sat down next to him and took his hand. “I’m not an old woman yet. It can’t be that much of a shock. What’s the matter?”
“Mmm.” His eyes were closed and he was dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief.
“Stop it!” Helen shook him by the arm. Then she stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Are you happy or not?”
Abe stood up too, a little shaky at first, and managed a smile. “Sweetheart, of course I’m happy. We’ll have a beautiful baby.” Helen popped a kiss on his cheek and promptly pushed him back down. “Sit. I’m going to get you a glass of water. You look green. I can’t raise five children alone, you know. I don’t want you to have a real heart attack.”
Abe closed his eyes again and tried to relax. He should have seen it coming. The way she was looking at her cousin’s baby a few months ago—like a kid drooling over a lollipop! That look in her eye, the frantic way she pulled him into bed. He should have known. And here was the result: just when they were able to enjoy themselves a little and get a couple nights of sleep, they were heading back to diapers and midnight feedings.
Abe knew his initial misgivings would fade. He’d get used to the idea and get excited about it, just like all the other times. In fact, he told himself, he might as well get excited about it soon, because Helen wasn’t going to tolerate any other kind of reaction from him.
“Drink this. I let the water run so it’s cold. Here.” She handed him the glass just as he was getting up.
“Where are you going? I thought you felt sick?”
“I’m okay. I’m going to head to the park and hit a few balls with the boys, grab them all and bring them home for dinner in an hour. How’s that?”
“Fine. But come home if you don’t feel well. And tell them not to pound on the stairs when they come home—it sounds like a pack of animals stampeding!”
“Sure.” He paused. “How do you feel?”
“Good. Tired. Fat.” She let Abe take her in his arms. “A new baby will be good for us,” she told him. “I read in a magazine that having babies keeps women young.”
Abe was skeptical. “Yeah? What did it say about men? Because all this is making me old.”
She pulled away and shook her fist at him in mock frustration. “Go to the park already! Go to your pack of animals!”
Abe blew her a kiss and shut the door behind him. He felt like he could breathe again. He wondered if he should tell the boys the news at the park. No, better to do it with Helen at dinner. He’d wait.
Chapter 6
MORT
Mort’s sandwich sat on top of a brown paper bag on his desk, uneaten. He wasn’t happy. Something was off with the collections for last month, and he was going through the orders one by one until the numbers made sense to him. He had been at it for several hours already, and he was getting frustrated. Why am I the only one who pays attention to this? He knew Abe took care of sales and handled the guys in the warehouse. But as far as Mort was concerned, none of that was business. That was just hand-holding and schmoozing. The only thing that really mattered was the numbers. If the numbers didn’t make sense, the business didn’t make sense.
Mort sharpened his pencil and took down a different book from the shelf on his wall. Mort and Abe had adjacent offices in the back left corner of their building. They were windowless, sparsely furnished and identical in size and shape. But that was where the similarities ended.
For one thing, Mort’s office door was kept closed at all times. His desk, bare except for a single black-and-white photo of Rose on their wedding day, was pushed against the far wall. When Mort sat down, he faced the wall with his back to the door. This position suited him best and provided the least amount of distraction.
In contrast, Abe’s office was a hodgepodge of clutter and inefficiency. Mort couldn’t understand how Abe got any work done there, with his desk smack in the center of the room, facing an open door all day long. Abe’s desk was so littered with photos of Helen and the boys that there was barely room for the phone. Plus, Abe never threw anything away, so every card he had ever received was either on the desk, taped to the wall or in a pile on the floor in the corner. Mort considered the ever-growing pile a fire hazard.
He was going over the numbers again when someone knocked. Abe poked his head in the doorway, still chewing the remains of his lunch.
“Mort—we’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning. Bob Sherman set it up for us.” Bob Sherman, a name Mort hadn’t heard in years, was their father’s old friend. “Bob met somebody in Philly, guy making breakfast cereal.” Mort was still absorbed in the pages of his ledger.
“Mmm,” he muttered. He had just found the error he had been looking for all morning. He wasn’t surprised: Abe had given one of the buyers a discount and had forgotten to record it.
“This is a big meeting. Could you maybe look at me for a minute?”
Mort forced himself to look at Abe. “What’s so important about this guy?”
“What’s so important is that he’s the king of breakfast cereal. Cornflakes, wheat puffs, all that stuff.”
“Cereal tastes like sawdust.”
“You don’t have to eat it, for Chrissake! This guy wants us to package it.”
“Hmm?” Mort had already lost interest in the conversation, his eyes naturally drifting back down to the comfort of the numbers on his desk.
“In cardboard boxes, Mort! Millions of boxes! And the guy needs a new supplier.”
Mort was unimpressed. “We don’t make boxes for that.”
“We can make anything! We make shirt boxes for the laundries now. Why not cereal boxes?”
“I suppose.”
“You suppose? Mort, do you have any idea how big this could be? How much business we could get from this guy?”
Reluctantly, Mort put down his pencil. He was used to Abe’s enthusiasm, the way he wound himself up over every new client and every new deal. But Mort could never connect with it. He was immune. It had been the same when they were boys. Being the older brother, and the one with more playmates, Abe was always the first to catch any childhood illnesses. Their mother’s policy was that if Abe caught something, Mort should be exposed as quickly as possible in order to get the whole thing over with. She had learned this strategy from her own mother, who swore by it. Somehow it never seemed to work with Abe and Mort. When Abe got the chicken pox, their mother forced Mort to sleep in the same bed with Abe. But Mort never got the chicken pox, and he was still resistant to Abe’s optimism.
“Listen, I know you don’t like meetings, but we both need to meet this guy. He deals with big-time suppliers. What if he asks how many boxes we can get to him every week or how much the monthly shipping is gonna be on this?” Abe’s speech was coming faster as he reeled off the issues.
“You don’t need me for that. You give buyers quotes for those things all the time.”
“Yeah, but not with this kind of volume. These are gonna be big, big numbers.” Abe was pacing fretfully around Mort’s small office now, pointing at the ledger books and the adding machine to make his point.
“So? Bigger numbers just have more zeroes. They’re still just numbers. Don’t worry so much.”