Cool Water by Dianne Warren Page B

said.
    â€œLester,” Astrid said, “what in the world are you talking about?”
    He rolled away then (Astrid described the sound of the bed creaking over the racket outside) and the talking stopped.
    She decided she might as well go downstairs and make herself a cup of tea. She wasn’t sure where her terry-cloth robe was in the dark, so she went as she was, with the afghan around her shoulders. It wasn’t cold—it was summer after all—but the wind made her think it should be cold.
    She went to the kitchen and turned on a light. The first thing her eye landed on was Lester’s mother’s silver tea service in the oak cabinet across the room. It had come from Norway, so the story went, and Astrid could see that it needed a good polish. Well, she had nothing better to do at three in the morning. She plugged in the kettle and then got the tea service and placed it on the kitchen table. She was about to get the silver polish from under the sink when she heard the tomcat yowl again, making an ungodly sound like that of a baby in distress (sometimes she would throw in another wink here). It sounded as though the cat was in the porch off the kitchen. How in the world could he have got in there? she wondered, imagining the mess, a tomcat spraying everywhere.
    â€œGit you,” she said, opening the door to the porch and flipping the light on, a glass of water in her hand for encouragement should he refuse to go. But it wasn’t the cat that was yowling. It was a baby (a lovely baby, she sometimes added—Lee liked the sound of that, and when he was playing alone with the new kittens in the barn he would repeat it to himself: a lovely baby ), not a newborn, but not very old either, in a red plastic laundry basket. He’d been wrapped in a blanket but had kicked that off and was now wearing nothing but a diaper and a blue knit hat. A baby bottle and a half-dozen disposable diapers were tucked into the basket with him. The baby stopped crying and scrunched his eyes shut against the light.
    Astrid stared. She didn’t know what to do. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “Git you. I didn’t mean it. I thought you were a cat.”
    She came to her senses and set down the water glass and picked up the baby. She felt his hands and feet, expecting them to be cold, but they weren’t.
    Her first instinct was to call Lester, but then she thought, What good will he be? And she wasn’t calling the RCMP, not yet anyway. She and Lester were far enough off the highway that no stranger was going to pick their farmyard at random, in the dark, as a good place to abandon a baby.
    She sat down at the kitchen table with the baby, who now seemed content, and tried to come up with a logical explanation. He had been left sometime after Astrid and Lester went to bed. The yardlight switch was in the porch and there certainly had been no baby there when she’d turned the light off, as she always did, before they retired for the night. A calamity, perhaps. Someone from down the road had left the baby while she, the mother, dealt with whatever had come up. But that was ridiculous. Astrid and Lester never locked their doors. Someone desperate for help could have walked into the house and right into their bedroom if need be.
    The kettle was boiling. Astrid moved the tea service from the table to the counter, and then she spread her afghan on the table and laid the baby down. She made tea in the silver pot, she wasn’t sure why, perhaps just because it was handy. ( Or perhaps because we had special company , she said to Lee in one telling of the story, and from then on Lee would say if she forgot, “Because you had special company, right?”) She wondered if the baby was hungry, and retrieved the bottle and the pile of diapers from the porch. Although she’d never had a child of her own, she knew about caring for babies, having done quite a bit of that over the years for