Seeds of Plenty by Jennifer Juo Page B

of her mind.
    As she had hoped, news of the baby changed Winston in subtle ways.
    “You should get to bed. It’s late,” he said one night. “Need to make sure you get enough sleep. It’s important for our baby.”
    Our baby, she held onto his words. He sounded concerned, maybe even a little proud. She let herself feel a small sort of happiness. She wanted to give him this baby, our baby as he said. Their family seemed to be loose pieces in a bag, banging around, and she wanted wholeness. That night in bed, she reached out for his hand. He didn’t move away. He let her hold his hand until sleep loosened her grip.
    In the morning, when she woke up, he was already awake. Lila was crying in her crib. She nursed Lila and then dressed herself. She found Winston in the kitchen, stirring a pot of shefan rice porridge over the stove. It was Sunday, Patience’s one day off.
    “You sit,” he said.
    “I didn’t know you knew how to cook,” she said, surprised.
    “I don’t, not in the way you do. But I can prepare a few basic things. I cooked for my father and me sometimes. When it was just the two of us in Taiwan.”
    In another pot, it looked like he was boiling some eggs.
    She put Lila down in the plastic playpen in the adjacent living room. Then she went over to the cabinet, reaching up to get some large, Chinese porcelain bowls for the shefan .
    He came running over. “Let me do it. You shouldn’t strain yourself. It won’t be good for our baby.”
    She looked up at him appreciatively, warmed by his sudden attentiveness. She felt more optimistic about the future.
    They sat down to breakfast. Winston put two tea-leaf eggs on her plate—hard-boiled eggs with cracked shells steeped in soy sauce and tea leaves.
    “Thank you,” she said, putting her hand on top of his.
    They still ate in their usual silence. Winston was a man of few words, but this time, the silence didn’t bother her.
    Winston finally made arrangements to move Lila to her own room, and he asked Patience to sleep with her, so Sylvia wouldn’t worry about the snakes. It also meant if Lila woke up at night, Patience could attend to her needs, and Sylvia could sleep. She saw Ayo again at a clubhouse event and noticed he was with a young, blonde, Swedish translator, hired to translate the ADA reports into the five languages of the donor countries. It hurt to see him with this woman, but Sylvia was not entitled to feel jealous, he was not hers and never would be. He waved at her, but Sylvia turned away. She was pregnant now with her husband’s son, as she should be. She didn’t have time to entertain such thoughts anymore.
    ***
     
    When it was time to have the baby in the summer of 1975, Winston made arrangements for them to travel to America. They went to Minnesota where Sylvia’s brother, John, and his wife now lived. Winston wanted to make sure his baby was born in a proper hospital with the best doctors.
    Everything was different at this birth. Winston paced the ammonia-scented hallways of the hospital, waiting eagerly for the arrival of his child. Sylvia did not get to hold her son covered in amniotic fluid, fresh from the birth canal like she did with Lila. Instead, he was whisked off, scrubbed clean by nurses in rubber gloves and then left in a plastic crib in a nursery lined with rows of crib-trolleys, each identified by a typed label on the front with the mother’s name. Winston was the first to hold his baby boy dressed in the hospital-issue blue hat with Mt. Sinai written across it. When Sylvia finally saw her son, it was through the glass window of the nursery.
    At the hospital, she watched Winston hold his son. He was in awe of the miracle of it all. She knew that feeling. It was how she had felt when Lila was born. He simply stared into his son’s eyes, and the baby did the same, taking in this man who was his father.
    “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” Sylvia said, proud of the gift she had given her husband.
    Winston looked up at