"Christopher Moore - Dirty Job" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to
the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in.

“She’s not breathing,” Charlie said.

“She’s breathing fine,” Rachel said, patting the baby’s back. “Do you want to hold her?”

Charlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had handed her quickly to a
nurse insisting that someone more qualified than he do some finger and toe counting. He’d done it twice
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and kept coming up with twenty-one.

“They act like that’s all there is to it. Like if the kid has the minimum ten fingers and ten toes it’s all going
to be fine. What if there are extras? Huh? Extra-credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?” (Charlie was
sure he’d spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram. Umbilical indeed! He’d kept a hard copy.)

“She doesn’t have a tail, Mr. Asher,” the nurse explained. “And it’s ten and ten, we’ve all checked.
Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.”

“I’ll still love her, even with her extra finger.”

“She’s perfectly normal.”

“Or toe.”

“We really do know what we’re doing, Mr. Asher. She’s a beautiful, healthy baby girl.”

“Or a tail.”

The nurse sighed. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of a snake up her right calf that showed through
her white nurse stockings. She spent four hours of every workday massaging preemie babies, her hands
threaded through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive spark in there. She
talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no
bigger than a balled-up pair of sweat socks. She cried over every one, and believed that her tears and
touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies, which was just fine with her. She could spare it.
She had been a neonatal nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new
father.

“There’s no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!” She pulled down the blanket and aimed baby Sophie’s
bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta
Male had never seen.

Charlie jumped back—a lean and nimble thirty, he was—then, once he realized that the baby wasn’t
loaded, he straightened the lapels on his tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. “You could
have removed her tail in the delivery room and we’d never know.” He didn’t know. He’d been asked to
leave the delivery room, first by the ob-gyn and finally by Rachel. (“Him or me,” Rachel said. “One of us