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Orient Point

by Emma Straub

It was August, and the car’s air-conditioning was broken. That was part of the problem. John believed in waiting to see if appliances fixed themselves, if some benign magic from the greater universe would intervene. And so there we were, John in front and me in the back with the baby, all the windows down, sweat making the backs of our thighs stick to the seats. It would take three hours to get to his parents’ house on the very tip of the North Fork of Long Island, and the open windows only helped when we were moving quickly, which wasn’t often the case. John kept looking at us in the rearview mirror—no, not at us, at Eve.

“Is she OK?” he asked. Eve was too small to face forward, and so he could only see the car seat itself in the rearview mirror.

She was damp with sweat, just like us, her tiny brown wisps of hair plastered to her forehead like a doll’s molded plastic coif.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Just hot.”

On cue, the baby whimpered. Eve was almost a year old and had mastered a few consistent words, all of which sounded like a drunk talking in his sleep.

“Sounds like she’s hungry,” John said. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Is she hungry?”

“She’s fine,” I said. Even thinking about breast-feeding made my body spring into action. I could feel the internal valves open. She would eat soon enough, whether she was hungry or not. John had made sure of it. Otherwise, we’d arrive at his parents’ house, John and Eve slick with sweat, me with sweat and tacky milk.

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