Frankenstein

now sported a serpent with bared fangs winding around her left arm or had started tossing off the F word with aplomb.
    “Are you making a pie, Mrs. D?” Carson asked when she entered the kitchen and saw Mary Margaret using the paring knife.
    “No, dear. Who would want mere pie when they could have apple dumplings? Did you get your man?”
    “I shot him in the foot,” Carson said.
    “Good for you, dear. Assuming the miscreant deserved it.”
    “He had a gun to Carson’s head,” Michael said.
    “Then
you
as well should have shot him in the foot, boyo.”
    “She also vomited on him,” Michael said.
    “You vomited, too,” Carson reminded him.
    “But just into the bay. Not on the perp. I’d never vomit on the perp.”
    A movable playpen stood in a corner of the kitchen, the wheels locked. In a pink pullover, a disposable diaper, and pink booties, Scout sat in the center of the pen, chewing on the baby-safe nose of a pediatrician-approved teddy bear.
    Starting two weeks previously, Scout had been able to sit up on her own. But the feat still dazzled Carson, and she was no less proud of her daughter than she’d been the first time this happened.
    As Carson and Michael bent close to beam at her, Scout turned the bear upside down and said, “Ah goo, ah goo,” to its butt.
    With alarm, Michael said, “Mary Margaret, what’s that in her mouth, there’s something in her mouth, what is it?”
    “Relax, lad. It’s a tooth.”
    “A
tooth?
Where did she get a tooth?”
    “It came through in the night. She never cried. I found it when I prepared her bottle this morning.”
    “She never cries,” Carson said, lifting her smiling baby from the playpen. “She’s one tough little cookie.”
    “A tooth,” Michael marveled. “Who would ever have thought she’d have a tooth?”
    Scout said, “Ga-ga-ga-ga, ba-ba-ba-ba.”
    “Chains of vowels and consonants! She’s babbling. My God, she’s babbling!”
    “She is,” Carson said. “She really is. Mary Margaret, did you hear that?”
    Clutching the teddy bear by the crotch, Scout said, “Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga, wa-wa-wa-wa-ga-ga.”
    “Chains of vowels and consonants,” Michael repeated with wonder just short of awe. “Babbling. Scout’s babbling.”
    “Not just Scout,” said Mary Margaret.
    “She hasn’t even finished her seventh month,” Carson said. “Mary Margaret, isn’t it amazing, to babble this early?”
    “Not considering her parentage,” said the nanny as she continued to peel apples. “Indeed, herself might be a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, the blessed angel, but let’s not just yet declare her a prodigy.”
    “Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga,” Michael said, encouraging his daughter to repeat her stunning performance.
    “Poor Duke,” said Mary Margaret, “you’ve been displaced,” and she dropped a slice of apple that the dog snatched from the air.
    “Let me hold her,” Michael said.
    Hesitant to hand over the precious bundle, Carson said, “Well … okay. But don’t drop her on her head.”
    “Why would I drop her on her head?”
    “I’m not saying you’d do it on purpose.”
    “Look at that tooth,” Michael said. “A baby crocodile would be proud of that tooth.”
    Mary Margaret said, “And what was all the vomiting about?”
    Carson and Michael glanced at each other, but neither of them replied.
    As the widow of a cop, Mary Margaret had no patience for those who evaded questions. “Am I talking to myself then, hallucinating your presence? See here, you couldn’t have worked homicide with a weak stomach.”
    “It wasn’t a weak-stomach thing,” Michael said, dandling Scout. “It was a fear thing.”
    “You were hard-charging policemen for years,” Mary Margaret said. “Or so I’ve been led to believe. You mean to say you never had a gun held to your head before?”
    “Of course we did,” Michael said. “Thousands of times.”
    “Tens of thousands,” said Carson. “But never while on a boat. Maybe it was the combination of the gun to the head and the movement of the boat.”
    “Ka-ka, ka-ka, ka-ka,” said Scout.
    Turning from the sink, facing them forthrightly, apple in one fist, paring knife in the other, fists on her hips, Mary Margaret appeared as stern as the mother of a priest, a Marine, and two nuns might be expected to look when she knew someone was shining her on.
    “However I may appear to you,” she said, “I’m in fact not even a wee bit stupid. You were vomiting all over