The Real Macaw: A Meg Langslow Mystery

realize how important breast milk is for babies’ health! You should—”
    “I completely understand the importance of breast milk,” I said. “That’s why I pump as much of it as I can, divide it in half so each boy gets his fair share, and top it off with enough formula to fill them up, since by now they’re each drinking slightly more in a day than I can produce.”
    “Well, that’s all right then.” The woman pulled back slightly. Had I snapped at her? My tone had sounded perfectly civil to me, but I was running on even less sleep than usual, so I wasn’t necessarily a good judge of the finer points of human interaction.
    “Sorry if I snapped,” I said. “My dad’s a doctor, you know, so I get rather a lot of free medical advice from him.”
    “I’m sure,” she said.
    “He and my cousin Rose Noire are in complete support of what I’m doing,” I said. Although Dad and Mother were only part-time residents of Caerphilly, he commanded a certain amount of respect in the county. So did Rose Noire, though in somewhat different circles—but if any of these women shared my cousin’s interests in alternative medicine, organic nutrition, and holistic child-rearing, they’d probably feel reassured.
    “Oh, well that’s great, then,” the mother said. She was edging farther away from me.
    Had I made things better or worse? I couldn’t tell. Either way, if I’d made her wary of publicly reproaching bottle-feeding mothers, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Not everyone had a choice about how to feed their babies. What if I was one of those mothers who couldn’t produce milk at all, or whose babies couldn’t easily feed? Or an adoptive mother? Couldn’t she imagine how someone in one of those situations would feel? Her words stung me a little, even though my only problem was that my kids outnumbered me and had healthy appetites.
    And why did I feel so compelled to defend myself to these women I hardly knew? When had motherhood become so damned competitive?
    At my side, Francine was shaking her head and chuckling slightly.
    “Honestly,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “Some people.”
    I felt reassured. I settled Jamie in a comfortable position and checked on the game. The Red Sox were at bat now. Timmy and his teammates were having a competition to see who could pull his batting helmet down the farthest over his eyes.
    “How many innings do these games run?” I asked.
    “Only three,” Francine said. “Feels like nine, though.”
    “That’s because it takes about as long as nine in the majors.” I sighed and tried to find a more comfortable position on the unpadded metal bench. I was probably in for a lot of hours on these bleachers. Both Michael and my father adored baseball, so if either or both of the boys showed the slightest shred of athletic ability, they’d undoubtedly be playing T-Ball in another five years.
    So I’d get a head start planning how I was going to cope. For example, figuring out how to volunteer for a cushy job before getting assigned an impossible one. I didn’t want to be bench coach, for example. It was like playing a game of whack-a-mole with live preschoolers. Not an assignment I should take on.
    But the mother who was sitting beside a grocery bag of snacks and a cooler full of cold treats, guarding them lest the team begin pigging out prematurely—now that was the job to have. Snack Mom.
    Or perhaps even better, the job of the woman who came up and exchanged a few words with the snack mom before scribbling a few things on the paper on her clipboard. Snack Coordinator.
    “I hope she brought something my monster will eat,” one mother muttered behind us.
    “I think it’s more important that the snack be healthy,” another mother announced.
    As I listened to the ensuing debate over the relative merits of organic trail mix and Cheetos, I decided that any job connected to the snacks was too controversial.
    Base coach. You stood out in the field, you made sure the runner ran when the ball was hit, and in the right direction, and you tried to keep the baseman awake and pointed toward the game. And you stood far away from the bleachers and their gossiping occupants. My kind of job.
    A job Terence Mann seemed to have given up on. He and the mayor had retreated to a more private place near the edge of the woods that surrounded the athletic field and were still having a visibly heated conversation. Mann seemed to be getting the worst of it—most people did