She didn’t even realize she was expecting someone to whisk him away—the dead mother, risen from her grave, or even the cowboy who brought him—until she decided to trim the baby’s fingernails, bendy but so sharp they’d scratched his cheeks. She put her curved scissors to his inch-long finger and had to make herself squeeze. Holding her breath. One, two, three, four nails done, then his pinkie twitched and she pinched it and a tiny smile of blood appeared and immediately she glanced at the door. But no one came to take him, leave her orphaned. The child was squalling so she picked him up and sucked his little finger and shushed him, holding him against her shoulder and patting him as she executed her loose-legged bouncy walk, the one that had worked on Jacob. The bouncy walk came right back. The baby calmed. Later, to trim the rest of his nails, she put his fingers one by one in her mouth and nibbled them smooth. And so she grew to know him through her mouth.
