It was ten o’clock in the evening, so the Scotch was all right. Who would deny a man a Scotch at that time of night?

From the Yellow Pages, Carl was gathering ideas. He needed another job, what with the second kid coming. His wife was pretty close to bringing the new one into the picture; Jean was swollen seven months, and, like the other child they had built together, this one would suck its first breath in the air of their house.

They thought this way of doing the birth was best. Jean was a nurse, and had discovered a lot of obstetricians stuck to their personal notions about how everybody should act when it came down to labor and birth. So Jean and Carl did it at home, made babies and had them there, too. This was an act of bravery; it was really her bravery, of course. Her courage was established out of the same stuff that makes those fish thrash their way up from the ocean to the certain stream that is their spot for taking care of life and death. Nothing stops them, I’ve seen it, and while these fish are fighting their way uphill a sheen simmers above the water, highlighting their act of faith. It’s the same halo men see as the glow on their pregnant wives. The extra bravery seeps out of them.

I was talking about the Yellow Pages, and the ideas in there. Carl thought about what he knew how to do, which was plenty, and he compared that with the advertisements for all the services offered in the book.

One thing was, he knew how to drive. He’d been getting paid pretty well for wrestling blue buses through memorized routes. It was a job for the moment, until something better reared its head, and he thought since he had the special license, he might as well put it to use. He took a drink from the glass, and pinched a half-inch or so of the pages together to fast-forward to the L’s. He had been in the E’s, and nothing there had anything to do with driving anyway.

Under the book hid a piece of a bread crust, about the size of a fruit fly, say. The weight of the extra pages moving over to the crumb’s side of the book’s spine was just enough to dust it into powder. The sound it made was too weak to be heard by anyone. The bread that spawned the crumb had enjoyed its gestation within the clean white belly of one of those automatic bread-making machines. Sure, there is something less of the human touch there. The kneading is done with the sweat of whatever makes electricity, and not with the sweat of Jean, or even Carl. But still, fresh bread. The house billowed with the smell of it most mornings.