Ann Patchett: Commonwealth

“What if she’d been a boy?” Cousins asked.

“I would have named him Francis,” Fix said, yet again making Cousins feel he had asked a stupid question.

“When the first one was a girl we named her after Kennedy’s daughter. I thought, that’s fine, I’ll wait, but now—” Fix stopped, looking down at his daughter. There had been a miscarriage between the two girls, fairly late. They were lucky to get this second one, that’s what the doctor had said, though there was no point in telling that to the deputy district attorney. “It works out this way.”

“It’s a good name,” Cousins said, but what he thought was, Lucky you didn’t wait .

“What about you?” Fix said. “You’ve got a little Albert at home?”

“My son’s name is Calvin. We call him Cal. And the girls, no. No Albertas.”

“But you’ve got one coming up.”

“In December,” he said. Cousins remembered how it was before Cal was born, how he and Teresa would lie in bed at night saying names to one another in the dark. One name would remind her of a kid who got picked on in grade school, a kid who wore stained shirts and bit his thumbs. Some other name would remind him of a boy he never liked, a bully, but when they got to Cal both of them were happy. It was something like that when they were thinking up names for Holly, too. Maybe they’d spent less time on it, maybe they didn’t talk about it in bed, her head up on his shoulder, his hand on her stomach, but they’d picked it out together. She wasn’t named for anybody, just for herself, because her parents thought it was a beautiful name. And Jeanette? He didn’t even remember talking about a name for Jeanette. He’d been late getting to the hospital just that one time and if memory served he’d gone into the room and Teresa said, This is Jeanette. She would have been Daphne if anyone had asked him about it. They should talk about what they were going to name this new one. It would give them something to talk about.

“Name this one Albert,” Fix said.

“If it’s a boy.”

“It’ll be a boy. You’re due.”

Cousins looked at Frances asleep in her father’s arms. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if they had another girl, but if it was a boy then maybe they would call him Albert. “You think?”

“Absolutely,” Fix said.

He never did talk about it with Teresa but he was there in the waiting room when the baby was born and he filled out the birth certificate — Albert John Cousins — after himself. Teresa had never much liked her husband’s name but when would there have been an opportunity to bring that up? As soon as they were home from the hospital she started calling the baby Albie, Al- bee . Cousins told her not to but he wasn’t ever around. What was he going to do, stop her? The other kids liked it. They called the baby Albie, too.

“So you’re telling me that you named Albie?” Franny said.

“I didn’t name Albie,” her father said, the two of them following the nurse down a long, bright hall. “If I’d named Albie I wouldn’t have given him such a stupid name. You could trace a lot of that kid’s problems back to his name.”

Franny thought of her stepbrother. “There was probably more to it than that.”

“Did you know I got him out of Juvenile once? Fourteen years old and he tried to set his school on fire.”

“I remember,” Franny said.

“Your mother called and asked me to get him out.” He tapped his chest. “She said it would be a favor to her, like I was so interested in doing her favors. When you think about all the cops Bert knew in L.A. you have to wonder why they were bothering me.”

“You helped Albie,” she said. “He was a kid and you helped him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“He didn’t even know how to set a decent fire. I drove him over to see your uncle Tom at the fire station once I got him out. Tom was back in L.A. then. I said to Bert’s kid, ‘You want to burn up a school full of children then these are the guys who can teach you how to do it.’ You know what he said to me?”

“I do,” Franny said, not pointing out that there had been no children in the school when Albie had set it on fire, and that he’d done a pretty good job. Say what you will for Albie, he knew how to set things on fire.

“He said he wasn’t interested anymore.” Fix stopped, which made Franny stop, and then the nurse stopped too to wait for them. “People don’t still call him that, do they?” Fix asked.

“Albie? I don’t know. That’s what I’ve always called him.”

“I’m trying not to listen to this,” Jenny said. The nurse’s name was Jenny. She was wearing a name tag but that didn’t matter, they knew her.

“You can listen to anything you want,” Fix said. “But we should be telling better stories.”

“How are you feeling today, Mr. Keating?” Jenny asked. Fix had come to the UCLA Medical Center for chemotherapy so the question wasn’t entirely social. If you didn’t feel well they sent you home and the entire process was pushed even further out into the unknowable future.

“Feeling fine,” he said, his arm hooked through Franny’s. “Feeling like light on the water.”

Jenny laughed and the three of them stopped in a large, open room off the hall where two women wearing head wraps sat with digital thermometers in their mouths. One of them gave the newcomers a tired nod while the other stared ahead. All around them the nurses came and went in their candy-colored scrubs. Fix sat down and Jenny gave him a thermometer and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. Franny took the empty chair next to her father.

“Just to get back to the original point for a minute, you and Bert talked about what he should name his son before Albie was born?” Franny had heard the story about the fire and the phone call that came after it a hundred times but somehow the one about Albie’s name had never come up before.

Fix took the thermometer out. “It wasn’t like we talked about it later.”

“Hey!” Jenny said, pointing, and Fix put the thermometer back in his mouth.

Franny shook her head. “It’s just hard to believe.”

Fix turned his eyes up to Jenny, who unwrapped the cuff. “What’s hard to believe?” she said for him.

“All of it.” Franny opened her hands. “You and Bert making drinks together, you and Bert speaking, you knowing Bert before Mom did.”

“Ninety-eight on the nose,” Jenny said, and ejected the plastic thermometer sleeve into the trash. Then she pulled a length of bright-pink tourniquet out of her pocket and tied it around Fix’s upper arm.

“Of course I knew Bert,” he said, as if he were being denied the credit he was due. “How do you think your mother met him?”

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t a question she’d ever thought to ask. There was no time in her memory before Bert. “I guess I thought Wallis introduced them. You hated Wallis so much.”

Jenny was kneading the inside of Fix’s elbow with her fingertips, searching for a vein that might still be open for business.

“I’ve known junkies who shot between their toes,” Fix said with something approaching nostalgia.

“One more reason you don’t want a junkie for a nurse.” She tapped another minute on the papery skin and then smiled, holding the vein in place with one finger. “Okay, mister, here we go. A little stick.”

Fix didn’t flinch. Somehow she had managed to slip the needle straight in. “Oh, Jenny,” he said, looking into the part of her hair as she bent over him. “I wish it could always be you.”

“Did you really hate Wallis so much?” Jenny asked. She plugged in a rubber-topped vial and watched it fill up with blood, then she filled another.