LIAM'S GROWTH
Liam was three weeks old when I went back to work.
Not because I was ready. Ready had nothing to do with it — the money column in my notebook had a specific number at the top, and that number was decreasing at a rate that didn't accommodate sentiment about timing. I went back because the arithmetic required it and because Jasmine had, in the ten days since we brought Liam home, arranged everything else with the quiet efficiency of someone who had decided this was her problem to solve and had solved it.
Mrs. Park lived two floors below us.
Korean, sixties, four children raised and launched, currently available in the specific way of a woman who had earned her own schedule and chose to fill parts of it with other people's babies because she liked babies and was honest about
