Baby Driver [antikvár]

Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue. I sat in the window of our thatched house in Yelapa, not even a dot on the map below Puerto Vallarta, staring out through puffs of tiny afternoon flies. I patted the turquoise cloth draped over my seven-month belly, feeling the baby move within, revolving now like a restless planet. This hard compact ball was comforting—a rubber bumper to protect me from the world. Now it grazed the underside of the tabletop. This used to mean it was time to redo the legs, which were of coconut stalks, the only wood available in Yelapa. Every three weeks or so, John would throw out the shriveled brown sticks and start all over again with fresh green ones, lashing them together and setting the hardwood top back on. He'd just done it again that morning, chopping the legs longer this time with the machete, so the table would be higher. But my belly was growing too fast—Jike everything here in the tropics, growing so fast, and rotting away before you knew it. I was sitting there, marveling at the renewed solidarity of the table, a heap of Mexican pens before me. I had just finished a chapter of the novel John and I were collaborating on, a fairy tale account of drug trafficking and romance in Manhattan, called The Influence. On thirteen pages of children's composition paper, I had gone through five pens. One had died in