TEDDY BEAR

About the Book

This is your conscience speaking.  Your career is belly-up.  You've gotten married well beyond your prime.  And you get to be the stay-at-home parent changing diapers.  With all this love and care, why shouldn’t the kid earn his keep?

He lands a commercial.  You're please as punch.  And when things start going badly, punch someone is exactly what you do.  When you arrive home, there are two police cars outside your apartment building.

You take the prudent course; you keep your son and keep on going, for parts unknown.  Naturally, your wife has signed on for none of this.  But she is off to Paris to do the Deal of a Lifetime, so you're free to wander, to pick up your own pieces, definitely to watch your son take his first steps away from you.  

You wake up in New Bern, North Carolina, just as good as any place to set up house, put your son in a pre-school, and even get a some sort of a job.  Not much in the way of parenting beyond the basics, nothing more than any mother would automatically do for her child.  

Catherine Monroe is someone you spend time with every night.  She's the evening reader for CNN.  She's definitely someone you feel comfortable with, even though you've never talked to her, couldn't remember her name, but could definitely pick out of crowd of a thousand.  Which is fine, as long as she stays inside your television set.

Except now, she's talking to you about how you’re raising your wife’s son.  You’re willing to sit and take her advice because you need the attention.  After all, if you knew how to do the child care thing, you’d have your own T.V. show.

The hot, humid days of the North Carolina Coastal Plain wear on a lot of things.  Your wife is more and more difficult to get a hold of.  Your son is more and more comfortable in his new home.  You’re beginning to get some handles on this child raising business.  How many fathers have that front row seat?  And, oh, yeah.  How’s your marriage?  

 The question you must answer for yourself, for your wife by proxy, and for your son?  Should a tree fall in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it sound like an affair?

About the Author

PHILIP MACHALE lives outside New York City with his wife and two children. When he's not plotting their escape, he's researching his next novel.