# Love Stories in This Town

Amanda Eyre Ward

From the award-winning author of 'Forgive Me' and 'How to be Lost' comes this brilliant first collection of short stories. Linking stories about love, identity and motherhood in a changing world, the collection includes 'Miss Montana's Wedding’, the prize-winning short story that launched Amanda Eyre Ward's career in 1999.From a cabin in Maine to a comedy club in Manhattan and from a diner in Montana to a raft rushing through the Grand Canyon, these twelve stories from acclaimed author Amanda Eyre Ward encompass love in all its complexity, absurdity and glory.In six dazzling stories spanning a decade, Lola Wilkerson mends a broken heart and meets Emmett Chase, navigating elopement, motherhood and lingering questions about who she wants to be when she grows up. On the banks of Messalonskee Lake, a family tragedy forces Bill and Lizzy to take a hard look at their own lives. Casey, a suburban New Yorker with a wry sense of humour, braves the dating scene after losing her husband in the 9/11 attacks. Annie, a librarian in a small mining town, must choose between the only home she's ever known and the possibility of a new life. Whether in San Francisco, Houston or Savannah, Ward's characters search for the place where they truly belong.In stories as evocative as they are striking, Amanda Eyre Ward once again proves herself to be an astute interpreter of emotions both familiar and strange. Whether exploring the fierceness of a mother's love or the consolations of marriage, Ward's stories are imbued with humour, clear-eyed insight and emotional richness.

L

ove Stories IN THIS TOWN

Amanda Eyre Ward

Harper Press

For Barbara and Larry, Mom and Peter, Dad and Cassia, Sarah and Chris, Liza and Brad, and my love, Tip

## Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE

Should I Be Scared?

Butte as in Beautiful

The Stars Are Bright in Texas

On Messalonskee Lake

Shakespeare.com

The Way the Sky Changed

PART TWO: LOLA STORIES

Miss Montana’s Wedding Day

Nan and Claude

She Almost Wrote Love

Motherhood and Terrorism

The Blue Flame

Grandpa Fred in Love

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Amanda Eyre Ward

A Reader’s Guide

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

## Should I Be Scared?

I first heard about Cipro at the potluck.

“Thank God I’ve got Cipro,” said Zelda. “My doctor prescribed it for a urinary tract infection, and I still have half the pills.”

“Cipro?” I said, my mouth full of artichoke dip.

“Honey,” said Zelda, “where have you been?”

It was a cold, clear night in Austin, Texas. After the disgusting heat of summer, the cool was a balm. Zelda wore a giant sweater, knit loosely from rough, rusty-colored wool. She stood next to the barbecue, holding her hands in front of the hot coals. In the kitchen, my husband and his scientist friends concocted an elaborate marinade.

“Anthrax,” whispered Zelda. She had just begun to date my husband’s thesis advisor, and lent an air of glamour to departmental potlucks.

“Excuse me?” I said. I took a large sip of wine, which had come from a cardboard box.

“Ciprofloxacin,” clarified Zelda, hissing over the syllables. “It’s the anthrax vaccine. A super-antibiotic. If we’re dropped on by, like, a crop duster, Cipro is what you’ll need. And,” she lowered her voice again, “there isn’t enough for everyone.”

Zelda wore scarves and held her wineglass with her hands wrapped around the bowl. When she sipped, her eyes peered over the top, bright coins. She wore high leather boots and worked in a steel building downtown for a company that made expensive software. She had described her job to me: “It’s an output management solution, and I market it. It connects the world.” We had no idea why Zelda wanted to spend her evenings, which could obviously be spent in snazzier locales, with us. We wore Birkenstocks.

I was a scientist’s wife. This title pleased me. I also worked at Ceramic City, where people could paint their own pottery. My title at Ceramic City was “color consultant.” This title did not please me. I was trying to figure out what to do with my Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology, with a focus on the egalitarian foragers of the Kalahari Desert.

“Oh,” I said to Zelda, regarding the Cipro. It was times like this that I felt lucky to have a scientist for a husband. I could ask him later for details, and he would not laugh at me. He explained things patiently, drawing circles and arrows on the margins of the newspaper.

“Hey, ladies!” said a dark figure, emerging from the kitchen. It was my husband’s thesis advisor. “Is that fire ready for some birds?”

Zelda smiled charmingly. The light from the coals made her look a little scary when she turned to me.

“Get some for yourself,” she said in a quiet voice. “I’m serious,” she said, and then she turned her face up to meet her lover’s lips.

My husband explained in the dark of our bedroom that ingesting expensive antibiotics for no reason was a bad course of action. We had pulled the covers over our heads and invited the cat into the warm cave. My husband called the cat “spelunker,” saying, “What do you think, little spelunker? Do you think we should let the terrorists make us afraid? Do you think we should buy canned goods and a six-day supply of water?” (The last was in reference to my actions of the previous day, when I had arrived home with twenty-eight cans of Progresso soup and three gallons of water.)

This was the beginning of the War on Terrorism.

Two weeks before, we had discussed what to eat for dinner and if we were drinking too much beer. We had talked about having a baby, mowing the lawn, and what sort of dog we should adopt. (My husband was partial to standard poodles, and I liked little dogs that could sit in your lap or in your purse. If you carried a purse.)

In those days—which seemed impossibly bright now, untarnished—we had talked idly about what sort of fishing rod my husband should buy with his jar of quarters. My husband came home each night, took the change from his pants pocket, and dropped it into a large water jug; he claimed he had done this since he was six years old, and the first time the jug filled (right before I met him), he bought a canoe. The canoe! He loved it ferociously. He named the canoe after me, wrote my name in Wite-Out on the side. One night, when I was reading and he was asleep, he spoke. “You’re the best,” he said, his arms around my waist, squeezing. I checked: he was in dreamland, speaking from that place. “You’re the best,” he repeated. “You’re the best, best, best canoe in the world.”

In the end, we had decided that we wanted a baby more than a dog or a fishing rod, and we had thrown away my birth control pills and made love slowly, with the moon shining a soft light over us.

Things had changed so quickly and forcefully that it seemed to me my husband hadn’t quite accepted the fact that we were in danger. I lay in bed in the mornings now, hearing helicopters and listening to the news.

“Your dad is making fun of me,” I told the cat under the covers. I began to cry a little, and my husband said he was sorry.

The next morning, from behind the counter at Ceramic City, I called Dr. Fern. The first time the nurse answered, I hung up. I was alone in Ceramic City, but I did not know what to say to the nurse. Was I being crazy? I wanted to think so. My mother, who lived in Connecticut and had gone to three funerals for her friends’ sons, told me that it was unpatriotic to want some Cipro for myself. When I told her I was afraid to get out of bed, she said, “That’s just how the terrorists want you to feel.”

I called Dr. Fern again. This time, when the nurse answered, I said that I would like to make an appointment.

“Issue?” said the nurse.

“Excuse me?” I said. A man peeked into the window of Ceramic City. I thought, Fuck.

“What is the issue,” said the nurse, “that you need to see the doctor about?”

“Uh, I’d like to get a prescription,” I said.

“For?”

“For ciprofloxacin,” I said. The peeking man came inside and began to wander around, inspecting Personalized Pottery.

“Beg pardon?” said the nurse. Was she instructed not to use full sentences?

“In case of an anthrax attack on America,” I said, “I would like to have my own supply of antibiotics.” The man was holding a blue bowl painted with fish. He stared at me.

“Oh my,” said the nurse.

“Well, so,” I said. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Can I be of assistance?” I asked the man.

“My wife’s birthday is Tuesday,” he said.

“One moment, please,” I said. The nurse told me that she would have to consult with the doctor and get back to me. She took my number. When I hung up the phone, I saw that the man had put the bowl back on the shelf.

“Should I be scared?” he asked.

· · ·

The nurse called later that afternoon and explained in no uncertain terms that the doctor would not give me the drugs I had requested. She added that it was against every tenet of the medical establishment to prescribe drugs when a patient was not ill. I hung up the phone, instead of saying, “You self-important bitch.” At home that evening, I cried again.

My husband watched me skeptically. We were eating Freebird burritos, sitting on our front porch and peeling off aluminum foil in small, metal circles. “We’re not going to get anthrax,” said my husband. He made a sound that I would classify as an incredulous snort.

“I know!” I said. I bit into my burrito, which I had ordered with extra guacamole. Extras were a dollar, and usually I refrained, but I had the feeling that I should live life to the fullest, and make a celebration of every day.

“And I want you to stop watching so much television,” said my husband. He had been talking, it seemed, for some time. I nodded, and he turned his head toward me, squinting as if I were a scientific mystery. “Oh, honey,” he said.

Nonetheless, I did watch television that night after my husband had fallen asleep. I sat in the front room in my pajamas, watching bombs and food rations fall. I drank a warm glass of milk and watched dirty children rip open bags of Pop-Tarts and jam them into their mouths.

The next day, I discovered an advertisement for Cipro on the back page of the Austin Chronicle. There it was, sandwiched between a massage therapist and a Spanish tutor: CIPRO AVAILABLE 1-800-CIPRONOW. (The last “W,” it seemed, was for effect.) Ceramic City was empty again, and I picked up the phone.

When I got home that evening, my husband was making linguine with clams. There was an open bottle of wine on the table, and two wineglasses. My husband had gone to some trouble: cloth napkins, the whole nine yards. In the kitchen, he was stirring dinner and leafing through a fishing catalog. I came into the kitchen and put my arms around him. “I’m your apron,” I said.

“Look at this,” said my husband, pointing to the catalog. “A baby-size fishing rod. I can take our little boy out in the canoe.”

“Or our little girl,” I said.

“Whatever,” said my husband. “Either way, the change jar is now officially for the baby. For a little fishing rod, or maybe a little life vest.”

As we ate the linguine, which was delicious, I brought up the Cipro. I explained that the pills we needed to stay alive for ten days would cost three hundred dollars. My husband put down his napkin, and looked at the table. He unclenched his fists and placed each hand carefully on either side of his plate. Finally, he lifted his head. He took a breath, and I saw him make the decision to act rationally. “We don’t have any money,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “we do have the change jar.” My husband nodded, his eyes closed. “If we die of anthrax,” I said, “what will a fishing vest be good for?” Even I could tell I sounded hysterical. We sat in silence and finished the bottle of wine. My husband then stood up and left the room. He came back with the jar, which he overturned. Years of change spilled over the floor.

“It happened without them knowing,” I said. “I want to be ready.”

My husband did not look at me. He sat cross-legged on the floor and began counting. The change jar added up to one hundred seventy-two dollars and sixteen cents.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

“Just get half,” said my husband. “Save yourself,” he said. And then he went and took the sleeping bag from the closet, and he placed it on the couch.

“I’ll get enough for both of us, for five days,” I said. “Five days will be enough to figure something out.” I stood next to the couch, where my husband was feigning sleep. “I’m just asking for five days,” I said. “I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

The man at 1-800-CIPRONOW had told me to meet him in the alley between San Antonio and Sixth. I drove there the next morning, a plastic bag of change in the passenger seat. “You’ll be glad,” I told my husband. “You’ll thank me later.”

The CIPRONOW man was Hispanic. He wore tight Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt with an American flag. Over the phone, he had explained that the Cipro was his mother’s prescription; she needed money more than the drugs.

The man, whose flag shirt, upon closer inspection, was not very clean, was unhappy about splitting up the prescription. “What you need,” he said, “is the full thirty pills. Three times a day for ten days. That’s what you need.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, gesturing to the bag. “This is all I have.”

“All you have,” said the man, and he laughed. I blinked. “No deal,” said the man, shaking his head.

“Well, fuck,” I said. The change bag and I drove away.

That evening, as my husband grilled hamburgers in the backyard, I thought about how to get another hundred dollars and change. With our student loans, there just wasn’t a dime to spare. “I already gave you all my money,” my husband said, dramatically. “You can’t live your life this way,” he said, among other comments that amounted to same. “I can sell something,” I said.

“Oh really?” said my husband. He put his hands on his hips, and the spatula stuck out awkwardly. “Really?” he said. “What do you have to sell?”

I did not answer. The damn fact was that I had nothing to sell. My books, maybe, or my bod. Unhappily, neither would likely bring a hundred dollars. I did not sleep that night. I lay awake, and dreamed about dying horribly, with lots of gasping. Worse, I dreamed of life without my husband, our house, our canoe. I dreamed of living in a cave, with no access to the sunlight, and no food.

The next day, anthrax was found in a letter mailed to NBC News. “Now tell me I’m crazy,” I said to my husband, who had brought me a tuna sandwich at Ceramic City.

“I never said you were crazy,” he said, wiping his lips with a napkin. “I’m just trying to say that if we’re going to die, well…” He lifted his hands up, a gesture of acceptance.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t just wait. Can you understand?”

My husband shook his head, his eyes full of sadness for me.

The CIPRONOW man said he would take a canoe and one hundred seventy-two dollars and sixteen cents. God knows why he wanted a canoe. Perhaps he had realized that the tide was turning: the government was in negotiations to buy a zillion tablets of discount Cipro, and the terrorists were hatching smallpox. The Cipro market was at peak performance.

Maybe he liked to fish, I don’t know.

I gave the CIPRONOW man our address. He arrived with a Ziploc bag full of pills and a trailer for the canoe. I invited him inside for a beer and he accepted. I gave him a Shiner Bock. “This is a beautiful home,” he said. He looked around, nodding. I saw it through his eyes: the books lined up in a row on the bookcase my husband had built for me, my copy of To Lake N’Gami and Back next to my husband’s Trout of the World. The cat—once my cat, but now ours—curled up in a circle on the floor. The large glass windows, which could shatter with little provocation. The CIPRONOW man sipped his beer, and then looked down at his American flag shirt.

I got things ready for my husband: I made a seafood stew with coconut milk and lemongrass. I put out two green bowls we had bought at a tag sale. Next to the salt and pepper shakers, which were shaped like Hawaiian dancers, I placed the bag of Cipro pills. They looked good, as if they belonged.

After some time, when my husband had not come home, I poured a glass of wine and called my mother. “I saw Lou Kensington at the Yacht Club Christmas party,” she confided. I could see my mother, leaning against the kitchen doorway in her New Canaan home. She twisted the phone cord around her finger, and although this habit had always seemed annoying, now it seemed precious, and I wished I had never moved away from her.

“Lou is not doing well,” said my mother. “He’s obsessed with where Howie was on the plane.”

I finished my glass of wine and poured another. “Where was he?” I said. I tried to think reverentially of Howie Kensington, but the only vision I could summon was one of Howie in his football helmet, his face sweaty.

“Lou thinks he was bumped to first class, next to one of the terrorists. Howie called his girlfriend and told her he was going to order a free St. Pauli Girl, even though it was morning.”

“I hope he did,” I said.

“So do I,” said my mother. After a minute, she said, “Howie was the captain of the hockey team at Yale.”

“I know,” I said.

“You wanted to go to Yale,” said my mother, “but you didn’t get in.”

“I know,” I said.

· · ·

My husband had still not returned from the lab by the time I finished the wine and went to sleep. I wrote a note, and placed it on the kitchen table, next to the bag: “I hope you will understand that this is for us.”

I do not remember my husband coming home: his long back, his thin eyelids, his mind full of numbers, his bottom, warm against my stomach. By the time I woke, he was out of bed again, and I was alone.

I found him, freshly showered, in the kitchen. The morning paper was still rolled up, bound by a rubber band. I went to the coffeepot and filled a china cup. My head pounded, and I was still in the dress I had worn to work the previous day.

On the table, my note was gone, and in its place was a box of condoms.

We sat opposite each other, the bag of pills and the box of condoms between us. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen. The sun cast a buttery light, and the hairs on my husband’s forearm looked like gold.

## Butte as in Beautiful

It’s a crappy coincidence that on the day James asks for my hand in marriage, there is a masturbator loose in the library. On Monday morning, for example, everything’s the same. Pearl gets picked for the Copper Lunchbox, so we have to listen to Steve Winwood all afternoon. Rosie goes, “Did you have to pick all Steve Winwood?” and Pearl goes, “Look. It’s my Copper Lunchbox.”

“Fair enough,” I say, and then I say, “Can you all be quiet so I can alphabetize in peace?”

Pearl and Rosie snort and turn up the radio. When you see a chance, take it. Find romance, make it make it.

We fight about the radio, primarily. We’ve each been picked for Copper Lunchbox at least once, and then all the library patrons put down their newspapers (which they’re not reading anyway) and think it’s their job to comment on your musical tastes. They don’t have real jobs in Butte anymore, so people take what they can get. In July, and it was hot, Old Ralph announced that Madonna’s music heralded the final tear in America’s moral fabric. I was like, “You know what, Old Ralph? Relax. ‘Crazy for You’ is a dance song, not a code of ethics.” Old Ralph’s like, “Touch me once and you know it’s true. I never wanted anyone like this!” making the words sound lewd and disgusting. I almost took the new Mary Higgins Clark and beaned him, but Ralph likes to pontificate, and in a public library, that’s his right.

So, we live in Butte, Montana. The richest hill on earth, ha, ha. They dug a pit the size of the city next to the city and now it’s filling with toxic water. It’ll overflow in the year 2000 they say, so I say, well, a year is a year. Now they’re talking about mining the water.

My dad was a miner. He’s dying now of cancer—it’s in his bones—and all his friends are dying of cancer too. They come over to the house and drink Guinness and smoke like fiends and what’s Mom going to say? It’s bad for your health? When I get home, there’s some kind of meat or some Beefaroni, and when I get in bed, my sheets smell like Downy. In between my dad’s coughing, I can hear my mother’s soft laughter.

They hired me at the library out of Butte High. I was the class valedictorian. At the graduation ceremony, I said, “Go forth and find your dreams.” I could have gone to Missoula and played for the Lady Griz, but my coach was like, “Annie, that knee’s going to give in less than a season.” I had to tape it for the last game as it was, but the Lady Griz still wanted me. They are the best women’s basketball team in Montana. They went to State and then to Florida to play in the championships this year. I watch them on TV. They’re all as tall as me, with their hair in little ponytails, and they were on the beach with suntan lotion all over their noses because hey, they’re from Montana and their skin isn’t used to Florida sun. One of them married the quarterback of the Grizzly football team. She wore a cowboy hat with a veil, which I think is tacky.

So, people used to send their daughters to Butte because their skin would get pale here, and that was fashionable. The arsenic in the air will bleach your skin. Our Lady of the Rockies is white as snow.

Our Lady of the Rockies is a hundred-foot marble statue of the Virgin Mary. Butte bought her and helicoptered her up to the Continental Divide to give the town something to be proud of, when all the copper was gone. At night, with the moon over her shoulder, she is something out of a dream. No matter what goes wrong or crazy, staring at Our Lady of the Rockies makes me calm. She’s right where she should be, and it’s a good thing, because she weighs eighty tons.

After work, James picks me up and we go driving. Sometimes we drive over to Pork Chop John’s for sandwiches, sometimes to the flats for a beer, and sometimes we go all the way out to Deer Lodge where the prison is or to Anaconda where the smokestack of the old smelter rises up like an arm. James! He smells like hard work—a cinnamon, cigarette smell. When James started calling me, he had just dropped out of tenth grade. Butte is small; I knew who he was, of course, and that he lived with his deadbeat father in a drafty double-wide. Nobody thought it would last, the studious girl and the grocery guy with a tattoo of his dead mother on his back.

After work, James plays saxophone for the Toxic Horns. His hair always looks messy and sticks up like a little chickadee. His tongue is the softest thing in the world.

Back to Monday. By the afternoon it’s raining, and that’s the best time to shelve. It’s quiet and warm in the library, and the books are all organized and beautiful. I’m humming and checking out the Romance section when there’s a shriek from the second floor. It’s Pearl and she goes, “OH NOOOOO! AAAH!” and the upstairs exit slams shut and Pearl comes running down the stairs like a puppy. Her mascara is smudged and her wiglet is askew.

“What? What?” goes Rosie, and Pearl can’t say it. She breathes in and out and finally she says, “There was a man upstairs.”

A man? (All the librarians are spinsters or divorcées and hate men.) I was like, “Pearl, men are allowed to go wherever they—”

And Pearl goes, “NO! You don’t UNDERSTAND!” And she starts crying. Rosie leads her by her little liver-spotted hand into the bookbinding room and Pearl’s shoes make this shuffling sound. You can hear the two of them talking quietly and then Pearl’s crying, Rosie’s soothing sounds. A few minutes later, Rosie comes out. Her mouth is drawn together tight as a prune.

“There is a masturbator loose in the Periodical area,” says Rosie.

By now all the regulars have dropped their newspapers. Nobody’s even pretending to browse. Old Ralph (of course) leads the way. He runs up the stairs with determination on his face for the first time since I have known him. Abe follows him and the little biddies stand at the foot of the stairs chirping encouragement.

Nothing.

The masturbator had escaped. That afternoon, Rosie gets the whole story out of poor (Catholic as they come) Pearl. She had noticed a strange man in the Science periodicals. (I was like, “What was he reading? Discover? Scientific American?” but Rosie told me to zip my lips.) The man was tall with brown hair combed back. He had a receding hairline and was wearing jeans, a brown leather jacket, and white penny loafers.

So, Pearl’s organizing the magazines, maybe reading a bit as she usually does, which is why it takes her forever and a day, and she hears sounds from the man. What sounds? Grunting sounds and breaths, little short ones. (Pearl kept saying, “Like a bear, like a bear,” but nobody wanted to explore that statement.) So finally she looks up and his back’s to her. He’s hunched a bit.

You have to understand about Pearl. She’s sixty-five, and her husband was brought over straight from County Galway. He was killed in a mine explosion, but not before he left Pearl for a stripper. She never remarried, or went on a date, or even talked a whole lot to a man after that. In short, the masturbator had to turn around, raise an eyebrow, and give Pearl an eyeful before she realized he was no regular library patron. She was paralyzed for a minute. According to Rosie, who appointed herself official psychoanalyst, he finished the job right there and then, and that is why Pearl doesn’t use the water fountain anymore. Pearl finally screamed and came galloping down the stairs, and the masturbator escaped.

James drove past Pork Chop John’s. He had showered, and didn’t smell like his lunch-break Winstons but like Paco Rabanne. “What, did you leave work early?” I said.

He looked at me, and put his hand on my knee. “Annie,” he said, “I did. I left work early today.” He was talking like a movie, which pissed me off. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Usually, we couldn’t find enough to say to each other—what food must be like in foreign countries, why our parents failed, MTV. In summer, we lay in the bed of James’s truck and made up stories of our bright future, our heads cradled by James’s winter parka and snow pants.

While James was busy squeezing my knee, he missed the light on Mercury and almost ran into a hippie Volkswagen van. “Van!” I cried, and he hit the brakes in time. “I’m hungry,” I said.

“Darling, you shall be fed,” said James.

“I’m in an onion ring mood.”

James shook his head. “So, James,” I said, “a masturbator is loose in the library.” James sighed.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. He licked his lips. “Annie, if you could go anywhere, anywhere for dinner this evening, where would it be?”

I thought for a minute. “Tower Pizza,” I said.

“No.”

“Yes! You said I could choose, James. What’s your problem?”

James was breathing hard and talking strangely. He was making me nervous. “Skip it,” I said. “Mom’s making meat loaf anyway.”

“Fine!” yelled James, jerking the steering wheel and pulling into the parking lot. James didn’t even touch his salad or the double pepperoni with mushrooms. He listened glumly as I told him about the masturbator.

Then, the moment. The moment went like this:

Curtain opens on a young couple in Tower Pizza, an orange-walled restaurant with waxed yellow floors. The couple is smoking cigarettes and eating pizza from small plastic plates. The woman uses a knife and fork and the man uses his hands.

ME: Should we have gotten extra cheese?

JAMES: No. This is fine.

ME: I sort of wish I had caught the masturbator.

JAMES: Why?

ME: At least it would be exciting, you know?

JAMES: Annie, I got a promotion today. I’m leaving produce.

ME: Awesome! I wish we had extra cheese.

JAMES: I’m going to be manager of the meat counter. I almost have enough money to get us out of this place. This fucking place! I’m taking you to New York. We can stay with my cousin in Armonk, and then we’ll move to the city.

ME: Can we get cheesy garlic sticks, babe?

JAMES: Annie, will you marry me?

So I said yes, and we went up to Our Lady of the Rockies and had sex. James fell asleep, but I lay awake and gazed at Our Lady. At night she’s lit up like a Christmas tree, her arms open to us all.

The next day, there are posters all around the library. They say: CAUTION, PLEASE, THIS MAN MAY BE MASTURBATING IN THE PERIODICALS ROOM and then there’s a picture that Pearl drew of a man’s face. It looks like a cartoon pig. I tell Pearl and Rosie the signs might lead people to believe the man should be left alone, but they look at me with their brows furrowed and I zip it. Everyone is very upset about masturbation going on in the library.

Jan and the Morning Crew keep making jokes about us on the radio and repeating the description of the masturbator, down to the penny loafers. All of a sudden everybody wants to hang out at the library, and the books are in disarray. I can’t bear it.

After an hour, Rosie tells me I need a break. I tell her somebody’s got to shelve the damn books. She puts her hand on my shoulder and says, “Honey, the books aren’t going anywhere.”

I call my mother and ask her to have breakfast with me. She wasn’t awake when I left for work, and my father was coughing too hard to notice the ring on my finger. It was a thick gold ring with a diamond the size of a pencil eraser—James’s grandmother’s ring. She was a famous lounge singer who was given the ring by a movie star I can never remember the name of. It glitters and flashes around as I file the card catalog. Nobody notices when I slip out a side door.

My mom is waiting at the Squat and Gobble. She has ordered her tea and my creamy coffee, and is wearing a pillbox hat. When I come in, she looks up, and in the bright sunlight her face is lined and dry. Jesus, I think, she’s an old biddy. Then I feel guilty and give her a big hug. And don’t you know she sees that rock on my finger before I even sit down.

“Margaret Ann,” she says, “is that what I think it is?”

I say, “Yes,” and her eyes fill with tears.

“James is a good boy, he is,” she says.

“I know.”

We eat eggs and bacon, and my mother dabs at the corners of her lips between bites. She comes from a wealthy Irish family and never lets us forget it.

“James was promoted to the meat department,” I say. She smiles. “He wants to leave Butte.” Her smile widens. “How do I know if this is the right thing, Mom?”

“Do you love him?”

I think of James and his baby chick hair. “Yes.”

“I loved your papa, too,” says my mother, and she shakes her head slowly. “Thank goodness you’ll get out of this town,” she says. She looks through the window, and I look too. There are old cars glinting in the sun. A man with a beard leans against Frank’s Pawn Shoppe and draws a circle with his toe. He has only one arm. A woman comes out of Terminal Meats holding her dinner wrapped in paper. Her face is rosy and her shoes are shiny and new. Her coat is lined in fake fur and she holds it closed with the hand not holding the meat. She nods at the one-armed man, who smiles tiredly. “Maybe you and James could go to Florida,” says my mother. “Just like the Lady Griz.”

“My knee is broken!” I yell, by mistake. My mother shuts up like a clam and her face goes even paler.

“I’m sorry,” I say. My mother stares at her eggs. She looks like what she is: an old lady with a husband who has cancer in his bones. Her pillbox hat is faded and her lipstick creeps into the wrinkles around her mouth. She doesn’t dab at her eyes but lets her cheeks get all wet, so they look like they’re made of clay.

“Why aren’t you happy for me?” I say. “This ring belonged to Marlon Brando!”

My mother meets my gaze. “I am happy,” she says.

“Why don’t you come with me?” I say. “Why don’t you go instead of me? I don’t care.”

“Breakfast is my treat,” she says, and I watch her count change from her purse. On impulse, I grab her soft fingers. She looks up, startled, but does not pull away.

The masturbator has already left by the time I return to the library. This time it was Mrs. McKim who saw him in the Newspaper Nook. He was working himself into a frenzy by the stacks. Mrs. McKim didn’t get a gander at the whole package. She saw the leather jacket and the loafers and ran screaming before he even turned around. He had gotten away by the time the police arrived. “Secure all the doors!” the police say to us. Nobody shelves the whole afternoon, and the books are not in order on the cart. All the peepers who have started hanging around begin to pick up books, look at the covers, and then drop them somewhere else. I find a Young Adult novel in the Reference Room! That night, I can barely sleep. I have my mother tell James I’m too sick to go dancing. In bed, I listen to the sounds of my house: the clink of silverware going in drawers, the hum of the TV. The creakings of two old people moving around each other in the night.

The next day, I take the ring off and put it in my pocket. It’s getting in the way. I’m at the counter when they come in: three little kids brandishing pens. “We,” says the tallest one, throwing her shoulders back, “are the Future Problem Solvers of America.” I recognize her—she’s Katie, the granddaughter of one of my dad’s miner pals. She has black hair parted in the middle and combed behind her ears. She wears glasses, and through them, her eyes are wide and blue. I know Katie’s mother, June, who dropped out of Butte High and drinks too much.

Another kid chimes in. “We are working on deforestation,” he says.

“Check the card catalog under ‘forest’ or ‘woods,’ ” I say. The Future Problem Solvers of America look sheepish.

“We can’t read,” says Katie.

“No worries,” I tell her. I spend all afternoon helping the kids. We find pictures of clear-cut forests and pictures of lush, green ones. We find pictures of log homes, and rugged men with axes. The FPS of A leave satisfied. They promise to return next week, when they will begin to cure cancer. When they open the library entrance, the late-afternoon sun makes Katie’s hair shine.

I tell James I have the flu, and watch television with my father. I wrap myself in an old blue blanket and laugh so hard that my father tells me to shut my piehole.

By Thursday, things have settled down at the library. The masturbator has not returned, and James has stopped coming by and asking what’s wrong, what’s wrong.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong. It took me all day to get that library back in order. What’s wrong? People and their ability to mess everything up. Disorder always increases. That’s the rule, according to Einstein or whoever. Well, I’m no Einstein, but I’ll tell you this: I tape my knee every day. It won’t get worse, and that’s a promise.

I like being a librarian. I like the peace and quiet, and the smell of old paper. I like listening to Old Ralph and paging through magazines. Each book is stamped with a history: who’s read it and when. Who needed a renewal. Nowadays, everybody loves mysteries, but I can prove that people used to like history books.

My kids are going to know all about history. Pocahontas to Columbus to Marcus Daly, who took all the copper out of Butte and left us with his empty mansion and a cancer pond. I’m going to teach them to be a part of history, like the Lady Griz and their championship. Like the masturbator, even.

At three or so P.M., I hear the front door open. It makes a click sound and by the time I turn around, someone is climbing the stairs. I know without seeing that it’s him. But I keep filing for a time. Really, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Finally, when nobody else goes about catching him, I climb the staircase. It’s a wooden staircase, and it makes a creaking sound with each step. Outside the door to the Periodicals area, it’s silent, and smells like chicken soup. I push on the door, and of course, there he is, the masturbator, whacking away.

“Hey!” I say, and he turns around. His face is red. His hair is neatly combed, and his shirt is white and pressed. He looks like somebody’s lawyer, or somebody’s dad. Granted, his dick is hard and he’s got his meaty hand around it. But the expression on his face is not panic. He looks relieved, or like I had walked in with a present all tied up in a bow. He says, “Oh.”

What is there for me to do? I am eighteen years old, and a grown man is standing between me and the weekly periodicals and he’s got his pants unzipped. I am a librarian, and a Montanan.

I recognize the look in his eyes.

“Go home,” I tell him. “Can’t you just go home?” And something changes in his face. His eyes fill up with tears.

Rosie comes through the door. She has been fixing her hair and she smells like Aqua Net and a new dose of perfume. Her mouth opens wide, and she grabs me. The man (dick completely soft by this time, and swinging wildly) pushes us to the ground and heads for the door. Old Ralph tackles him downstairs, and when the cops arrive, the masturbator is tied to the card catalog with packing tape.

It turns out that the masturbator has a name: Neil Davidson. He lives in Helena with his wife and two kids. He’s a mortgage broker. His picture is on the front page of the Friday paper, along with my name and the name of our library. It is an old picture: his hair is thick, and he wears a tie. His smile is full of hope.

“What a sick, sick man,” says my mother, looking at the paper over my shoulder. Her hair is still pinned in curls, and she has given me my toast with honey. She is rotting from the inside, I can smell it.

“You got that right,” calls my father from the living room. His oxygen tube almost drowns out the television. I can see my father’s face, and it is gray and resentful.

I don’t say anything, but I know they are wrong. I saw Neil Davidson in the flesh. I knew the look in his eyes. I wish my parents would just be quiet. I will call James today, and I will give him back his ring. “Please understand, James,” I will say. And then I will tell him what I should have told the masturbator: There are plenty of things worse than having a home, and doing what you have to do to stay there.

## The Stars Are Bright in Texas

They told us the baby was dead, and two days later we were on a plane to Texas. We were moving, and had to buy a house. We’d always rented, and all our furniture was from Goodwill. We’d never had a realtor before. We were going to be rich.

In my carry-on bag, I had three magazines, an apple, and two bottles of prescription pills: an antibiotic and a painkiller. I swallowed one pill from each bottle as we taxied down the runway, leaving Bloomington, and my dead baby, behind.

It hadn’t even been a baby, my doctor said, despite my morning sickness, tender breasts, and anticipatory purchases from A Pea in the Pod. It was just a mass of cells, the wrong egg fertilized. Though my husband, Greg, knew more than any of us about chromosomal abnormalities, he was superstitious—he was convinced it was because he was drunk or stressed out from his pharmaceutical company interviews when we conceived. That night had been a heavenly memory: the smell of a fire, snow falling quietly outside our bedroom window. Now it was just a storm and a mistake.

We landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Joe, from Lone Star Realty, picked us up in his mother-in-law’s gold minivan. He wore a Mexican wedding shirt that would be soaked through by the end of the day.

Our friends Daniel and Jane had recommended Lone Star Realty. Daniel finished his PhD in molecular biology a year before Greg, and we watched with fascination as he went through the recruiting process. When Daniel slipped his wrists into the golden handcuffs, which was what we called pharmaceutical jobs, he and Jane went to Texas for a weekend and returned with stories of giant houses, hot brisket, and a dip called queso. Daniel, too, had considered a teaching job, but PharmaLab’s glittering promises were too wonderful to resist. “Once you’re in, you never get out,” mused Daniel, who had shaved his grad-school beard for interviews, revealing a small, pale chin.

“But why would you want to?” Jane asked. “Did we tell you we’re getting four thousand square feet? And a flipping pool! We’re twenty-six.” She shook her head with wonder.

“I’m twenty-eight,” I said.

“See what I’m saying?” she replied, gesturing at our dumpy Bloomington apartment, where I had just microwaved us two mugs of Earl Grey. Daniel and Jane were away the weekend we visited Houston, but promised to throw us a pool party when we arrived for good.

I tried to ignore the way Joe’s hands shook, the fact that he took a wrong turn getting to the first house, and then said, “Hey, now this is cute!” as if he’d never visited the neighborhood before. We were looking at houses in the Woodlands, the planned community north of Houston where Pharma-Lab was located. We could live in a real city, Daniel had told us, but the commute would be a bitch.

The first house was on Pleasure Cove Drive. It was made of limestone, and had an orange roof. The “country kitchen” included a wood-paneled refrigerator, and the nursery was furnished from the same Pottery Barn Kids catalog I had on my bedside table. This mother had chosen the Lullaby Rocker and Ottoman in cranberry twill. I had wanted butter twill.

“Did you see the country kitchen?” asked Joe. “How about the master suite?” He seemed overly excited.

The master suite had pictures of Chicago sports teams all over one wall. A wedding photo featured a blonde with a dazzling smile. The husband was not such a looker, but hey. Someone was reading Who Moved My Cheese? in bed. The other one was reading Star.

Greg was in the yard, under a sign that said MARGARITAVILLE!

“I hate it,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “okay.” We moved toward the minivan.

· · ·

As we drove to another house, Joe chatted with himself. “Silly flooring choices,” he said, and “tiles from the wrong period.” He turned on Treasure Cove Drive and stopped in front of a faux Victorian. “Right,” he said, running a hand through his hair. He told us the price of the house, which was one hundred thousand more dollars than we could afford, even with the handcuffs.

I looked back at Greg, who shrugged. He was wearing a light blue shirt I had sewn for him—it was the color of his eyes. He had a fresh haircut, and looked weary but optimistic.

My brother, Adam, a devotee of HGTV, would have loved the house on Treasure Cove. It was solid brick—so unlike the house we had grown up in, which shook during Georgia thunderstorms—and had a media room with a wet bar and a giant deck for entertaining.

I was feeling woozy and dreamy. In a stranger’s bathroom, I changed my Maxi Pad. The bathroom had a Jacuzzi tub. I wrapped the old pad in toilet paper and stuck it in my pocket. My blood—which had cushioned the mass of cells—dripped into the toilet bowl. In the tub, someone had lit berry-scented candles. I began to feel ill. I took a few breaths, then composed myself and joined my husband, who was admiring the skylight above the bed. A stitched pillow proclaimed THE STARS ARE BRIGHT IN TEXAS. It was a mass-produced piece of junk. Perhaps no one had the time to hand-stitch in Houston. Perhaps no one had a motto worth hand-stitching. THE HOUSES ARE BIG IN TEXAS, I thought. THE HAIR IS BLOND IN TEXAS. WHAT AM I DOING IN TEXAS?

In the minivan, I said I was too tired to trek around anymore. “Sweetie,” said Greg, “we only have this weekend….”

“How about a Diet Dr Pepper?” suggested Joe. “Got a twelve-pack in the cooler.”

My empty womb was starting to cramp. “I just don’t feel so well,” I said. “I’m on antibiotics.”

Joe smoothly put the car in gear. He talked about strep throat, how he always used to get strep throat as a kid, always taking antibiotics.

“Let’s hit a few more houses,” said my husband. “Kimmy, you rest in the car. I’ll let you know if anything’s amazing.” The doctor had suggested we cancel the trip, but I had already covered my shifts, and I wanted so much to fly somewhere new, somewhere else, and buy a home. Our apartment was grimy, despite the curtains I had made from vintage fabric. The previous tenants had left old pots and pans; there was even a towel in the bathroom that said RANDY.

“You’ll be completely wiped out after the procedure,” the doctor had said, as I lay on a gurney, an IV in my arm. I was given an anti-nauseal called Regulan.

“I feel a bit weird already,” I said.

“Hm,” said the doctor, leaning in. I was her first operation of the day: I could smell the hair dryer and Aqua Net. “Do you feel anxious, jittery, like you want to jump off the table?”

“I do.”

“It’s the Regulan,” said the doctor, matter-of-factly. But I was also about to go into surgery, to have what was left of my baby scraped out. We had prematurely named the baby Madeline or Greg Junior.

“You’ll be in la la land in a sec anyway,” said the doctor.

She was right. The next thing I knew, a nurse said, “It’s all over. Now don’t forget Doc’s instructions.”

She pulled back a white curtain, and there was Greg, his eyes red. “Mouse,” he said, and he tried to smile.

The nurse continued, “Dr. O’Brien told you the surgery was fine, and you asked when you could have a margarita.”

“What did she say?” Greg and I asked in unison.

“She said Sunday.”

It was Friday night when Joe dropped us at the Hilton Garden Inn, but we ordered margaritas anyway at the Great American Grill. The espadrilles I had bought for the trip were already giving me blisters. We were depressed.

“I can’t imagine myself in any of these McMansions,” I said, poking an ice cube with my straw.

“I’m not hungry, but I’m getting fried chicken,” said Greg.

“I miss it,” I said. Greg slid his chair next to mine and took me in his arms.

“I know,” he said. “Me too.”

Three nights before, I had climbed into bed and said, “I have a little blood in my underwear.”

“What?”

“But I looked on the Internet. Something about old blood, sometimes, like making room for the growing uterus or something. I don’t know.” I felt a sick excitement, speculating that I’d get some extra attention and maybe see the baby on an early sonogram, paid for by Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

“It’s probably nothing,” Greg had said, putting one hand on my stomach and the other on his fruitfly genome data.

After two rounds of margaritas, we went to our hotel room. Greg took a shower and joined me in bed, smelling of the hotel’s ginger citrus shampoo. When he fell asleep, I was alone in a humid city.

I was six when a man approached my mother near the perfume counter at Dillard’s. Once in a while, she took us shopping in Atlanta, about an hour from our hometown of Haralson, Georgia, population 143. The man asked my mother if she’d ever thought of being a model. She laughed in a way I had never heard, showing her throat. She said she was happily married with two small children. The man told my mother they had nannies in Paris, who were called au pairs.

In my memory, the man had dark hair and shiny skin. He wore a suit and tie. He handed her a card and said, “Just promise me you’ll think about it.” My mother was a rare beauty, he said.

She looked at the card, her forehead creased. She said, “I’ll think about it. Okay, I will, I’ll think about it.” She bought a shirt for my brother and a plaid jumper for me, and then she drove us home.

She was beautiful, my mother. She’d rest her long, bare arms on her knees and stare into space while I tried to capture her attention. She didn’t cook, like other mothers, or put name tags in my clothes. I can imagine her hanging my new dress in my closet, mulling her options. Did she even hesitate? Lighting a cigarette, dialing the number, packing her suitcase.

I don’t know if she made it to Paris, or became famous there. Whatever she found, I hope it brought her happiness. I hope it was better than my brother and me.

At ten the next morning, I climbed into the front seat of Joe’s mother-in-law’s minivan. Greg was in the back, next to the cooler. We drove south, heading into a neighborhood I loved immediately. There was a big park with a swimming pool, and a jungle gym surrounded by moms holding take-out coffees.

“Okeydokey,” said Joe, looking through a messy pile of papers, each a possible place for us to live. “Okay, now,” he said, “we’re a few blocks from the Ginger Man, a good little bar.”

Greg and I locked eyes happily.

We walked into the house, and it was perfect. High ceilings, a big open kitchen for me to cook in, or learn to cook in. A bonus craft room, where I could put the Singer sewing machine my father had given me when I graduated from college three years before. I found Greg in a second garden, off the bedroom. He stood with his hands on his hips, gazing up at the canopy of trees. When I approached, he turned and looked at me.

“We found it,” I said.

“I could love this,” he agreed quietly.

“Yes,” I said. My mind swam with visions of us: reading the paper on the front step, walking across the street with towels slung around our necks, tucking someone into bed in the kids’ room. I opened the freezer and saw ice-cream sandwiches. I thought, I love ice-cream sandwiches.

Maybe it was the caffeine—which I was drinking for the first time in months—but the next few houses were a blur. We chattered about mortgages and contracts. As Joe drove, I furnished the house in my mind: a sleek couch in front of the fireplace—maybe leather? I imagined myself in the craft room, sliding fabric under the needle, really making a go of Madeline Designs, now that I no longer had to waitress every night.

Joe’s cell phone rang. “Hello?” he said. “No, no,” he said. “Couldn’t have been me.” He snapped the phone shut and turned to look at us. “Somebody took the key to the first house. That was the owner. He’s pissed.” He shook his head and chuckled.

I looked at Greg, who said coldly, “Why don’t you check your pockets, Joe.”

Joe’s phone rang again. “What?” he said. He started to flush. “Well, okeydokey,” he said. “I-I-I…” He stopped talking and nodded, then closed the phone. “I guess we’re the only ones who’ve been there. But I just don’t—”

“Watch out for the divider,” said Greg in a steely voice.

As we doubled back to all the houses we’d seen, I tried to calm my husband. “It’s going to be perfect,” I said, as he muttered, “total waste of our time.” After Joe found the key to our dream house, locked in another house, he called the owners. “Hi there, Joe Jones, Lone Star Realty,” he said. “The funniest thing—”

“Don’t turn on University,” said Greg from the backseat. Joe turned on University. We sat in traffic caused by a construction site—a site we had driven by earlier—in complete silence.

By lunchtime, we had returned the key. The house looked better than ever. A lemonade stand had been set up by the park. A little boy rode by on his bicycle, a wrapped birthday present in the basket.

Joe took us out to lunch. I popped my pills right at the table and changed my Maxi Pad in the bathroom. I was not healthy. I ate a cheeseburger with avocado, cheddar, and bacon. I called my father in Haralson and said, “We found it,” and my father said, “That’s wonderful, Kimmy.”

Across the restaurant, Greg spoke excitedly into his cell phone. “Mom,” he said, “Listen to this, Mom…”

Over lunch, we filled out the paperwork, making an offer for full price and then some. Joe assured us we would get the house. Between bites of his burrito, Joe told us he had just hit his stride at Enron when the shit storm hit. “Thought I’d give this real estate thing a try,” he said. He talked about his six-month-old baby, whom he called “Girly.” His wife, also an Enron-employee-turned-realtor, he called “Doll.”

After lunch, we drank Diet Dr Pepper and looked at many houses that sucked, feeling superior.

That night, I wore a strapless dress. It was deep green, and had a matching jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves. We wandered around the Woodlands, trying to find a restaurant where we could splurge, though we were nervous about spending every cent PharmaLab had promised and hundreds of thousands they hadn’t. If we got the house, we could no longer say, “Oh, screw Big Pharma. Let’s just move to Wyoming and live off the land.”

Though we were outside, I felt as if we were trapped in a mall, with one neon-lit shop after another. All we could find was a Cheesecake Factory, and I’ve never liked cheesecake, so we returned to the Great American Grill.

“Cheers,” I said, holding my margarita high.

Greg brought his glass to mine, and said, “Cheers, my love.” We toasted ourselves, and the little family we would begin, as soon as I was no longer bleeding heavily. A week before, I had packed some Victoria’s Secret Supermodel Sexy Whipped Body Cream into my suitcase. It would keep.

The gold minivan pulled up as usual in the morning, but Joe was no longer at the wheel. Instead, Doll—whose real name was Sally—hopped out. She was short and plump, her red hair in barrettes. “Joe wanted a day with the baby, and I needed some adult time,” Sally explained. Her skirt was tight and orange, and she wore plastic jelly sandals. As we sipped coffee and ate bagels, Sally’s phone rang. It appeared her phone was broken, and she could use only the speaker attachment.

With Girly crying in the background, Joe told Sally that there was another offer on our dream house. We needed to name our best price right now, he said, and the owners would decide in the next five minutes.

I felt flustered. The next five minutes? Neither Joe nor Sally knew whether we should raise our price or not. “They could have a lowball offer,” said Sally. She added, “Or they could have a higher offer.” She took a bite of her bagel. “Yum,” she said.

Greg had done some calculations on his laptop (he loved Excel spreadsheets) and concluded the house was worth less than the asking price. We decided to hold firm, and headed out with a list of addresses, waiting nervously for Sally’s phone to ring. “Might as well keep looking, just in case,” said Sally. The flight back to our rental apartment and my dogeared copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting was at 4 P.M.

On Scullers Cove Court, we entered an airless house where someone collected Hummel figurines. “This would be a great house for an older couple with no kids,” mused Sally. She stood in the hallway, telling us about Girly, and how she didn’t like tummy time, but how Sally had to make her do her tummy time. It was so stressful, said Sally.

Back in the minivan, we parked outside another (gigantic) house. “Whoops!” said Sally. “Y’all? It looks like I locked my purse inside that other house? And my phone’s in it, and my Palm. And it’s locked, oh, whoops! And we can’t look at any other houses, cause my realtor key is also—”

“In your purse,” Greg finished.

Sally thought fast. “How about I drop y’all off for a nice lunch?” she suggested. “And I’ll go get all this worked out? And y’all can have a real nice lunch?”

“It’s ten-thirty,” I said. “I don’t want lunch. Our flight leaves in a few hours!” I was a wreck, admittedly.

“Oh, whoops,” commented Sally.

At the hotel concierge desk, Sally made some calls. Greg stared at his nice new shoes. The night before, we had made each other crack up by saying, “Diet Dr Pepper!” and “Girly!” Now, nothing seemed so hilarious.

Sally finished her whispered calls and approached, looking a little less spry. Again, she made the case for an early lunch.

“What about the house?” said Greg loudly.

“Oh, right,” said Sally. “I did talk to Joe. We lost the house. But how about I run get my keys, and…a nice, you know, lunch?”

I listened vaguely as Greg discussed the situation further, learning that we had been outbid, and it was over, though we could make a backup offer. When the calls were made and what phones worked and where various keys ended up, we were too exhausted to clarify. I would never stand in that beautiful kitchen, eating an ice-cream sandwich in my bathing suit.

I went upstairs and changed my Maxi Pad and swallowed my pills. I took off my oversize sunglasses and lay down. Reflexively, I put my hands on my stomach, but then remembered, and let them fall open.

We spent a long afternoon looking at other homes. We tried to convince ourselves that a too-small house with a crazy water feature was even better, all things considered, but as Sally dropped us off at the airport, a sinking feeling was already settling in.

“Don’t forget,” said Sally, as I climbed from the van, “the perfect home is out there.”

“Okay,” I said. Four days before, a technician had moved her wand on my skin and looked at an image on the screen. The doctor was sure everything was fine. The ultrasound was just a precaution. Greg told me he could see the baby’s face—its eyes—but when the doctor explained that the baby had never grown more than a few weeks old, that it had no head, and no heart, Greg said he must have been wrong.

In two weeks, my baby, the mass of cells, would be analyzed and we would be told it was tetraploidy. The doctor wrote something on her rectangular pad, then handed it to me. The paper read, “Tetraploidy. 92, XX, YY.”

“Any questions?” asked the doctor.

I knew that to Greg, these symbols would mean something, bloom into a narrative. To me, they were cruel and unfathomable. “But why?” I said. “What did I do?”

She sighed, and said, “Nothing, Kimberly. It had absolutely nothing to do with you. It’s just…the way things work out sometimes.” She scribbled again, handing me a prescription for Prozac. When I got back to our apartment, I put both sheets of paper in my underwear drawer.

Outside the Houston airport, Greg waited, holding our bags. He stood, broad shoulders a little slumped, and watched me. I remembered the sweet shock I’d felt when I’d first seen him, in the audience of my graduation fashion show. Most of my classmates, like Greg’s sister, presented glamorous gowns, but I designed coats for little girls, swinging cape-style coats made of wool and fastened with vintage toggles. I knitted matching scarves and mittens. I’d worn only plastic parkas growing up—my designs came from my imagination, and a picture I’d seen once of a Parisian schoolgirl, standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Though the SCAD store had wanted to buy my whole collection, I saved one red coat, one scarf, one set of mittens.

“Have a safe trip home,” said Sally.

“Okay,” I said. I walked to my husband, and he folded me inside his arms. I wanted to say something, to fix something. He looked so young, and so bewildered.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “It happened so fast.”

“There will be another,” he said.

We looked at each other. There would be another, there would. But I wanted the one that was gone.

### On Messalonskee Lake. ONE

A woman had drowned in the lake, but that did not make it any less picturesque. We hadn’t known her, after all; I had never met her, and my husband, Bill, was a boy when she died. She was Bill’s aunt Renée, married to his father’s brother, Gerry. She played the violin. This was all I could get out of my husband during our drive up I-95.

“So she fell out of the boat?” I said, waddling into the cabin, which smelled of either pine, Pine-Sol, or both.

“Yeah,” said Bill.

“When was this?”

“A while ago,” said Bill. “I told you, I was just a kid.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We need some air,” said Bill. He was wandering around, opening doors and windows.

“Who falls out of a boat?” I said. “It’s very sad.”

My husband approached. He tried to take me in his arms, but I barely fit. “Here,” I said, pressing his palm to my stomach. His fingers were warm, and I leaned into him.

“What?” he said, into my hair. He moved his thumb along my neck softly; I kissed him.

“I think it’s hiccuping,” I said. There was a bubbling sensation inside me, not the kicks I had come to know, but something lighter.

“Maybe it’s laughing,” said my husband.

When we realized we would never be alone again, Bill and I had decided on a romantic week at his family’s Maine cabin. He had spent his childhood at Camp Snow Island, and I knew he wanted to move back and run it someday. Unless I was hit by a bus or got trigger toe, I wasn’t leaving the Boston Ballet, but I was happy to spend a week in the wilderness.

I asked for an economy car when I called Thrifty Rental, but when we took our key into the parking lot, there was a PT Cruiser in Slot A-8. “No,” said Bill, when he saw it.

“I think it’s cute,” I said.

“You cannot drive a PT Cruiser to Belgrade Lakes,” said my husband. “You can’t step out of that car and buy bait.”

“I’ll buy the bait,” I said.

“Lord help us all,” said my husband.

· · ·

I began putting away the groceries we’d bought on the way: jam, bread, milk, eggs. “Was Renée pretty?” I asked, opening the refrigerator.

“Sure,” said Bill. “I don’t know.” He motioned to one of the family photos placed around the cabin in tarnished frames. “There she is,” he said.

I peered at the photograph. Aunt Renée wore a bemused expression and a bandanna. She had her hand on the shoulder of a little boy. “Who’s that?” I said. “I thought you said they didn’t have kids.”

“That’s me,” said Bill.

“Oh,” I said. The boy in the picture—Bill—was smiling timidly. I wondered if our baby would be shy.

At Day’s General Store, we bought steaks and beer. I had gained eighteen pounds, but the doctor told me to eat even more. He wasn’t really worried, he said, but he was cautiously concerned. Jocelyn, who was in my company, hadn’t gained enough pregnancy weight, and her baby was born six weeks early. Little Allan was fine, but the story was scary enough to make me choke down a bunch of beef.

As Bill manned the grill, I sat on the deck overlooking Messalonskee Lake. Snow Island, where the camp was located, was faintly visible across the water. A green boat puttered by: a man and his young daughter. “Any luck?” called my husband, and the girl held up a fish.

“Goddamn,” said Bill. He was in his element here, a fact I tried to forget every morning as he set his jaw and stepped on the T, uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Bill didn’t like cities in general and Boston in specific. He loathed his job raising money for the Appalachian Trail Society. I had studied dance in Burlington, Vermont, for the first few years of our marriage. We had planned on a lifetime of dreaming big and working hard. When I actually made it, we were both ecstatic, but also stunned.

“I can’t wait to take the boat out,” said Bill.

“Is it the same boat?” I asked. “The one Renée fell out of?”

“What?” said Bill. “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

I hefted myself out of the chair—my balance was completely off now—and walked across the pine needles to take a peek. It was yellow, with a bucket in the stern.

Bill finished grilling, and we ate at a wooden picnic table. We made up two beds on the screen porch and lay in one. Bill pressed his ear to my belly, trying—but failing—to hear a heartbeat. I pulled my maternity tank top up, feeling his scratchy cheek against my skin.

For days, we napped and cooked and swam in the lake. I worked out regularly—I was expected back in the studio six weeks after the baby was born, so there was no time for a break. In my off-time, I constructed elaborate stories about dead Renée: a doomed affair, a clandestine meeting gone disastrously wrong. I pressed Bill for details, but he claimed to know nothing. Had he been there the night she drowned? He was asleep, he said. Was she depressed? How would he know, he said. He told me not to get worked up. Each evening, the man and his daughter floated past us, holding up lines of fish. Bill had some luck, and I even went with him a few times, though I joked I would sink the boat. I loved watching my husband paddle—the movement of his strong muscles.