I get to the coffee shop ten minutes early, because to get what you want, it’s a little about luck and a lot about positioning. You have to be in the right place at the right time to seize the day.
I sit on one of the velvety purple couches that Lara would’ve flipped over during her color soothes the soul phase. I pick the far corner, so Faye will know this is serious—no running out so easily. When she called yesterday, she sounded a little unsure. She said the housekeeper found the ultrasound of the Little Alien and asked if it was Faye’s, which totally cracked me up, even though Faye most definitely was not laughing. But we’re down to the nitty-gritty now. She is either into this or she isn’t.
The place is full, and the girl behind the counter, who looks like she’s auditioning for the role of “fat Goth chick,” glares at me now and then. At one point, I say loudly, “I’m waiting for someone,” but this doesn’t make a difference because that’s the thing with people these days—they have no respect. On the bus, it’s not the girls who get up for you when they see you’re pregnant, it’s the guys. Which is why I fricking hate the bus. Some people have respect, and some are lazy bastards, and you never know which one is going to be mouth-breathing beside you.
Maybe I should’ve told Denise the social worker that was my number-one criteria: anybody raising my kid has to teach them respect. Only I know what she would’ve said. She would’ve looked at me with that oh-so-patient, acne-scarred face of hers and said, Okay, respect. What do you mean by that, Bev? Maybe you could elaborate. And I would’ve said something like Respect, Denise. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Do you need to look it up?
When I was a kid, Ray used to call me his “chubby little diva,” which he thought was very funny, but these days, it seems about right, since I’m getting rounder by the minute and almost everything pisses me off. Like how from the minute we met, Denise rubbed me the wrong way.
“You can’t just place an ad,” she said. “There’s a process. If you trust me, we can do this in a way that works for everyone.”
It’s like she thought I was retarded, and I almost lost it. “You thought I was serious? I just wrote that to lighten things up a bit. I’m not stupid. Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”
Then she backpedaled like crazy, told me how she’d been a teen mother too, that she’d made a lot of mistakes and only got her social-work degree after attending the school of hard knocks, blah, blah, blah. All that effort, I wanted to say, and still a beauty-school dye job. How much do they pay you down at Family Services?
A red jacket flashes by the window, and I know it’s Mannie. I can tell by the way the jacket’s flapping in the wind, trailing after him like a cape. I swear he leaves it unzipped so I will give him shit and tell him to do it up because “it’s cold, moron.”
I slouch down a little, even though it’s pointless. It won’t keep him from finding me, and it’ll only shift the stabbing pain from my lower back to my right butt cheek.
“He seems to be standing tall as a little soldier right on your sciatic nerve,” the doctor had said when I last saw him. “Maybe with a little massage, he’ll shift on around.” There was something about the way he said it, Mr. Casual and Collected, that made me want to scratch his face off. It seems you’ve lost an arm, he could’ve been saying. Here, have this tissue—maybe it’ll stop the bleeding.
The little bell above the door tinkles, and Mannie looks around like some cowboy entering a saloon. When he sees me, he puts on his Mr. Tough Guy look, his lips set into a little pout, his eyes small. The closer he gets, the smaller the eyes get and the bigger the pout, but I try not to laugh, because it would only get him worked up.
“What, did you follow me here?” I ask.
He stands over me, feet apart, arms crossed. His nose is running, and he’s wearing too much body spray. “What was I supposed to do?”
I lean forward, and my tailbone feels like I just sat on a cactus. I want to sucker punch Mannie in the balls, but I know that will ruin everything. I remain Ms. Casual and Collected. “You could stop following me around.”
“You don’t tell me nothing,” he says. “What am I supposed to do?”
I lean back and gasp as a porcupine slides down my right leg.
“It still hurts?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It still hurts. And it’s not ‘nothing.’ It’s ‘anything.’ ‘You don’t tell me anything.’”
Mannie starts to rock back and forth, like he always does when I correct him—it’s like his weird-ass version of a nod.
“Whatever,” he says. “Don’t change the subject, Bev. What do you want me to do?”
It reminds me of when Ray first found out Mannie and I were together. I’d only been back in Winnipeg a few months, but I could already tell that Ray and me in his tiny condo was not going to work. When he’d sat me down, I thought he was going to tell me I had to go back to Lara in Vancouver.
“What’s this I hear about you and the kid in the kitchen?”
He’d been trying to quit smoking and was going through a lot of gum. He chewed with his mouth open, like he meant business.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Sit here by myself knitting you socks? How am I supposed to meet people?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Go to the gym, go to school. You’re the one who wanted to do the correspondence thing. Shouldn’t kids your age be with other kids your age?”
“You hired him,” I said, “and he is my age.”
He opened a new piece of gum and spat the old one into the wrapper. I was pretty sure he was putting on this concerned-dad charade for some new woman in the picture, and I was right.
“Don’t change the subject,” he said. “This is about you. You got to keep your eye on the ball. You’re not a baby anymore.”
You got that right, I should’ve said. All your babies are grown up, and we’ve all seen the concerned-dad act.
Mannie keeps rocking now, and the waft of his body spray starts to make me feel queasy. I lean forward even though it hurts like a bitch and grab his shoulder. “Stop that or I might hurl.”
He wedges himself in beside me, puts his arm around my shoulder and squeezes softly, like we’re at the hospital and someone just died. “You still feeling sick? I thought that was getting better.”
I drag myself out from under him. If having the Little Alien hurts worse than what I’m feeling right now, then I will die on the delivery table and Ray will no longer have to worry about whether I’ve got my eye on the ball.
The bell over the door tinkles again, and I know without looking that it must be Faye. Now and then, for no reason, I can tell what’s going to happen—sort of a second sight. Like, even when I was ten, I knew Lara would not get over Ray anytime soon, even though she pretended every minute of every day that she was. And last year, I knew Ray was seeing health-nut Charlotte even though he never told me about her until he decided not to invest in her kickboxing studio.
But having a little second sight doesn’t mean you can just sit back and relax—far from it. I have to suck up the jabs and think fast, because Mannie is here, his dumb, tough face turned all sucky and concerned, and there’s nothing I can do. There’s no time to get rid of him.
He inches over. “Bev?”
Faye spots us and it’s all I can do not to shove him away. “Yeah. Yes. I just need to breathe here without any stink, okay? I just need a little space to breathe.”
When I look up, Faye is standing a few feet away, staring at us with her cool, black eyes. She’s wearing a brown hoodie with extra-long sleeves, but I can see she’s picking at her fingers. I remember her doing that whenever she got nervous. I’d say something wild like “Let’s write messages with our own blood,” and Faye would pick, pick, pick. Or Ray would tell me to tell Lara to either put on some lipstick or go back to bed, and Faye would pick, pick, pick.
Mannie doesn’t budge. “Can I help you?”
Part of me wants to slam my fist into his thigh, give him the ten-minute charley horse that one of my half brothers taught me. But part of me wants to laugh, because Mannie the Hero is almost as ridiculous as Mannie the Cowboy.
“This is Faye,” I say. “My friend.”
Mannie gets up and the shift in the couch almost makes me howl bloody murder. He leans across the coffee table as far as he can without falling over and offers his hand. “Mannie here. Any friend of Bev’s is a friend of mine.”
Faye stops fidgeting to shake politely. Fat Goth Girl comes up behind her with a dingy wet cloth covered in flu virus. “You guys going to order anything?”
Mannie looks down at me, and I look up at Faye.
“I have a card,” she says. “What do you want?”
Fat Goth turns away as if we’re not worth her time. You dress like a vampire, I want to say, but I bet you go home to your mommy every night. She’s probably a realestate agent, and you borrow her silver sedan to get to your shitty, pocket-change little gig.
“I don’t do hot drinks,” Mannie says. “I need something cold, with a kick to it.”
Faye starts to pick again. It’s hard enough to think these days without Mannie being so Mannie. I tell myself to focus. My game legs may be wobbly, but they haven’t given out yet. “No, this time it’s on me,” I say.
Faye pulls the card out of her pocket. “No, really. I’ve still got lots left on this. What do you want?”
Mannie pushes past my knees and scoots around the coffee table to Faye. He does it in three swift steps, quick as a cat, before I can stop him. Even wearing a filthy apron and hairnet in Ray’s kitchen, there was something catlike about him—sleek black hair, dark-green eyes, arms so lean you could see every muscle.
“I got to look at what they have,” he says, then turns back to me. “You want juice? Juice would be good.”
Since he found out I’m pregnant, Mannie has turned into a fricking dietitian, which is a laugh and a half coming from a guy who lives on instant noodles and weed and still looks cut. When he bugs me about taking my prenatal vitamin, I want to take the pink bullet-shaped pill and shove it up his nostril.
“Don’t tell me what’s good for me,” I say.
Though he’s known her for all of one minute, Mannie turns to Faye for backup. “I’m just saying.”
Faye nods politely but looks ready to bolt.
“Whatever,” I say. “Juice is fine. Anything but apple.”
They go to the counter, and Fat Goth takes a very long time getting three bottles out of a fridge. Mannie says something to Faye, who keeps nodding politely.
For the fourth time today, the Little Alien has the hiccups. They’re steady as a heartbeat, and the first time I noticed them, maybe two weeks ago, that’s exactly what I thought I was hearing. When the little tapping stopped after a few minutes, I wondered if that was it, if the Little Alien was gone and now Mannie would shut up and Lara would start crying over something else and Ray would forgive his chubby little diva for not killing the Little Alien earlier and I would have some peace.
Mannie holds out a poppy-seed bagel on a paper plate.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He puts it on the table and settles in beside me. “What does it look like?”
Faye sits down in the overstuffed armchair across from us and opens a bottle of iced tea. She plays with the cap, like she doesn’t want to interfere.
“Thanks for coming,” I say to her. I can sense Mannie getting ready to pout, and I know I don’t have much time. “You remember your old baba made that poppy-seed cake and your dad walked around with little black bits in his teeth all afternoon?”
Faye smiles a little and keeps playing with her cap.
Mannie drains his energy drink as quickly and loudly as he can, then slams the can on the coffee table like he’s just done something great. “So you guys go way back?”
Most women find Mannie pretty easy on the eyes, but there is no way he is Faye’s type. She looks at him like she’s thinking about something else, like somebody just gave her a math problem she can’t figure out. And she can’t quite believe she can’t figure it out ’cause she’s really good at math.
I take a chance, because sometimes you have to go with your gut, you just have to rip that Band-Aid off. “She’s going to help me with the interview.”
“You getting another job?” Mannie asks. “I thought we’d been through this.”
This is moronic even for Mannie. Since he found out he was going to be a daddy, he’s become not just a nutrition expert, but Mr. Do-The-Right-Thing. He quit dealing to make two-for-one pizzas all night. He acted glad when I quit waitressing at the pancake place because it was “too hard on me.” Whenever I ask how the hell we’re going to pay for food, he says, “Don’t worry, babe. Sit down. Screw Ray. We’re good—we’re together. Don’t worry.”
I want to grab his tongue and twist. But Faye is pick, pick, picking, and I must remain casual and collected, Ms. Relaxed and Controlled. I remember that when actors are sitting around a table on TV, they often eat something to appear natural, so I take a bite of bagel. The poppy seeds stick to the roof of my mouth like sand.
“The adoption interview,” I say.
Mannie crosses his arms and slouches back in the couch like he might take a nap. “Just like that, eh? You decide. You decide everything. You know best, Bev. You know goddamn best.”
If he were more of a man, he would’ve got up and walked out. He would’ve at least had the dignity to know when he wasn’t wanted. But no, Mannie doesn’t quit a job, he just complains about the crap pay. He drives such a shit truck that it can’t make it through three nights of deliveries. He’d rather sulk about how I’m treating him than face the fact that I’d rather serve pancakes to seniors in matching windbreakers and their mouth-breathing grandchildren for the rest of my life than raise a kid with him. I’d rather have a girls’ night out with Denise the social worker. I’d rather pop the zits on Ray’s back, like my poor, victimized mother used to.
But that’s the difference between Mannie and me. He’s had a shitty life, so it’s like he doesn’t know any better, whereas I know I was not meant to fetch packets of rockhard butter that people will try to spread only to end up mutilating their toast. I was meant to run the restaurant. Ray may be a prick, but he taught me this: sometimes you’re going to be short of cash, but you’ve always got to have a plan.
“You’re giving the baby up?” Faye asks.
I swish some juice around in my mouth and nod. The Little Alien is hiccupping again, as if it knows we’re talking about it.
“Why her?” Mannie asks. “What does she have to do with this?”
Because I want to show Ray how it’s done. Because I don’t know anyone else who’s adopted. Because even after I moved back to this third-rate burb, I barely thought of Faye at all, not until after I got into this shit, when I knew I needed a plan, and then I couldn’t get her out of my head.
“Because,” I say, “we go way back.”
I wait for Mannie to bring up Betty, his sainted pseudomother, wait for the sad-sack story about how he knows a thing or two about this stuff and maybe he should have a say because it’s his kid. But he shuts up and keeps pouting.
Faye is looking at my bump, and I think of the time Lara told Faye that she had wise eyes. It was right after Lara’s hysterectomy, when she lay milking it on the couch for days, hopped up on OxyContin. “You look like you got judgment,” she told Faye, and we beelined it out of there, away from the stench of Calming Cucumber body lotion and greasy hair and flat ginger ale.
The Little Alien goes quiet, like it can feel Faye’s eyes on my stomach. For the last five minutes, it hasn’t jabbed or moved, has left me in peace for once, as if it knows its fricking future is at stake here.
No one has to say a word, and I can sense it’s a done deal. You have to be prepared for a few curveballs. You have to trust your instincts and get a little lucky.
“When’s the interview?” Faye asks.
“Three days,” I say. “Tuesday. Four fifteen. I’ll be exactly thirty-one weeks.”
Denise and I pick Faye up outside her school on Tuesday as requested. I can tell by the way she’s standing, hands shoved in pockets and skinny legs stiff as Popsicle sticks, that she’s been waiting for a while. It’s sunny, and she has to walk through a little pile of slush to get to the curb. Denise lets her in the back of the minivan and slides the door closed so hard, you’d think she was a jail guard.
I look back and give Faye a little wave. She smiles like she doesn’t really mean it, and her dainty Chinese nose crinkles a little. I know, I want to say. It stinks like rancid chocolate milk and the smokes Denise must sneak when her kids aren’t around.
“It’s close,” Denise says. “Maybe ten minutes away.”
Now and then, the craziness of things hits you right between the eyes and you have to suck it up. You can’t let yourself think about the fact that you’re suddenly in a social worker’s nasty beater with someone you never thought you’d see again, going to meet some barren couple named Olef and Helga who happen to live in the old neighborhood.
You have to suck it up, let the current take you over the waves, into the spray, onto the rocks. The ocean was the only thing I liked about living out west. I hated the drizzle. I hated the do-gooder two-faced bitches who talked about saving the trees while they stole your boyfriend. But the ocean was all right. Everything going with the flow—don’t even try to paddle, just wait and see where things will wash up.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Ray had asked. “That kid is too stupid to bus tables, never mind raise a kid. And you—you think you’re ready? Lara was always go easy on her, Ray, always don’t be such a hardass. But look what it gets you. What’s your plan?”
“Don’t lecture me,” I said. “I’m not going to make having kids and getting divorced my new hobby. I’m not keeping it.”
“You’re not keeping it,” he said. “Right, I can see that. You’ve obviously looked after things and have just been eating too many Long Johns.”
The Long Johns remark was a low fricking blow. Sometimes, when we still lived in Winnipeg and Lara stayed in bed late on the weekends, Ray would take me to the bakery up the street, and Long Johns were my favorite treat. He teased me about my “Long John gut,” but we still kept going, and in between cell-phone calls, he’d talk about his problems with beverage deliveries and leaky roofs and short-order chefs who stole, like I wasn’t just a kid. And so the blow was all the lower because he was right. I hadn’t looked after things, had let week after week go by without booking an appointment at the clinic. But I hadn’t wanted to think about any of it, not the nauseating tightness in my gut, not the little hand vac they’d stick between my legs, because sometimes thinking too much gets you nowhere.
Look at Lara. She’s gone from thinking she’s fat because her mommy died when she was five to thinking she’s fat because she’s an emotional eater or because Ray is a sociopath. She has a bad back because her fillings are made of mercury, or because her chair at work is toxic, or because Ray is a sociopath. She hashes things over and over, endlessly gazing at her stretch-marked navel and tying her panties up in knots.
Maybe that’s why I always end up back with Mannie, why I find it so hard to stay mad at him. He never seems to worry about what happened five minutes ago, never mind five years. Except when it comes to his foster mom, the sainted Betty, but he only really talks about her in the morning, if we stay in bed for a bit and he lights a joint. I can tell when he’s going to start, because he rolls over to me and brushes my hair out of my face like they do in the movies and smiles, his face still puffy and soft like a little kid’s. Once I knew the signs, though, I could get up to pee before the Bettyfest even began.
Mannie has no postsecondary, no real smarts, but he is a man of action. When I met him, he’d already been charged with strike number two and his probation officer was on speed dial. Mannie had sworn to him that he was done with joyriding, was seeing a new girl, “the fricking heiress of a restaurant chain,” but there were times when he’d show up at Ray’s condo door and hold out a set of keys like a bouquet.
Pretty much everybody in my family has their addiction. With Lara, it’s food and navel-gazing. With Ray, it’s money and wives. With Jill, it was some married record producer with buckteeth. All of my half sibs have their own “thing,” except for the oldest, the twins Karla and Kim, who don’t stay in touch, so I don’t know. For years, I kept waiting to see what my poison would be. I’d seen enough boozers and junkies at my “alternative” West Coast schools to know what a fricking bore they were. There was no way I was going there. Then I met Mannie and, lo and behold, found out I couldn’t get enough of speeding through suburbs in stolen SUVs. It’s dangerous, it’s pointless, but when you’re there, unbuckled, nothing applies to you. Nothing. You run the red, you fling a kid’s car seat out the window, it doesn’t matter if you live or die. Afterward, the high sticks around for a while, the thoughtless, breathless rush, and when Mannie touches you, he is a hungry cat, not a two-bit dealer who says nothing instead of anything, and you let yourself be devoured.
Still, I hated Ray that day he dared to get so pissed at me, because he was right. I’d screwed up. I didn’t need some hypocrite to tell me that, and I knew even before he said it how it was going to end, because even when we’re royally pissed, Ray and I understand each other.
“I can’t support this,” he’d said. “It wouldn’t be right. The gravy train ends today. Let Big Daddy Carjacker support you.”
Giving it up for adoption never would’ve occurred to him. You don’t give away something that’s rightfully yours. Better kill the thing than give it to a stranger, much less a stranger who lives south of the tracks, where the odd tract of public housing brings everything else down.
In the old neighborhood, the farther you get from the river, the less posh it becomes. Within a few minutes, the big old trees and big old houses with dormers and trellises turn into rows of stucco-covered boxes with tacky trimmed hedges. Ray and Lara don’t agree on much, but whenever they ventured a mile or two south of our old place on Montrose, they said the houses “lost all pedigree.” Pedigree is a word they started to use a lot when they got the bright idea to get a basset hound to breed when money was a little tight one winter.
“Oh, the stench,” Lara always says when she tells the story. “Who could have anticipated the profound stench? My eyes water just thinking about that animal.”
“Watch for Taylor,” Denise says. “It’s a right on Taylor.”
Suddenly, I hate Denise almost as much as I hate Ray. The afternoon sun is so bright in Denise’s beater that it hurts, and I wonder how old she must be. Forty? Her makeup has sunk into the little lines around her eyes, and in this light, there are signs of a faint mustache above her lip. She’s probably at that age when most people start needing glasses, although she tries to dress younger. If you got some glasses, I want to say, maybe you’d notice the ’stache and stop squinting in that really unattractive way whenever we’re going through forms.
“Up there,” Faye says. “Taylor.”
We stop in front of a bungalow much like the kind Lara rented when we first moved to Vancouver—beige stucco, concrete steps, two square windows staring at you on either side of the front door.
“Here we are,” says Denise, like we’re her kids and we’ve just arrived at an amusement park. I hate the way Denise is always too much of something—too down-to-business, too touchy-feely, too I’ve-been-in-your-shoes, too cheery, like she’s trying to live down the fact that she’s got a homemade tattoo that says Billy above her left wrist. When I asked her about it, she said it was from a long time ago, in another life, and it reminds her every day how far she’s come. Which seemed like a load of shit to me, and I wasn’t in the mood to let her get away with it. “Right,” I said, “and I bet it would hurt like a bugger and cost a lot to have it removed.”
The front sidewalk has been completely cleared of all signs of slush. The concrete isn’t even wet, as if someone has not only shoveled but also blow-dried the thing. Before we’re even halfway up the walk Helga opens the door and ushers us in.
The living room looks smaller than the one in our house in Vancouver, but it’s hard to tell because there’s a lot more furniture. After Ray dumped her, Lara went all minimalist, but these people have obviously gone to town at some big-box store—matching couch and love seat, matching end tables, matching recliners. The sofasize painting of lily pads must’ve been part of the deal.
Helga takes our coats one by one and piles them in the crook of her arm. “Sit, sit,” she says, pointing from one seat to another. “Make yourself at home. Olef ’s just making coffee, but we have tea, soda. What would you like?”
She heads to the hall closet before we can answer. She is somewhere between sturdy and chubby, maybe thirty pounds overweight, which is about what I expected. In her file, she listed baking and Aquasize as two of her main hobbies.
Denise takes a seat primly on the love seat. The purple of her sweater isn’t a bad color for her, but it’s starting to ball and makes her breasts look saggy. The sleeves are just long enough to cover her wrists and the tattoo.
I sit in one of the hideous recliners, and Helga comes up behind Faye and leads her to the other one. “Now, what can I get you guys?”
I glance over at Faye, who has said all of four words since we picked her up. “Do you have any diet grapefruit?” I say.
“Oh,” Helga says. “No. But we have diet everything else. You name it.”
There’s something about her that reminds me of Heather, Ray’s daughter with his second wife, Val. They both look like they could be the milkmaid on a package of butter—rosy cheeks, big teeth and bigger thighs.
“Surprise me,” I say.
Helga blinks nervously, like I’ve just told her that if she guesses my weight correctly, the baby is hers. “Righto. A surprise it is.”
“Coffee would be lovely,” Denise says.
Faye gives a little wave with her tiny hand. “I’m good.”
Olef appears with a plate of banana bread. The file said he owns a sports memorabilia store, and he looks exactly like the kind of guy who watches—but doesn’t play—a lot of sports. His face is shiny and pale, and if it weren’t for the just-baked banana bread, you could probably smell his sweaty golf shirt.
Denise repeats the introductions with Olef as he passes out cake with no napkins. He looks eager and nervous, that nice guy who only checks you out when he thinks you’re not looking. Except the vibe I’m getting is anything but horniness. He wouldn’t notice if I had a unibrow and one leg; all I am to him is a walking womb—a non-junkie, healthy, blond womb.
He wrote in the file that he’s wanted to be a dad for as long as he can remember. His own father had been a Wolf Cub leader and a hockey coach and played Santa at the community club children’s party. Olef also wrote that Helga is the “light of his life” and that he married her even though she’d had a hysterectomy at twenty-four.
Helga comes back with the coffee and a no-name diet cola. Denise takes her coffee black, and somehow I know that both Helga and Olef will take the works: half-and-half and two sugar cubes each. They settle down on the couch together like two peas in a faux-suede pod.
“Well, it’s so great to finally meet you, Bev,” Helga says.
It hits me that I know all I need to know about these people. Thanks to their profile folder, I know more about them than I do about my own family. Helga is an executive assistant at a big insurance firm, which means she’s a glorified secretary, but will quit when a baby arrives. Her mother died from uterine cancer when Helga was eight, so she wants to be there for every moment of her children’s lives. The biggest challenge in their marriage is that he’s a saver and she’s a shopper. Their favorite place in the world is their cabin at Matlock Beach. They are both Lutheran and, though they don’t attend church, will probably christen their children “because they both found a great sense of security growing up within a community of faith.” They will “welcome this baby into their lives with much joy and be fully prepared to maintain ongoing contact with his/her birth family.”
Denise picks the crumbs off her pants one by one. Faye squeezes her thighs together like she’s horny. Olef and Helga sit and wait, trying not to stare at the bump. What kind of guy wants to have kids more than anything else in the world and marries someone with a bum uterus? Apparently this one, with the homemade banana bread and shiny, desperate face.
“Bev has had a chance to get familiar with your file,” Denise says. “I know she has some questions for you.”
The straw in my drink is the bendy kind they give you in hospitals. I take a long swig, and the Little Alien jabs my pelvic bone. “Helga, you want to be a stay-home mom. Olef, you run a store that’s been open for just over a year. What if the business fails? Do you have a plan?”
They are surprised, but hungry, and recover quickly. Olef tells me he’s worked in retail for years, and if his own place fails, stores are always looking for good people, good managers.
After that, we roll along nicely. The Little Alien jabs, pointless questions pop into my head, and Helga and Olef answer dutifully. Would they both be hands-on parents? Yes. Would the baby have cousins close in age? Yes, a girl and a boy in Calgary, ages two and four, a boy in Brandon, eighteen months, and three girls in Winnipeg, twelve, eight and five. Are there good schools in the area? Yes, an elementary two blocks away, a bus to the high school. Do you have a nursery ready?
Yes. A blinding-yellow box of a room with nothing but a glider rocking chair, probably from the big-box store. We all crowd into the doorway except for Helga, who walks right into the middle and holds out her arms like she’s about to sing opera.
“We both automatically thought yellow,” she says. Her chipper voice echoes against the bare walls, and her cheeks are suddenly more blotchy than rosy.
“It’s like sunflowers,” Faye says.
Helga hugs herself and giggles, as if Faye has just uncovered some in-joke between her and Olef. “Isn’t that funny. The paint’s called Sunflower Fields.”
Good ol’ Faye rescues the milkmaid from blotchiness and tears. I knew there was a reason I brought her along.
I give Denise a let’s-wrap-this-up raise of the eyebrows. “Well,” I say, “you have a lovely home. This has been great. It was so nice meeting you in person.”
“Us too,” Olef says. He takes my hand awkwardly, grasps it in both of his like I’ve just won an award. His hands aren’t sweaty like I expected. They’re smooth and warm and firm.
Denise pulls them both aside into the kitchen, and the grown-ups chatter quietly amongst themselves for a minute. When we get to the van, Faye and I both get in back, as if Denise is just our driver.
“They were nice,” Faye says.
“Yeah,” I say. “They were nice. But I’m not sure they’re the ones.”
Denise turns on the ignition and busies herself pretending to adjust the mirror.
Faye starts pick, pick, picking. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she says.
“What?” I ask. “Can’t do what?”
“This,” she says. “This whole thing.”
“I know it’s weird,” I say. “But I need some backup, Faye. You know Lara, she used to say you had good judgment. You were just a kid and she thought you were the Queen of Good Judgment.”
Denise peers at us through the rearview mirror. She looks tired, like she might be coming down with something. “Well, Bev, you’ve chosen a few files for consideration. We can meet with those couples as well, if you like. You’re in your third trimester now, Bev, and we’ll want to move things along, but we want you to feel totally comfortable with your decision.”
Faye stares down at her poor, picked-over fingers.
“It has the hiccups,” I say. “Do you want to feel? It’s bizarre.”
I grab Faye’s hand and hold it against the bump.
“That’s hiccups?” she asks.
I nod and hold her hand there until we’re practically back at the school.
“You sure you don’t want us to take you home?” Denise asks.
Faye is already out the door. “This is great. I have a late cello practice in the band room.”
It warms my heart to think even perfect Faye is a liar.