One week earlier
The birthday party was at two o’clock, an appropriate hour for an eight-year-old, Jo thought. It was a five-hour drive so she left the farm shortly after eight that morning, giving herself a buffer against thruway construction or a flat tire or natural disaster. Henry was killing chickens as she left, standing beneath the awning off the barn, in his shorts and rubber boots and Grateful Dead T-shirt, his gray hair tied back in a ponytail to keep it from falling over his face as he bent to his work. They had an order of two dozen birds for the market in Monticello the following day.
She dropped down to 84 and took it across the state, skirting Scranton before picking up the Pennsylvania Turnpike and taking it all the way west to the Pittsburgh suburb of Laureltown. It was the first she’d driven the Explorer since Stan at Mooretown Tire & Lube had replaced the brakes and she could notice the difference. For eight hundred dollars and change, she should notice something, she thought. Stan fancied himself both a ladies’ man and a master mechanic and to hear him tell it, replacing the brakes on a ten-year-old Ford fell just short of fine-tuning an Apollo spacecraft. Whatever his expertise in the field of auto mechanics, his technique as a charmer left a lot to be desired. If he was under the impression that talk of scored rotors and seized calipers was the way to get Jo’s blood running, he was seriously mistaken.
It had been six months since Jo had seen Susan and Dave and the birthday girl, Grace, and she felt considerable guilt over the fact. Where did the time go? It was the same old story; they vowed to get together more often and they meant it when they said it but it never happened. Jo, running the farm with Henry, rarely went anywhere socially, especially between the months of April and November. Susan and Dave had their own work, and Grace was involved in too many things for Jo to count—school and soccer and camping and dance and baseball, and undoubtedly a bunch of other activities Jo didn’t know about. Jo did speak to Susan on the phone once a month or so, and always talked to Grace at the same time, so she felt close to them, closer than to most people in her life. She had first met Grace a few hours after she came into the world and had been quite in love with the very thought of her ever since. The summer before this one, she had come to stay with Jo at the farm for three days while Susan and Dave had gone to California for one a work thing of Dave’s. Jo and Grace had spent every waking hour together, and the sleeping ones too, as Grace, then just shy of seven, hadn’t wanted to sleep alone in the old farmhouse, with the creaks and groans of the building and a grumbling hirsute man down the hallway, even if the hairy grumbler was Jo’s grandfather.
She arrived in Laureltown a little past one so she drove directly to the hotel to check in. In the past Susan had always insisted that Jo stay with them, but each year the party grew bigger—Dave’s parents drove up from Florida, Susan’s sister and family from Boston—to the point that there was no room at the house. For the past couple of years Jo had taken a room at the Radisson on the south edge of town.
In her room she washed her face and changed into a dress. She still had a little time to kill and knowing that there was nothing worse than showing up early for a party when the parents are still hurrying about doing last-minute things, she drove around the town for a quarter hour, past the high school where she and Susan had first met, past the bars downtown where they’d occasionally been served underage, by the canning factory where she’d worked after her senior year, before heading off to her short-lived academic career at Penn State.
The subdivision was just ten years old but it felt older. The lots were large, a couple of acres on average, and the houses were all of a vintage design—two-story for the most part, with exteriors of brick or fieldstone or stucco. A lot of functional shutters and leaded glass. When Jo got to the house there were eight or nine cars parked in the drive and along the road out front. The place was a saltbox design of red brick, sitting well back from the street. The lawn on either side of the concrete drive was freshly cut and trimmed for the party, and the pleasant smell of the grass clippings hung heavily in the air. The flower beds were full of color, late bloomers like hibiscus and camellias and mums.
Walking up the drive, Jo heard commotion from around back and so she skirted the house to follow the sound. There a dozen or so kids were running around the yard, all holding plastic rings above their heads, the rings producing great soapy bubbles that either floated through the air into the branches of the trees, or were popped by squealing children. Jo spotted Grace in the crowd but Grace, focused on her bubble ring, didn’t see her. A number of adults, all holding drinks both alcoholic and not, were standing around watching. Jo knew most of them by sight but couldn’t manage any names off hand. She went through the French doors into the house and found Susan in the kitchen, arranging wedges of cantaloupe and watermelon on a platter.
“Shit,” Jo said when she saw the food.
Susan looked up. “Nice to see you too.”
Jo shook her head. “I mean shit, I put together a hamper for you. Tomatoes and peppers and zucchini, bunch of stuff. It’s sitting on my front porch.”
Susan gave her a hug. “Guess you’re going to have to come back.”
Dave had gone into town for pizza so Jo helped with the snacks. The party went on for a couple of hours. There were presents for Grace and then the kids gorged themselves on pizza and what was announced as gluten-free cake. Some of the men were into the beer by then and it looked as if they might hang out a while. Jo waited until the main crowd thinned out before giving Grace her gift. The two of them walked over to the open gazebo perched on a rise on the lawn, next to a row of pine trees that marked the rear property line. They sat and Jo gave the little girl the bag.
“It’s a book,” Grace said, looking inside. She was still a little wound up from the party. And she had received a lot of presents, a number of them books. Jo watched as Grace gave the cover a quick glance before opening it. The little girl’s eyes widened.
“Hey, that’s me,” she said slowly. She took a moment. “And that’s you!” She stared up at Jo. “That’s us in this book!”
“That’s us.”
Grace looked toward the house, where Susan was standing on the patio, talking to her sister. “Mom!”
By the time Susan walked over, the little girl had already flipped through the fifteen pages of the book and started again. “Aunt Jo gave me a book about me and her on her farm. This is so cool. Look, there’s Buster! I told you about Buster.”
Susan looked at the illustrations a moment before smiling at Jo. “Finally putting that artistic bent to work?”
Jo shrugged. “Slow but sure.”
Grace looked up, realizing. “You made this book? No way.”
“I made that book.”
“Like, you did all the pictures and everything?”
“It’s the story of your visit to the farm, start to finish.” Jo reached over and flipped to a page. “That’s when you got your soaker down at the pond.”
“My first soaker ever,” Grace said. “Look at Buster, Mom. When you have a rooster, you don’t need an alarm clock.”
Jo smiled. She was quoting Henry.
Grace turned the page. “Here’s Aunt Jo and me collecting the eggs. Sometimes you have to clean a little poop off them. But they’re fine to eat.”
Jo was aware that Susan was looking at her as if she’d just won a Nobel Prize for something. Grace sighed and closed the book, then held it for a moment in both hands.
“This is the best birthday present anybody ever got,” she decided.
By eight o’clock the birthday girl was tired enough that she offered to go to bed without prompting. Jo took her up and tucked her in. Grace had been carrying the book since she received it and had gone through it with everybody there more than once. Jo sensed a saturation level with the uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents but nobody let on. Now Grace lay the present on the pillow beside her and reached out for a hug, her eyes already closing.
Susan was emptying the dishwasher when Jo went back downstairs. Dave and the others were in the family room, watching football. Both Dave and his father were Gator alumni and would rather—in Susan’s words—sever an appendage than miss a game. Jo poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the island. She would have had more wine but she had to drive to the hotel. Susan, finishing up, sat across from her.
“The best birthday present ever.”
“Hyperbole,” Jo told her.
“It’s not hyperbole if it’s true.”
Jo nodded. “It might have been better if she hadn’t kept mentioning it in front of all the other people who gave her stuff.”
“Screw ’em,” Susan said. “Not your fault you’re original. How’d you go about getting it made anyway?”
“It was amazingly simple. I did the story and the drawings and turned everything over to one of my summer workers, a girl taking art at Columbia. She did it all on her computer and we found a place in town to do the binding.”
Dave came up from the family room, looking for another bottle of wine.
“Gators are up by six.”
“We don’t care,” Susan reminded him.
He cut the foil from the wine. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Kids,” Jo said. “Your kid.”
“Look at you,” Dave said to her. “I can practically hear your ovaries crying out in the wilderness.”
“Nice,” Susan said. “Have another beer, hon.”
Dave sat down, the corkscrew half in the bottle. “Seriously, Jo. Why don’t you just do it? You know you want a kid more than anything.”
“You do understand the process, don’t you?” Jo asked. “Takes two to tango and all that.”
“Get inseminated. It’s the twenty-first century, for Chrissakes.”
“I raise organic food for a living,” Jo said. “Wouldn’t it be bad for my business model if I produced a genetically modified human being?”
“Just do it.” Dave twisted the corkscrew a couple more turns and pulled it to no avail. Susan took it from him. “It’s not genetically modified anyway. It’s real sperm. You want some of mine? I’ll whip you up a batch right now.”
Susan pulled the cork from the bottle and handed it over. “Goodbye.”
He was laughing as he left the room.
“Like you needed that image in your head,” Susan said when he was gone. “But maybe he has a point. Have you thought about it?”
Jo nodded. “I’ve considered it. There’s something so…antiseptic… about it though. Is that really how I want to make a kid?” She drank some coffee. “I’m pretty sure my car mechanic would take a shot at knocking me up.”
Susan’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh?”
“But then he might want to hang around afterward.”
“Well, there’s always a catch.”
Jo sighed. “Maybe I’m destined to live vicariously through you guys and Grace. I could never produce a child that beautiful anyway.”
“Wait until she becomes a snotty teenager. See what you think then.”
“She will never be a snotty teenager,” Jo said. “She’s perfect.”