Then Came You

PART ONE. Sweet and Sour

The man in the suit was watching me again.

It was March of my senior year in college, a clear, chilly afternoon, when I felt what was, by then, the familiar weight of a man’s gaze, while I sat by myself in the food court. I looked up from my dinner, and there he was, at the end of the line for the salad place, looking at me the way he had for the past three weeks.

I sighed. The mall was one of my favorite places, and I didn’t want to give it up because of some creep.

I’d found the mall my freshman year. If you walked off campus, across Nassau Street and into a kiosk in the center of town, you could buy a discounted ticket with your student ID, and the bus would take you to a fancy shopping center with a fancy name, the Princeton MarketFair. There were all of the chains: a Pottery Barn and a Restoration Hardware, and Gaps, both Baby and full-grown, a Victoria’s Secret where you could buy your panties and a LensCrafters where you could pick up a pair of sunglasses, all of them in a sprawling, sterile building with marble floors and flattering, pink-tinted lights. At one end of the mall was a big, airy bookstore, with leather armchairs where you could curl up and read. At the other end was a movie theater that showed four-dollar matinees on Mondays. Between them was the food court.

Shortly after my discovery, I’d learned that only losers used public transportation. I’d found this out when I heard two of my classmates scornfully discussing a date that a girl we all knew had been on. “He took her to the movies. On the bus.” Giggle, giggle… and then a quick look sideways to me, for my approval, because, tall and blond and with two juniors on the varsity crew team vying for my affection, I couldn’t possibly fall into the busgirl’s category.

The truth was I liked the bus, and I liked the mall. It felt real, and Princeton’s campus, with its perfect green lawns and its ivy-clad, gargoyle-ornamented, stained-glass-windowed buildings, and its students, none of whom seemed to suffer from acne or obesity or even bad-hair days, felt like a film set, too wonderful to exist. On campus, everyone walked around as if they’d never had a second of doubt, an instant of feeling like they didn’t belong, carrying their expensive laptops and textbooks, dressed just right. People at the mall did not look as if they’d just stepped out of catalogs. Their clothes were sometimes stained or too tight. They walked past the shop windows yearning after things they didn’t need and couldn’t afford: end-of-their-rope mothers snapping at their kids, boyfriends sighing and shifting their weight from foot to foot as they lingered outside the dressing rooms at Anthropologie, teenagers texting each other from a distance of less than three feet away across the table; the fat people, the old people, the ones with walkers or oxygen tanks or wheelchairs — all of them reminded me of home. Besides, I could practically be guaranteed to never see anyone from school there — not on the bus, for sure; not at the movie theater, at least in the daytime; definitely not scarfing kung pao chicken from China Express. Maybe my classmates came here to buy things, but they never stayed long, which made the mall my secret, a place where I could be myself.

Most Mondays, when my classes ended at 2:00, I’d take the bus and I’d browse in the stores, maybe trying on shoes or a pair of jeans, and I’d see a matinee of whatever movie looked interesting, then have dinner in the food court, or at the sit-down seafood restaurant if I’d managed to pick up some extra hours at my work-study job in the admissions office. For less than twenty dollars, I could make a whole afternoon and early evening pleasantly disappear.

I looked up from my plate again. The man was holding his briefcase, standing in profile, looking like he was trying to decide what to do next. It could, I knew, go one of two ways: he’d keep staring, or he’d work up the nerve to cross the tiled floor and say something.

When I was thirteen, my father sat me down and gave me a little speech. “There’s something you should know,” he’d said. We were in the family room, half a flight down from the front door, a room with pine-paneled walls and mauve-colored carpet and a glass-topped coffee table on which there were a decade’s worth of yearbooks, one for every year my father had been the yearbook advisor at McKinley Junior High.

“What’s that?” This was in the fall; I’d been wearing my soccer uniform; shorts and shin guards and a sweatshirt I’d pulled on for the bike ride home. My dad was in his worn black recliner, a glass of ice cubes and whiskey in his hand, still dressed in the coat and tie he wore to school. My mom was in the kitchen making baked chicken — she’d dip each piece in a mixture of buttermilk and mustard, then roll it in cornflake crumbs. That chicken, along with Rice-A-Roni and a cut-up head of iceberg lettuce doused in bottled ranch dressing, was my favorite meal, and all I wanted was to take a hot shower, pull on my sweatpants and a too-big T-shirt, eat my dinner, and get to my homework. For the first time, math was actually hard for me, and I knew I’d need at least half an hour to get through the problem set we’d been assigned.

My dad ducked his head, sipped his drink, and said into the knot of his tie, “Men are going to look at you.”

This wasn’t news to me, and hadn’t been for a while. “It’s not your fault, Julia,” said my father, pulling off his glasses as he spoke. “It’s what men do. It’s how we’re wired, maybe, men and women. We’re programmed to notice each other.”

I’d flicked my ponytail over my shoulder. I was already five foot four inches of the eventual five foot nine I’d reach. My hair was thick and butterscotch blond, and that fall I’d graduated from a training bra to an actual B-cup, and started junior high. These events combined made me feel as if my body wasn’t really me anymore, but something I lived inside; a borrowed blouse I’d snuck out of my mother’s closet, something I needed to treat carefully and could, if I was lucky, one day return.

Men will look, my dad had said, watching me with a mixture of love and regret. Sometimes, he’d quote a line of Yeats, about how “only God, my dear could love you for yourself And not your golden hair.” It made me feel strange, a little proud, a little ashamed, especially because the truth, which maybe he’d guessed, was that men were already doing more than looking: they’d hoot, they’d whistle, they’d make sucking, smooching sounds when I was alone, walking home from school, and they were in their cars. One of my classmates, Tim Sather, seemed to have decided that his mission in life was to snap my bra strap as often as he could, and Mr. Traub, the gym teacher, would wrap his arms around me, letting his jogging-suited torso press, briefly but firmly, against my back as he helped me with my volleyball serve. That summer I’d been wearing my swimsuit, a dark-blue one-piece, and running through the sprinkler with the Lurie kids, whom I’d been babysitting at the time, and I’d looked up to find Mr. Santos, who lived next door to the Luries, staring at me over the top of his fence with his mouth hanging open. A few weeks later, my older brother, Greg, had gotten in a fight at the town park’s swimming pool. When my mother had fussed over his black eye and swollen cheek, demanding to know who’d started it, Greg had muttered that the boys had been saying stuff about me. My mother hadn’t asked him anything else, and I’d been embarrassed, unsure of how to behave. Did I thank Greg? Did I ask him what the boys had said, if I’d done anything to provoke it? Finally, I decided to say nothing, to pretend the whole thing had never happened. That seemed like the smartest thing to do.

The worst part wasn’t the boys; it was the girls, the ones who had once been my friends. She thinks she’s sooo pretty, I’d heard Missy Henried sneer to Beth Brock one day at lunch after Matt Blum, staring at me across the cafeteria, had almost walked into a table. Like I’d asked for him to stare. I had a mirror, and I’d seen enough magazines and TV shows to know that I was what was considered good-looking, maybe even beautiful. But the beautiful girls on TV or in those glossy pages all seemed happy. They never looked lonely, like their faces, their hair, their bodies were traps keeping them apart from everyone else. I couldn’t figure out why I felt guilty when boys stared, like I was lying, or offering them something I didn’t really have. All I knew was that Missy and Beth and I had been Brownies together; we’d trick-or-treated every October, giggling in the costumes that had turned us into cheerleaders or witches or Pink Ladies from Grease, posing on Missy’s front porch while her father struggled with his video camera. Now I was their enemy. Now they were on one side of a wall, and I was on the other.

“So what am I supposed to do about it?” I asked my dad. Back then, I thought he knew all the answers. Our house was full of books he’d read, biographies of presidents and scientists, thick hardcover novels with approving quotes from The New Yorker on their backs, different from my mother’s mysteries, which were bright paperbacks with actual people on the covers and titles spelled out in foil.

He’d patted my shoulder. “Just be aware.” Almost ten years later, whenever I felt a man’s eyes passing over me — sometimes lightly, like water, sometimes like the high whining of a mosquito in my ear — I’d remember my father, mumbling into his tie, my father, when he was still all right. Love you, sweetheart, he’d said, and hugged me, the way he hardly ever did since my breasts had gotten bigger than bug bites on my chest.

In the food court, I speared a maraschino cherry on my chopstick. The man in the suit made up his mind, walking away from the salad stand, heading straight toward me. I thought he was in his late thirties, maybe his forties, with dark, curly hair and a handsome, coddled face.

I bent over my dinner, hoping he’d just keep walking, and began the time-consuming process of separating the chilies from the chunks of chicken and pineapple, wondering whether he’d work up the nerve to say something or if he was just cruising by for a closer look. When I looked up again he was standing right in front of my table for two, with nothing to eat.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you go to Princeton?”

I nodded, unimpressed. I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said Princeton right across the chest. No makeup, except a little lip gloss and the mascara and eyeliner I never left the dorm without, because my lashes are so sparse and fine that they’re basically invisible without a swipe or two of Lash Out, and my eyes are such a pale blue-gray noncolor that they tend to blend into my forehead without liner, giving my face the look of an underbaked pie.

“You like it there?” he asked. I nodded again.

He lifted his briefcase and moved as if he was going to sit down across from me. I edged my metal-legged chair backward, preparing to tell him, politely, that I needed to finish my dinner and get going because my friends were waiting, when he asked, “Do you play any sports?”

This was a surprise. I’d been betting an either What’s your major or Where are you from… either that or he’d ask me for help, the most common ploy. At the mall, guys would ask which movie I’d seen and if I’d liked it, or if I could help them pick out a necklace or a sweater for their sister or their mom. At the gym, guys would point at the controls for the StairMaster, feigning confusion. Hey, do you know how to work this? In the grocery store, they’d need my assistance picking out pasta or plums. At the gas station, they would require directions; in class, they’d want to know if I’d read the assignment, if I had plans for the weekend, if I’d read this book or heard that band. I know this makes me sound as if my life was a nonstop parade of men who were dying to talk to me, but it’s just the truth. When you look a certain way — blond and tall, with D-cup boobs, with wide-set eyes and a straight nose, and full lips that are dark pink even without lipstick — men want to talk to you. Usually they ask you out, and twice in my life, once in this very mall, I’d been asked if I was a model.

“Field hockey and lacrosse,” I said. I’d played both in high school, but not since.

The man sat down, uninvited. “Are you twenty-one?”

I narrowed my eyes, one hand on the strap of my backpack, wondering whether he was going to propose something illegal or seamy, like phone sex or stripping. Up close, he was older than I’d thought, older than he should have been if he was hitting on a girl my age, maybe forty-five, with a plain gold wedding band on his left hand, and I didn’t want to have dinner with him, or give him my number or my e-mail address or tell him where I lived or let him buy me a drink or a frozen yogurt; I just wanted to finish my food and go back to my dorm room, avoid my boyfriend, curl up with a book, and count the days until graduation. That was when he smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m getting ahead of myself. Jared Baker,” he said, and stuck his hand across the table.

I shook it quickly. The skin of his palms felt as soft as I imagined the skin on his face would. I got to my feet, never mind that half my dinner was still sitting there. “Excuse me, but my friends are probably waiting for me.” I had my tray in one hand and my backpack in the other when Jared Baker said, “How would you like to make twenty thousand dollars?”

I paused. My skin was tingling. Illegal, I thought. It has to be. “Doing what? Smuggling drugs out of Mexico?”

His smile widened so that I could see his teeth. “Egg donation.”

I set my tray back on the table. “Sit,” said Jared Baker, coming around the table to pull my chair out for me. He looped my backpack’s straps over the chair and did everything but spread a paper napkin in my lap. It was a funny performance, like a parody of a man tending to a wife who was fragile as an egg. Or who was carrying fragile eggs. “Eat your dinner.” He frowned at the plate. “Skip the spring roll, though. Saturated fats.”

Looking him right in the eye, I dragged the roll through the slurry of Chinese mustard and duck sauce I’d made, and took a giant bite. His grin widened. “Moxie,” he said. “That’s nice. People like a girl with a sense of humor.”

“Are you serious?” I asked once I’d swallowed. “Twenty thousand dollars for an egg?” I’d seen ads, of course, in the school paper, online, and on fliers posted in the student union and the library. Families seeking egg donors. All expenses paid. Please help make our dreams come true. But I’d never noticed the fee for the egg itself, and I’d never guessed it would be so high.

Jared Baker was friendly, but not smarmy, serious and calm as he asked me more questions: Where had I grown up? What were my SAT scores? Had I ever had an IQ test? Had anyone in my family had cancer or diabetes or mental illness? I gave him the numbers and said no to the illnesses. He pulled a notebook out of his briefcase and asked if I had siblings, how old my mother had been when I was born, and how much I’d weighed as a baby. I was careful with my answers, thinking about what he’d want to hear, what story would go best with the girl he was seeing, a tall, blond, jockish girl in a Princeton sweatshirt who was eating by herself only because her friends had finished first and were waiting for her in the bookstore.

“Ever been pregnant?” he asked, the same way he’d asked if I was a vegetarian or if heart disease ran in my family. I shook my head, ponytail swishing. I’d only had sex with three different boys, an embarrassingly low tally at my age. I was starting to think that I was one of those people who didn’t like sex very much. Maybe it made me lucky. I wouldn’t spend my whole life getting my heart broken, chasing after this guy or that one.

“And are you single?”

I nodded, trying not to look too excited, to give the appearance that men stopped by the food court to offer me piles of cash every Monday I went to the mall, but my mind was racing, imagining what I could do with twenty thousand dollars, a sum I hadn’t imagined possessing unless I won the lottery or married very, very well. Even with the investment-banking job I was going to take after I graduated, I’d have to manage rent in New York City and start paying back my loans, so the idea of having five figures’ worth of discretionary income was new to me, extraordinary, and alluring.

Jared Baker handed me a business card, a rectangle of heavy ivory paper with embossed letters on top that said PRINCETON FERTILITY CLINIC, INC. His name was underneath, with telephone numbers and an e-mail address. “Be in touch,” he said. “I think you’d be an excellent candidate.”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” I said again.

“Minimum,” he repeated. “Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind telling me your name?”

“Julia Strauss,” I said. “My friends call me Jules.”

“Jules,” he said, giving me another appraising look and shaking my hand again.

So that was how it started: in the Princeton MarketFair, over a Styrofoam plate of sweet and sour chicken and a spring roll that I never got to finish. It seemed so simple. I thought that selling an egg would be like giving blood, like checking the Organ Donation box on your driver’s license, like giving away something you’d never wanted or even noticed much to begin with. And yes, at first, I was just in it for the money. It wasn’t about altruism, or feminism, or any other ism. It was about the cash. But I wasn’t going to blow it on clothes or a car or a graduation bash, on Ecstasy or a trip to Vail, or Europe, or one of the hundred frivolous things my classmates might have chosen. I was going to take that money and I was going to try to save my father… or, more accurately, I was going to give him one last chance to save himself.

I stood in the kitchen with the telephone in my hand, heart pounding, until I heard a familiar voice on the other end say hello. “Ma?”

“Annie?” she asked. I could hear the sound of the TV set blaring in the background. My mother loved her programs, especially The View, which was why I knew exactly where to find her Monday through Friday from eleven to noon. “Are you still coming?”

I exhaled. She’d remembered. That was good. I wasn’t sure whether my mom had anything more than regular forgetfulness or something worse, like early-onset Alzheimer’s, which I’d looked up a few times on the Internet, but if there was something important, something you needed my mother to remember, you had to tell her and tell her and tell her again, and even then be prepared for the possibility that it would still slip her mind.

“Nancy’s here already. We’re just going over my bank statement.”

I imagined my sister sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with her acrylic nails tapping at her calculator. “The boys and I are on our way. And I’ve got some good news.”

“Ooh, fun,” she said. “Bye-bye, now.”

I switched off The Backyardigans, wondering when it was that my mother had started sounding more like a child than my actual children, and hurried Frank Junior, five, and Spencer, who had just turned three, upstairs to the bathroom, the only one in our three-story, five-bedroom farmhouse in Phoenixville, about forty-five miles outside Philadelphia. Frank and I had bought the farmhouse at auction five years ago. It had been a bargain, a big, sprawling place originally built in 1890, on three acres of land, with what the Realtor called “outbuildings” that had once been chicken coops and stalls for horses, along with a working outhouse that stood just off the back porch with the door now stuccoed shut.

Frank and I had grown up in the Great Northeast, in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. I’d lived in a ranch house with my sister and my parents; Frank and his mother and father had a duplex a mile away. Both of us loved the idea of a big place to spread out in and raise our own family: a garden to grow vegetables and flowers, a yard for children to run in, a big country kitchen with two ovens and a six-burner stove where our families could gather and I could cook. When the farm came up for sale, we scraped together enough money for a down payment and convinced a bank that we could afford it. I had a little money I’d inherited from my grandmother, Frank had some help from his parents, and in those days, not so long ago, the banks gave out mortgages like they hand out lollipops, to pretty much anyone who asked.

We’d been so excited about what the farmhouse had — hardwood floors, wood-burning fireplaces, that big, sunny kitchen with whitewashed walls, the thicket of raspberry bushes at the edge of the yard — that we’d barely noticed the things it was lacking: working toilets, reliable appliances, closet space. We hadn’t thought about the high cost of heating and maintaining such a big home, or the time it would take to mow the lawn in the summer and how much it would cost to get the driveway plowed in the winter. Frank had a job working security at the Philadelphia airport, but that wasn’t a permanent thing. He was going to school to be an airplane mechanic; we’d planned on his getting raises and promotions, but of course, we had no way of knowing that the economy would crash and the airlines would end up in trouble. But now, I thought, I’d found a solution, a way to get ourselves out of the hole we’d fallen into and move up a few rungs on the ladder, the way my sister had.

“Frank Junior, you go first,” I said, pointing my oldest son toward the toilet.

He frowned at me, eyebrows drawn, lower lip pouting. “Privacy,” he said. Frank Junior looked just like his father, tall for his age, lean and wiry, with nut-brown skin and tightly curled hair and full lips. Spencer looked more like me: lighter skin, straighter hair, a round face and a sweet, plump belly I’d kiss every time I changed his diaper. People who saw the three of us together, without Frank, didn’t always realize that I was their mom. I took a secret pleasure from that moment, when they’d look from the dark-skinned boys to the white lady taking care of them and try to figure out the deal — was I the sitter? The nanny to a famous rapper’s kids? Some do-gooder who’d done an Angelina and adopted a poor black child from Africa?

I changed Spencer’s diaper, made both boys wash their hands, inspected them to make sure their zippers were zipped, their buttons were buttoned, and their shoes were Velcro’d shut, then bundled their warm little-boy bodies into their coats — it was April, but chilly — and loaded them into the car. My parents were still in Somerton, the neighborhood where I’d grown up, but they’d moved to a condominium that my sister, Nancy, had helped them buy after she and her husband decided that “the house was getting to be too much for them.”

I knew I should have been grateful to my big sister. She’d been right about the house. Three years ago, my father had had a heart attack — a mild one, but still — and my mother was always forgetting about things like having the furnace filters changed and the gutters cleaned and the paper delivery stopped when the two of them went on their bus trips. Still there was something that bothered me about the way Nancy had done it, as if the doctor husband and the degree from Penn State meant that she was smarter than the rest of us, that she was the one who knew best.

But that was Nancy for you, I thought, snapping the buckles of Spencer’s car seat closed, then hurrying back into the house for string cheese and sippy cups, to pull my cell phone out of its charger and grab my purse. She used to be fat and bossy, and then, when she finished high school, she’d gone to work in a doctor’s office that did gastric banding and gotten the procedure and become skinny and bossy. One of the doctors in the practice had fallen for her, so now she was married and bossy, with that college degree that she never once let us forget about, the first one that anyone in our family had earned. I should just be grateful, I thought, as I got behind the wheel, that she and Dr. Scott were generous, even though I could feel a bitter taste crawl up the back of my throat whenever Nancy sweetly offered my parents a loan or slapped down her platinum card to pay for their gas or their groceries.

My mom was waiting at the door, waving as if she hadn’t seen us in months, when, in fact, we’d had dinner with her on Friday. She looked like a children’s book drawing of a grandma, short and plump, with white hair drawn back softly in a bun, a rounded face, and pink cheeks. She wore a flounced denim skirt, a frilly white blouse, boiled-wool clogs on her feet, and a yellow-and-pink apron in a cheerful paisley pattern around her waist. Frank Junior and Spencer pelted up the concrete stairs and into her arms. “How are my handsome boys?” she crooned, hugging them, making me feel ashamed for the way I judged her. Maybe she was silly and forgetful, maybe she spent a lot of time involved in the feuds and dramas of the Real Housewives of whatever city Bravo was visiting that season, but she loved my father, she loved me and Nancy, she loved her grandsons, she loved Frank, and she even managed to love Dr. Scott, who had the good looks and personality of a dried booger.

The condo was toasty warm, smelling like baked-apple air freshener and cinnamon potpourri. It wasn’t a big place to begin with, and my mom had covered every available wall and surface with framed stitched samplers, frilly doilies, cushions embroidered with inspirational sayings, scented candles, fringe-shaded lamps, and collections of commemorative snow globes, shot glasses, and thimbles from every place from Branson to Atlantic City to Disney World. On the coffee table were cut-glass dishes of nuts and foil-wrapped candies whose colors would change with the season and were currently pastels for Easter. In the bathroom, extra rolls of toilet paper were tucked underneath the skirts of dolls with old-fashioned dresses and yellow yarn hair. There was even a crocheted sock-style wrap for the air freshener can. The first time we’d visited, Frank said my parents’ place looked like a Cracker Barrel had thrown up in the living room.

“I baked cookies!” she cried as Spencer inserted a whole pistachio, still in its shell, up his nose, and Frank Junior crammed a fistful of pale-pink M&M’s into his mouth. Moving fast, I scooped the nut out of Spencer’s nostril, gave Frank Junior a stern look, gathered up the dishes of peppermints and butterscotch candies, Hershey’s Kisses and Swedish Fish, and put them out of reach.

I turned from the mantel, from which Christmas stockings hung year-round, and saw my sister standing in the kitchen door, studying me.

“Hi, Nance.”

She nodded. In high school, she had our mother’s rosy cheeks and fine, flyaway light-brown hair. She’d been pretty, sweet-faced, with soft features and a body as plump as a bunch of pillows tied together. It had been hard to take her seriously when she told me what to wear and what to do during the daytime when, at night, I’d fall asleep while she cried over some insult, imagined or, more often, real.

Now she was a size two with a butt and belly you could bounce quarters off of, and she worked as a part-time bookkeeper and receptionist in Dr. Scott’s office and spent most of her time working out, buying clothes to show off her new body, and, as she’d told Mary Sheehan, a classmate we’d bumped into Christmas shopping at the Franklin Mills mall, “planning our next vacation.”

“That was kind of rude,” I told her when we stopped at the food court. I was having a pretzel, she was sipping bottled water.

“It’s true,” she’d said with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “She asked what I do, and I told her.”

I took a bite so I wouldn’t say something smart, or point out that Nancy and Dr. Scott, who had chosen not to have children, weren’t exactly renting a yacht and cruising the Greek islands or spending weekends in Paris. Scott’s idea of a good time began and ended with squash, so Nancy’s job — quote-unquote — was to find the resorts that were hosting some kind of medical conference and also had regulation squash courts, so that Dr. Scott could play his game and take the whole thing as a write-off.

My sister’s face was a smooth and poreless beige, and her hair, which she had chemically straightened every three months, hung in stiff curtains against each cheek. Her mouth was lipsticked and her eyelids shaded, and her jeans looked brand-new. She wore a black sweater tucked into her waistband, which was cinched with a black leather silver-buckled belt, and high-heeled leather boots on her feet. I turned to hide my smile. She looked like Oprah when she’d wheeled that wagon of fat across the stage, a thin, white Oprah full of the talk-show host’s confidence and self-regard. I hugged her, feeling dowdy in my own jeans (unpressed) and sweater (untucked) and boots that were not leather or high-heeled but, instead, rubber-soled lace-ups lined with dingy fake fur, fine for a muddy Pennsylvania spring but not what you’d call fashionable. Once I’d been the pretty one, the thin (at least by comparison) one, the stylish one. But I’d kept on about ten pounds of baby weight after each boy and there was hardly any money for new clothes. These days, what I wore had to be practical, and I barely had time to comb my hair, let alone style it, or pay someone three hundred dollars every three months to do it for me. I looked ordinary, a woman of average height, a little rounder than she should have been, with light-brown hair usually in a ponytail and blue-green eyes usually without shadow on their lids or mascara on their lashes, a woman with a diaper bag slung over her shoulder and a plastic bag full of Cheerios in her pocket who maybe could have been pretty if she’d had a little more time.

“Mom said you had news,” she said. “Are you pregnant again?” She scrunched up her nose, loading the question with just enough distaste that I could hear it, but not enough that I could call her on it. My mother lingered by the oven, watching the cookies and keeping an eye on us for signs of violence.

“No, I’m not pregnant.” I tried to keep my own voice pleasant, thinking, You’re not the only one with plans. You’re not the only one with dreams. “But that’s part of what I wanted to tell you, Mom.”

My mother perked up. “What’s going on?”

“Give me a minute.” I got the boys set up in front of the TV in my mother’s living room, telling myself that a half hour of something educational was a necessary evil. Normally, I tried to limit their TV time and get them out and moving in the fresh air as much as I could. You’ve got to run boys like dogs, my mother had told me when Frank Junior was just two. I’d thought it was a terrible thing to say. Once Frank Junior started walking I understood, but in my parents’ condo complex there was nowhere to run. Most of the residents were older, and the tiny rectangles of deck off their kitchens were all they had. The playground was just sad, with a rusted swing set, a broken teeter-totter, and a single basketball hoop. There was a pool, but the one time we’d tried to use it, the lifeguard had yelled at the boys for running, for splashing, for cannonballing, and for improper use of the water aerobic teacher’s foam noodles, all within ten minutes of our arrival. We’d never gone back.

Back in the kitchen, my mother was pouring coffee. Nancy sat at the table, which was draped in one of my mother’s paisley-patterned tablecloths. In the center of the table there was a bouquet of dried roses (“Explain to me the difference between ‘dried’ and ‘dead,’ “ Frank had said after noticing my mother’s dried-red-pepper wreath) and ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the shape of Minnie and Mickey Mouse. Nancy had her legs crossed, one pointed toe of her leather boot turning in small, irritated-looking circles. “So what’s the big announcement?” she asked.

“I’m going to be a surrogate.” This was not exactly true. What was true was that, that morning, I’d gotten a phone call saying I’d been accepted into the Princeton Fertility Clinic’s program. My information was now available to their clients on their website. Hopefully, soon a client would click on my profile, read the essays I’d worked so hard on and the pictures I’d cropped and retouched, and ask me to have her baby.

“Huh,” said Nancy, fiddling with the zipper on her boot. My hopes of my family’s being happy on my behalf were dwindling. My sister, as usual, looked bored and slightly hostile, and my mother, as usual, looked confused.

“It means,” I began, before Nancy jumped in, leaning forward in her best college-graduate-sister-giving-a-speech mode, which had only gotten more obnoxious since she’d married a doctor and felt qualified to lecture about all things health-related.

“It means she’s going to have a baby for a couple that can’t have one.”

“Or a single mother,” I said, just to stick it in Nancy’s face, to show her that she didn’t have all the answers. “Or a gay couple.”

“Oh,” my mother said. “Oh, well, that’s sweet.”

“She’s not doing it to be sweet,” said Nancy. She pulled her iPhone — one of the new ones — out of her bag and started tapping at the screen with one painted fingernail, like a bird pecking for feed. “She’s doing it for money.”

“That’s not exactly true,” I said. My tone was light, but inside I was furious. Leave it to Nancy to make it sound like it was all about the fifty thousand dollars I’d be paid. . and, also, to be right. For years I’d been trying to find a way to earn money while staying home with the boys, clicking on every “Make Hundreds of $$$ at Home” ad that popped up on the Internet, figuring out whether I could sell makeup or Amway during the ninety minutes three days a week when Frank Junior was at school and Spencer was asleep. I’d filled out an application to be a teacher’s aide at Spencer’s preschool, but the job paid only eight dollars an hour, which, between gas and babysitting meant I’d be losing money if I took it. “Yes, I’ll be getting paid, but it’s not just that. I really do want to help someone.”

“That’s nice.” My mother had drifted toward the sink. She picked up a roll of paper towels, each sheet printed with a row of pink-and-blue marching ducks. I wondered if she was trying to figure out how to make it cuter somehow, to stitch a quick ball-fringe onto the wooden dispenser or cover it in ConTact paper patterned with dancing milkmaids.

“How much will they pay you?” Nancy asked, without looking up from her screen.

“Why would you want to know that?” I inquired pleasantly, which was what Ann Landers said you were supposed to do when someone asked you something rude. I’d never asked Nancy how much she earned working for her husband, answering his phone in her clipped, just-short-of-rude voice and planning their squash getaways. “It’s a lot,” I said when she didn’t answer. “I’m working with one of the best programs on the East Coast.”

“How do you know they’re the best? Because their website says so?” Nancy ran her fingers through her hair curtains and tilted her head, giving me the same wide-eyed, quizzical look the morning-show newscaster used when she was asking the hiker who’d hacked his own arm off whether he shouldn’t have told someone where he’d be going before he got trapped in that slot canyon.

“They have a very high success rate. Very satisfied customers.”

“So how does it work?” my mother asked, joining us at the table with her coffee.

“I wait for a couple to choose me. The egg will be fertilized in the lab…”

“So romantic,” Nancy scoffed under her breath.

“… and then implanted. Nine months later, I’ll have the baby, and give it to the parents.”

A frown creased my mother’s face. “Oh, honey. Won’t that be hard?”

“It won’t be my baby,” I explained. “It’ll be more like being a babysitter. Only no cleaning up.” I tried to smile. My mother still looked worried. Nancy had gone back to glaring at her iPhone. “Lots of women do this,” I continued. “Thousands of them. Lots of them are military wives. The insurance pays for everything to do with a birth…”

“Even if the soldier isn’t the father?” Nancy asked.

I bit my lip. This was sort of a gray area. Frank was in the reserves, and his insurance would cover my care as long as my name was still on his policy, but Leslie at the clinic had told me it might be better not to mention to the nurses and the doctors I’d be seeing that this wasn’t Frank’s baby. “We’ve never had a problem,” she explained. “There’s a long history of Tricare looking the other way in cases like these, and we can recommend doctors and nurses we’ve worked with successfully before. They know how little men like your husband get paid for the important work they do, so they understand about how wives would want to contribute to the family income.” It sounded like this was a speech Leslie had given before. Still, it made me nervous. When the baby was born, I guessed it would be white, like me; white, like most of the couples in America who hired surrogates. It wouldn’t be too hard for anyone who was paying attention to figure out that Frank wasn’t the father. . but I’d worry about that when I got picked. If I got picked.

“What’s your problem?” I asked my sister, tugging at the hem of my sweater, wishing I’d worn something that fit me a little better and wasn’t six years old. . which, inevitably, led to wishing that I had things that fit me better and were new.

“Girls,” my mother murmured, clutching her mug like a life buoy.

“No, seriously, Nancy. If you’ve got a problem, you might as well tell me now.” Not that I’d let her objections stop me. Nancy drove a Lexus and had that iPhone and her platinum card. She had no idea what it was like to live in a big old house, to feed and clothe two boys who seemed to never stop growing and never stop eating, to keep everything repaired and running on one paycheck that never stretched far enough. She could object, she could complain, she could be sarcastic, but unless she was prepared to give me money, nothing she could say would change my mind.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, allowing me a glimpse of the pearls in her lobes — real ones, I knew, that Dr. Scott had bought her for her birthday. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “It just seems unnatural.”

“Like getting your stomach stapled? Because that seemed pretty unnatural to me.”

Nancy jerked her head back like I’d slapped her.

“Banded,” she said. “It’s not stapled, it’s banded.”

“Girls,” my mother repeated. She’d never been the one to break up our fights. Our father was the disciplinarian. He was a baker at a supermarket, a big, husky man who stood six foot three and weighed close to three hundred pounds, not many of which were fat. He baked bread, mostly; rolls, sometimes croissants, leaving the sweet stuff — what he called “the fancies”—to other bakers. The one exception he made was for our birthdays, when he’d get up extra early to bake and frost our cakes. They were beautiful, those cakes. One year I’d asked for the Little Mermaid, and my father had covered my cake in an ocean of turquoise-blue icing that peaked in tiny white-capped waves, tumbling toward a golden shore upon which a topless mermaid with tiny pink-tipped boobies lounged underneath a green gum-drop palm tree.

“It’s just strange,” said Nancy. . and she sounded truly confused. I hadn’t heard that tone much since she’d gotten skinny and gotten married and gotten the idea that she knew everything there was to know about everything. “I saw a TV special about these women in India. Women in America hire women there to carry their babies — mostly because they can’t have kids of their own, but sometimes just because they don’t want to. They don’t want to gain weight or have stretch marks or be inconvenienced. It just seemed wrong. Women shouldn’t use each other that way.”

“Well, I’m not being used, and I won’t be having a baby for someone who just doesn’t want to be inconvenienced,” I said, even though I wasn’t completely sure if this was true. The clinic’s literature said I’d be helping an infertile couple—fertility was, of course, right there in the place’s name — but I could imagine some rich woman saying she was infertile and getting a surrogate just because she wanted to wear a bikini that summer, or didn’t want to miss out on a wine tasting or a ski vacation. Or, I thought meanly, a squash trip. “I’m going to be helping someone.”

There was a wooden bowl full of apples next to the salt and pepper shakers. My mother took one and started peeling it with a silver fruit knife with a mother-of-pearl handle that she’d ordered from QVC, a channel she affectionately called “the Q.” Only your mother, Frank had said, has pet names for her favorite stations. “Do you think you can do that? Have a baby and then just hand it over?”

I looked past her into the living room. The boys were on the couch, their crumb-laden napkins on the coffee table. Frank Junior was holding Spencer’s hand, the way he did when his little brother got scared at the movies. My boys. I thought about the bicycle Frank Junior wanted, a red Huffy in the window of the shop downtown that he would visit every time I took him on my errands with me. I thought about being able to sign Spencer up for sports readiness at the Little Gym, where classes cost four hundred dollars a semester. I thought about buying new winter coats and boots, instead of scouring the cardboard boxes at the church’s winter swap for hand-me-downs, and not worrying if they lost a mitten or if Frank Junior tore the sleeve of a sweater that I’d been planning to pass down to his brother. “I think I’ll be sad. But it won’t be my baby. It’ll be theirs. The intended parents.” Intended parents was a term I’d learned from the surrogacy websites. “As long as I can remember that, I should be fine.”

“And Frank?” My sister, I’d thought more than once, was like a woman on a long car trip with her finger pressed against the stereo’s “search” button, scanning up and down the dial, looking not for music but for trouble. “Have you talked to him about this?”

“We’ve discussed it.” In my head. In fact, this discussion was my rehearsal, my trial run for how I’d tell my husband what I’d done.

“I think it’s great,” my mother said.

“I think it’s crazy,” said Nancy.

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” I said stiffly, and got up from the table. But Fancy Nancy wasn’t done yet.

“I know you,” Nancy said. “You’re tenderhearted.” The way she said it—tenderhearted—it was like she was telling me I had bad breath, or hepatitis C. “They’re going to give you that baby to hold and you won’t want to let her go.”

“Why do you think it’ll be a girl? I only have boys.” The words came out more ruefully than I’d intended. I’d always wanted a girl, and I’d hoped, privately, that Spencer would be one, and that I could dress her in all the beautiful little pink things I’d looked at when I was buying Frank Junior his tiny jeans and sweatshirts. I’d felt a little sad when they’d told me I was having another boy, because two was our limit, unless Frank won the lottery or I found a way to change his mind. I would have loved a big family, but we couldn’t afford one.

“Especially if it’s a girl,” said Nancy. I sighed. We’d shared a bedroom until she left for college. She’d watched me dress up my Barbies in outfits I’d sewn myself and cook cakes for Roxie, the cocker spaniel next door, in my Easy-Bake Oven. If anyone in the world knew how much I would have loved having a daughter, it was Nancy.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and looked at my mother. “Want to take the boys for pizza? I told them we’d do Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Oh, right. Let me get my coat.”

I turned to my sister. “You’re welcome to join us.”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “Those places make me feel like I’m going to have a seizure. And you know I don’t eat wheat or dairy.”

Or anything else. “Okay, then. See you soon.”

I got the boys back in the car, feeling as if a thundercloud had settled in my chest. All I’d wanted was for someone to be happy for me — happy with me, straight-up happy, not happy with questions, or happy with reservations, or happy but confused, or not happy at all. . and there was no one in my life, including my husband, who fit the bill.

I met my stepmother — not that I would ever dignify the bitch with that title — the spring of my senior year at Vassar. My father placed the call to my dorm room himself, instead of having his assistant call me, and then making me wait on hold until he could come to the phone. Big news, I thought. Important. “Tina,” he said. “There’s someone special I want you to meet.”

He sent a car to take me home for the weekend. As usual, I asked Manuel to collect me at the coffee shop downtown, even though I wasn’t fooling anyone — in the era of Google and Gawker, all of my classmates who cared to make the effort of typing my name into a search engine knew exactly who I was.

Manuel drove me to Bridgehampton. The two of them, my father and India, were waiting for me in the doorway of the gray shingled house, like an ad for Cadillacs or Cialis, or for one of those Internet dating services for old people. When I saw him standing there, his arm around her narrow waist, I knew. “This is India,” my father said.

“The subcontinent?” I asked. India had laughed like she was reading words off a script: “Ha… ha… ha.” Then my brothers arrived, Trey pulling up in the minivan he’d bought when his daughter was born, Tommy slouched in the seat beside him, like he was ashamed to be riding in such a desperately unhip vehicle. My father beamed and dispensed hugs and introductions, and we all went in for dinner.

I sat quietly, observing, in the big kitchen with its white-painted floors and blue-and-white-striped cushioned benches. My parents had bought the place when I was ten, and my mother had decorated in a nautical theme, all crisp blues and whites and windows shaped like portholes, with canvas slipcovers for the couches and sisal rugs on the floor. I wondered if India was already dreaming of the improvements she’d make, the addition she’d build, the bedrooms she’d annex for her Pilates equipment and her clothes.

Once the meal was finished and my father and India — quote-unquote — had adjourned to the living room (India in her heels and fancy jeans and the fringed tweed Chanel jacket that she’d worn to pick at a meal of hamburgers and Carvel ice-cream cake), my brothers and I excused ourselves, then snuck through the butler’s pantry and out onto the back porch. Tommy pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and gave one to me and one to Trey. My classmates would have howled to see me smoking — to them, I was Bettina the straitlaced, Bettina the pure. The truth was, I only smoked with my brothers, and I only did it because it was one of the rare times they’d let me into their circle and talk to me like a person.

“Now, I ain’t saying she a gold digger,” Tommy sang. Trey shoved his hands into his pockets and gave a hooting laugh. I rolled my cigarette between my fingers and announced, “If any of those parts are original, then I am the queen of Romania.”

“Dorothy Parker,” said Tommy, tipping the bottle of beer he’d snagged from the refrigerator toward me in a toast. “Nice.”

Tommy flicked his lighter and shielded the flame with his hand until my cigarette was lit. I inhaled, blew a plume of smoke into the starry night sky, and delivered my one-word assessment of our father’s new ladyfriend: “Bitch.”

“C’mon, Bets,” said Tommy. “Maybe she’s not that bad.”

“Oh, she’s that bad,” I assured him. I knew her type. India — not that I believed for a second that India could actually be her name — had made an effort during the meal, asking Tommy about his band, Dirty Birdy, and Trey about his daughter and me about my internship appraising European paintings for Christie’s. She let us know that she knew things about us, where we lived and what we liked and what our hobbies were: that Tommy played the bass and guitar, that I collected things — seashells and bottlecaps when I was little; antique compacts and cigarette cases now. She was polite; she was — or at least acted — interested. She’d laughed (“ha. . ha. . ha”) when she’d gotten ketchup on the sleeve of her blouse, and hopped up from the table to clear the dishes. All of this should have eased my mind, but there was a hardness about her, something calculated, flinty and unkind. I could see scars behind her ears, beneath her chin. The skin of her cheeks was too taut and her breasts were too big for her frame. Her hair was dyed, her nose was done, and I suspected tinted lenses were responsible for the luminous indigo of her eyes. Who are you, really, I wondered as she rinsed and dried plates and kept up her expert, cheerful chatter. Who are you? And what do you want with my dad?

“I bet her name’s really something like Tammy,” I told my brothers. Trey just shrugged, and Tommy said, in the calm way that made me crazy, “Trying to make something of yourself isn’t a crime.”

“Making something of yourself is fine,” I replied. “Getting a boob job, dying your hair, getting your nose done, changing your name, whatever. That’s all fine. I don’t object. But she should make her own money, instead of going after his.”

“Dad’s a big boy,” said Trey, thumbing his BlackBerry, probably to see if his wife had called or texted or sent pictures of the most recent adorable thing that nine-month-old Violet had done during the three minutes since he’d last checked.

“And he’s lonely,” said Tommy.

I exhaled. This was the truly infuriating part. If our father had serially discarded his wives, trading up for younger, hotter models, we’d have rolled our eyes and agreed that he was getting what he deserved with the world’s Indias. But our mother had left him. After all her time in Manhattan, her years as a stay-at-home mom, a PTA volunteer, a fund-raiser for cancer research and the preservation of historic churches, she’d fallen under the sway of her yoga instructor, one Michael Essensen of Brick, New Jersey, who, after a six-week sojourn in Mumbai, had renamed himself Baba Mahatma and opened a yoga center and spiritual retreat five blocks from our apartment. The Baba, as my brothers and I called him, started popping up in passing in my mother’s conversation: The Baba says Americans should eat a more plant-based diet. The Baba says colonics changed his life. A few months after she’d started taking classes, we would come home from school and find the Baba himself in the kitchen, in all his ponytailed, tattooed, yoga-panted splendor, dispensing wisdom over a pot of green tea. “Oh, hi, guys,” my mother would say, blinking like she was trying to remember our names. The Baba, who had a chiseled chin and an artificial tan and flowing locks inspired by Fabio, would give us an indulgent nod, pour more tea for both of them (never offering me or my brothers a cup), and continue talking about whatever cleanse or fast or ritual he was endorsing that week. At fourteen, I’d been able to identify his spiel as incense-scented nonsense, but my mother had believed every word of it, swearing to her friends (and, eventually, to the strangers she’d corner in the schoolyard or the dentist’s office or the fish counter at Russ & Daughters) that the Baba was magical, and that his ministrations had helped her survive the mood swings and hot flashes of menopause when the hormone therapy prescribed by the top doctors in Manhattan had failed.

My mother had been born Arlene Sandusky in a suburb of Detroit in 1958. She’d married my father at twenty-three, then moved to New York, where she’d had three children and become an enthusiastic baker of cookies and trimmer of Christmas trees, a woman who liked nothing better than taking on some elaborate holiday-related project — assembling and frosting a gingerbread house, or running the schoolwide Easter egg hunt. In the wake of her association with the Baba, she’d ditched her traditions and her Martha Stewart cookbooks. She’d grown her hair long and let it go gray. She’d swapped her designer suits and high heels for embroidered tunics and thick-strapped leather sandals, and traded her Bulgari perfume for a mixture of essential oils that made her smell like the backseat of a particularly malodorous taxicab, sandalwood and curry with hints of vomit. She’d gotten a belly piercing that I’d seen and a tattoo that I hadn’t — I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to ask where or of what—and, eventually, she began slipping the Baba tens of thousands of dollars. When my father’s accountants finally started to ask questions about what the Order of New Light was and whether it was, in fact, a tax-free C corporation, she’d announced her intentions to get a divorce and follow the Baba to Taos, where he was building a retreat offering intensive yoga training, raw cuisine, and a clothing-optional sweat lodge.

I came home from school one afternoon and found luggage lined up in the hall and my mother in her bedroom, packing. “I am renouncing the meaninglessness of the material,” she said, sitting on top of her Louis Vuitton suitcase to get the zipper closed. I pointed out that the meaninglessness of the material did not seem to cover the great quantity of Tory Burch tunics and Juicy Couture sweat suits that she had packed.

“Oh, Bettina,” she said, in a tone that mixed scorn and, unbelievably, pity. “Don’t be so rigid.” She kissed me, taking me into her arms for an unwelcome and musky embrace.

“Be good to your father,” she said, smoothing my hair as I tried not to wriggle away. “He’s a good man, but he’s just not very evolved.”

After that, my mother communicated by letters and postcards, while my father became Topic A in the gossip columns and, when he started dating again, prey for single ladies of a certain age. There was the magazine editor famous enough to have been skewered in a movie, played by an actress who, in my opinion, was ten years too young and significantly too pretty to be a plausible standin. She was followed by a real-estate mogul with a face permanently frozen into a look of startled puzzlement, then a newspaper columnist, similarly Botoxed, who’d made a career out of being bitchy on the Sunday-morning political chat shows. In that realm of gray-suited, gray-faced men, it turned out that even a not-terribly-attractive fifty-two-year-old could pass herself off as a babe if she wore pencil skirts, kept her hair dyed, and made the occasional reference to oral sex.

Even when my father was technically attached, it didn’t stop other women from trying. There would be a hand that lingered on his forearm, a cheek kiss that ended up grazing his lips, a business card with a cell phone number scribbled on it, pressed into his palm at the end of a night. My father had resisted them all, the waitresses and the young divorcees and the actress-slash-models… which was why it made no sense that he’d fall for this hard-edged, new-nosed, fake-named “India,” who was no more in her thirties than I was the winner of America’s Next Top Model.

“Are you worried she’s going to spend our inheritance?” Tommy asked, spinning the wheel of his lighter.

“It’s not about the money,” I said, ignoring the twinge I felt at the thought of this stranger squandering what should have been mine. I had a trust fund, worth ten million dollars, that I’d be able to access on my twenty-first birthday, which was coming in two months. My father had already told me he’d buy me an apartment after I graduated, in whatever city I ended up working. Needless to say, I had no student loans. I’d most likely get a job that offered health insurance, and I’d inherited all the clothes, shoes, furs, and jewelry that my mother hadn’t sold before decamping to New Mexico. Even if my father married some grasping bitch (unlikely) and didn’t sign a prenup (even more unlikely), my brothers and I would be fine. I knew, for example, that my dad had already set up a trust for Trey’s daughter, Violet, and that he’d bought new amps for Dirty Birdy, which specialized in thrash-metal covers of female singer-songwriter ballads.

I ground my cigarette under my heel. “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing. This woman just thinks she can waltz on in here and have. .” I waved my hands out at the lawn, which rolled, lush and green, down a gentle slope to the ocean. “… all of this, and she didn’t earn any of it.”

“Well, when you think about it,” Tommy said, “we didn’t exactly earn any of it, either.”

“We survived Mom and Dad,” I reminded him. I’d given the matter of what we were and were not owed considerable thought. . sometimes while I was walking into what passed for downtown Poughkeepsie so my roommates wouldn’t see me being picked up by a driver.

“I think we need to give her a chance,” said Tommy.

“Do we have a choice?” I inquired, and Trey, who’d been looking at his BlackBerry again, shook his head and said, “We do not.”

I sighed. Tommy finished his cigarette. Trey put his telephone back in his pocket. “Dad knows enough to be careful.”

I didn’t answer. My brothers had both been away at school when my mom had left. I’d been the only one home. What happened to my dad hadn’t been dramatic. . he’d just gotten quieter and quieter, more and more pale. Prior to my mother’s departure, he was rarely home before eight o’clock at night, but, after she left, he started returning at five, then four, then three in the afternoon, locking the bedroom door behind him, saying that he needed a nap. My mother had left in September. By Christmas he’d stopped sleeping. He’d take his naps, then sit up all night by the windows, not eating, not drinking, not talking. I’d ask him, over and over, if he was all right, if he wanted anything. He’d shake his head, trying for a smile, unable to manage more than a few words. I’d talked about therapists; I’d mentioned antidepressants — half the kids I knew had been on some kind of medication for something at some point in their lives. I’d called my brothers, who’d told me — brusquely, in Trey’s case, kindly, in Tommy’s — that Dad would be fine, that this was just something he had to get through. Easy for them to say. They weren’t the ones who saw him frozen in an armchair, underneath a de Kooning on one wall and a Picasso etching on another, not noticing the art, or the sunsets over the park. They didn’t see the way his pants sagged around his shrinking waistline and flapped around his diminished legs, or the silvery stubble glinting on his chin.

One dark day in February, I came home from choir practice and found every dish in the kitchen smashed and my father shin-deep in the shards of china and porcelain. My parents had had half a dozen sets of dishes, and the mess was considerable. My father stood there, blinking, a dish with a blue bunny painted in its center in his hand. When I ran to him, I could feel the jagged edges of shattered bowls and plates and coffee cups biting at my ankles, ripping at my tights. “Daddy?”

He gave me a wavering smile. “I. . well. That felt better. That felt pretty good.” Together, we swept up the mess, filling a dozen garbage bags with the wreckage. Things improved after that. By spring, he was, as he put it, “stepping out,” whistling as I attached cuff links to the starched cuffs of his shirt, taking women to the benefits and balls my mother used to dread.

I picked up my cigarette butt and slipped it in my pocket, a thief removing the evidence, while I wondered about India’s strategy: whether she could get my dad to marry her, whether she was young enough to seal the deal by getting pregnant. I would watch. I would wait. I would do what I could to keep my father safe. India struck me as a formidable enemy and the money meant that the stakes were high. . but I was my father’s daughter, and I loved him very much.

You’ve been spotting, hon?” the nurse asked.

I nodded mutely. Spotting was what I’d told my obstetrician on the telephone that morning, spotting was what I’d written on the forms in the office that afternoon, but I was actually bleeding, not spotting. After three failed in vitro attempts, I knew the difference.

“Let’s take a look. Lean back, now. Deep breath.” I shut my eyes as she pushed the ultrasound probe inside me. Marcus squeezed my hand, and I thought how this office was the one place, maybe one of only a few in the world, where it didn’t matter what he was, that he’d sold his first business at twenty-five and started his own hedge fund at the age of thirty-one and now, twenty-six years later, had hundreds of millions of dollars and clients all over the world. Here, we were just another infertile couple, a little desperate, no longer young, flipping through limp magazines in the waiting room, hoping that we’d win the prize.

I knew, though, even before I looked at the screen, that it hadn’t happened this time. It was just like the previous two rounds: a positive pregnancy test, then rejoicing, even though I knew it was too soon. A few days later, a blood test had confirmed the pregnancy but revealed a low hCG count. hCG, as I’d learned, was human chorionic growth hormone, the stuff that shows up in your blood and lets you know that the embryo’s developing. The level’s supposed to double every forty-eight hours. In my case, that had never happened. The hCG number would rise, then stall, and then start dropping. A week or ten days later, the bleeding would start and I’d come to this office for an ultrasound, the crooks of my arms bruised from blood draws, and the doctor would tell me what I already knew: that there was a fertilized egg that had started to grow and then stopped. There was no heartbeat. You lose. Again. Blighted ovum, the Internet called it, though my doctor had never used those words, or any words that sounded like they assigned blame.

“I’m sorry, hon,” said the nurse. I’d seen her before, a no-nonsense lady in her fifties with short hair dyed blond and kind eyes. “Doctor will be right in.”

She pulled out the probe, pressed a pad against me, and left me and Marcus alone. It was sunny outside the windows, a perfect May morning, the whole city in bloom, from the daffodils in the planters in the median on Fifth Avenue to the trees in Central Park. “Shit,” I said, and shut my eyes. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

“Oh, babe,” said Marcus. He leaned forward to kiss my cheek, letting me feel the warmth of his skin and smell the cedar and vetiver in his cologne. He was crying a little. Perversely, that made me feel better, like I hadn’t forced him to do this. Marcus was in his late fifties, with three grown children, all of them out of the house and reasonably self-sufficient. He would have been well within his rights to tell me he was done with babies. But he hadn’t. Marcus loved me. He wanted me to have everything I wanted. “We can try again next month, if Dreiser says it’s all right.”

Dreiser was Dr. Theodore Dreiser of Harvard and Columbia, acknowledged by New York magazine and everyone else who mattered as the top reproductive specialist in the city. I shook my head.

“No more.”

“Listen. You don’t have to make up your mind right now. We’ll get some lunch, you can have a glass of wine.”

I smiled. These days, the only times I drank were after doctors’ visits such as these. . or after the D and C that would follow. Then I pulled the cotton gown down over my bare knees (tanned, hairless, absolutely jiggle-free, looking better than they had when I was a teenager) and sat up. “I’m not getting any younger.” This was true. I might have had the body of a woman in her twenties — I certainly worked hard enough at it — but I was forty-three years old, even if Marcus thought I was thirty-eight. “I don’t think we’ve got any more time to waste.”

Marcus, impeccable in his made-to-measure shirt and silk tie, started to answer when the door opened, revealing the doctor, slim and erect in his white coat, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, oversized Roman features, liquid brown eyes, and an expression of consternation. He didn’t like being a loser any more than I did. It meant that New York magazine and the ladies who mattered, the ones who could pay for treatments even after their insurance ran out, might start sending their friends somewhere else. “Guys, I’m so sorry,” he said. Marcus squeezed my hand again. I turned my face toward the wall and finally let the tears come, the ones that had been threatening since the spotting — bleeding — had started.

I was thirty-seven when I met my husband — thirty-seven as far as he was concerned; forty-two in real life, but if I looked thirty-seven and had ID to prove it, then why tell people I wasn’t? Honesty has its place, and its place is not in the dating world. For the past five years, I’d run my own public-relations shop, a boutique agency with a handful of clients, a mix of reliable-but-boring businesses — a jewelry designer, a chain of magazines — who’d pay their bills on time and rarely need my help in the middle of the night, plus a handful of celebrities who were neither reliable nor boring, who’d pay a minimum of five thousand dollars a month to keep me on retainer and sometimes would require my services in the wee small hours.

Every day I went to the office dressed in one of the designer suits I’d bought secondhand at Michael’s Consignment on the Upper East Side. I’d wear Manolos and Louboutins — I had two pairs of each, and rotated them every day. My jeweler client lent me necklaces and bracelets and cocktail rings; the makeup line I represented sent over a basket of freebies every month. I bartered with a dentist to get my teeth bleached and traded with a personal trainer and a dermatologist for their services, but I still paid to get my hair highlighted at Frédéric Fekkai, which was insanely costly but a necessary expense, the kind of thing you couldn’t scrimp on. Everyone saw your hair every day and everyone worth knowing would know whether you were paying for those buttery chunks or trying to get the same look at a less-expensive salon or, God forbid, by doing it yourself.

I had an apartment in the right neighborhood, a one-bedroom walk-up sparsely furnished with the beautiful things I’d saved up and bought with cash: a gorgeously curvy couch upholstered in fawn-colored velvet, a queen-size bed with Frette sheets, a Turkish rug, glowing blue and gold and ruby-red, that I’d admired in a shop window for months before buying.

Instead of paintings or sculpture, I had an expandable metal pole, an extra-long version of the kind meant to hold a shower curtain, that ran the length of my small living room. The pole held the clothes I’d bought at sample sales or secondhand or saved to pay retail for. The skirts and shirts and dresses, carefully culled and curated — cotton and taffeta, crisp linens, plush velvet, luscious silk — served as a movable, changeable display, hanging just above the low shelves filled with fashion magazines that ran along the wall.

There was no TV, but there were stacks of scrapbooks that I’d worked on for years, filling the pages with photographs I’d torn from magazines or snipped from the newspaper — pictures of models and socialites attending benefits and balls, pictures of women with three names, at least one of them belonging to an inanimate object or a fruit: the Sykes sisters at charity balls, Loulou de la Falaise presiding over a gala at the Met; Audrey Hepburn at the Oscars, Jackie O. on board the yacht Christina, in her oversized sunglasses, with an Hermès scarf tied beneath her chin. That was all I had by way of decoration, all I wanted. The apartment wasn’t a home as much as a cocoon, a place where I’d crawl in as a caterpillar and emerge lovely and transformed. . and rich, with all the security that piles of money implied.

I met Marcus at a Starbucks on Fifty-sixth between Sixth and Seventh, across from the Parker Meridien hotel, where I was hosting a party for my jewelry designer. Hearts and Bones was the theme. The tables were draped in blood-red chiffon, and the disc jockey was a skeletal young person who went by the name of Q, who’d flown in from Los Angeles with a sobriety manager. We were serving baby back ribs and molasses-basted chicken wings, Day of the Dead sugar skulls and, for the daring, tiny quail hearts pierced with silver skewers. I was going over the details in my head, waiting in line at the coffee shop for my usual, a tall skinny latte, extra hot, no foam, when Marcus pushed through the glass doors and stopped in the middle of the store. I noticed him as he stood there, rocking back and forth, peering at the menu with his chin raised, oblivious to the disgruntled hipsters and office workers backing up behind him.

“Coffee,” he said, half to himself. “I just want coffee.”

I could tell, with one quick glance informed by five years’ worth of reading GQ and T Style, that his suit was a two-thousand-dollar Brioni, that his shirt was made-to-measure and his shoes were hand-sewn. He was in his fifties, I figured, but fit, with the tall, broad-shouldered frame of a former football player and an easy, confident stance. He had a high forehead and features a little too small for his wide, round face, a snub nose and deep-set eyes and a rosebud of a mouth. His hair was thick, glossy black, beautifully cut, and even though he was freshly shaved, I could see bluish-black dots of stubble on his cheeks. If he kissed you, you’d know you were kissing a man, not one of these pampered, facialed metrosexuals who could tie scarves better than a Frenchwoman and talk knowledgeably about moisturizers. He had a cleft in his chin and big hands, with black hair on the knuckles and on the inch or two of wrist that I could see. No ring. My mouth went dry as I gave up my place in line and walked over to him. “Small, medium, or large?” I asked, standing close enough to give him a whiff of my perfume, Coco by Chanel, a little sultry for the office but perfect for this occasion. Spotting the Rolex on his wrist, I thanked God that I’d worn it.

He turned to me with a grateful look. “Large. Black.”

“Could make a dirty joke here. Won’t do it,” I said.

“I appreciate your restraint. May I buy you a coffee?”

“My treat,” I said, and stepped up to the barista, handing her my platinum AmEx card, the one I used for business expenses, ordering my latte and adding, “And one venti house blend for my friend.”

“Name?” asked the bored girl with tattoos of hyacinths twined around her arms. She would regret them later. I’d had my own tattoo, far nicer work than hers, lasered off the small of my back here in New York three months after my arrival, at considerable pain and expense.

“Marcus,” he said — half to me, half to her. “Marcus Croft.”

My brain did a fast Google while the girl scribbled Markus on a cup. Finance, I thought. I’d seen his name in the papers recently — a merger? A divorce? My heart was beating too fast. This was it, the thing I’d been waiting for.

When the coffee came, I fitted the cups into a cardboard carrier while Marcus watched, impressed. He held the door for me, and together we walked out onto a sidewalk that seemed to have been freshly paved, and strolled across the street, which cleared, magically, just as we stepped off the curb. “Do you work around here?” he asked.

“Downtown,” I said. “But I’ve got an event here tonight.”

“Oh, yeah? What kind of event?”

“A cocktail party for a client. She’s introducing a new line of necklaces made with semiprecious stones. Fun and functional,” I recited from the press release I’d written.

He frowned, broad forehead creasing. “Is jewelry ever functional?”

I widened my eyes, feigning shock. “I’m doomed.” I clutched his arm and lowered my voice to a whisper. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Your secret is safe with me.”

I laughed, low and throaty. My wrap dress was cut short enough to show off my legs, waxed just a few days before. My hair was freshly colored, and I was wearing one of my client’s pieces, a heart-shaped chunk of amber on a lacy gold chain. I felt good, my muscles warm and loose after my morning run, a six-mile loop through Central Park. It was a day full of promise, one of those perfect New York mornings where the city looked like it had been power-washed, the sky a rich blue, the trees thick with glossy green leaves, a gentle breeze blowing. The taxicabs honking their way up Sixth Avenue glowed golden. The people on the sidewalk were fit and scrubbed and full of purpose. And here I was, alongside the kind of man I’d moved to New York City to meet, my reward after all the pain and expense I’d endured. The apple was hanging from the tree, warm and ripe in my hand. All I had to do was pluck it.

Marcus had taken my elbow as we had crossed the street. Later, I would learn that he had a car and driver, which he’d left at the corner, waiting, and that the only reason he’d been in the Starbucks in the first place, puzzling over the difference between a grande and a venti, was because one of his assistants was in the backseat on the phone to a broker in Tokyo, and the other had been sent ahead to Teterboro, making sure the catering company had arrived to provision his private jet.

“Here’s my stop,” I said when we’d reached the hotel’s revolving glass door. I pulled his coffee out of the carrier and handed it to him, noticing how small the paper cup looked in his big hand.

“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” he asked.

“I could be convinced.” I gave him my business card. He rubbed it between his fingers, reading out loud: “India Bishop, President, Bishop PR.”

I nodded demurely. “That’s me.” I loved the name India. My mother had named me Samantha, but I was a long way from the place I’d been raised, from the girl I’d been. I’d taken the name from a book I’d read, Mrs. Bridge, about a married, settled midwestern lady with a name that was the most exotic thing about her. India suited me better, and so India was what I’d become.

“India,” said Marcus Croft. “I’ll be in touch.”

Upstairs in the ballroom, waiting for the banquet manager to go over the menu one last time, I flipped open my laptop, slipped off my shoes, and typed “Marcus Croft” into my search engine. The computer spat out eleven thousand hits — the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, the Robb Report. It didn’t take me long to learn that the man who’d been so nonplussed by the Starbucks offerings was the real deal, an arbitrageur who’d launched one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, a man who owned pieces of everything from sports teams to fast-food chains to clothing factories in China. Married once, to his college sweetheart, the former Arlene Sandusky; divorced for five years, three children, almost grown. He was fifty-five. That was older than I thought, but I could work with it. I figured that, barring an early and lucrative divorce, we could be man and wife for twenty years, and if he was considerate and didn’t linger, I’d have plenty of years to be a very merry widow.

But that was getting ahead of myself.

I dug deeper, refining my search, typing in his name along with the name of his wife. It didn’t take me long to learn that the ex — Mrs. Croft had taken a lover — her yoga instructor, which was not terribly original — and taken off for an ashram in New Mexico. All the better to replace you with, my dear, I’d thought, clicking the link for pictures, which revealed a generic society-woman-of-a-certain-age, in an updo and a satin gown at the Met’s costume ball. I was prettier than she was; thinner, younger, bigger boobs, a higher ass; the winner by technical knockout in the only categories that mattered.

My telephone rang. PRIVATE NUMBER, read the display. I put my finger on the button, readying myself, a backup quarterback who’d just been called into the big game. In that moment, I remembered going on the one vacation my grandparents and I ever took, to a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire that one of their friends had won at a church auction and had, for some reason, been unable to use. One morning my opa had woken me up before the sun had risen, and we’d slipped out of the cabin, leaving my grandmother still snoozing in the saggymattressed bed. Sitting in a wooden rowboat, one foot trailing in the shockingly cold water, holding the fishing rod my opa had brought up from the basement the night before we’d left, I felt at first a gentle tug, then a sharper one. The tip of my rod bent until it was almost touching the surface of the lake. I jerked back on it as hard as I could, until my opa stopped me. Easy, he said, his arms against my shoulders. Remember. He’s a fish. You’re a big girl. Play him in easy, and remember: you’re smarter than he is.

You’re smarter than he is, I thought, and arranged my face into a pleasant smile, crossed my legs, shook out my hair, and lifted the receiver to my ear.

I was in ninth grade when my dad had his accident. Miss Carasick, the guidance counselor, who was known, inevitably, as Miss Carsick, pulled me out of French class and hustled me down the hall into her office, which was decorated with posters from different colleges. “Your father’s in the hospital,” she said.

I’d been slouching in the seat across from her desk — cringing, actually. I was afraid she’d found out that Tricia Barnes and I had been hiding out in the girls’ room after we’d pled menstrual cramps to get out of gym class. I hadn’t seen my parents that morning, but that wasn’t unusual: most days, my father left for school before I even got out of bed and my mom stayed asleep until after I was gone. “What? Why? What happened?”

Miss Carasick sat back. Her glasses shone in the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead, and I could see a sprinkling of white flakes — dandruff, or dried mousse — at her hairline. “All I know is that there’s been an accident.”

“What…” My mouth felt frozen. I wished she had caught me and Tricia; that would have been a million times better than this. “What happened?”

I remembered the way she rolled her lips over each other, her lipstick making a faint smacking sound. Later, I’d found out that my father’d had his midterm performance review the previous afternoon and gone to a bar directly after. How, at closing time, the bartender had tried to take his keys away and my father had refused. How he’d driven his little VW Rabbit through a stop sign and hit a car with a young woman behind the wheel and her three-year-old in the backseat. How both of them, mother and child, were in the hospital, both of them expected to make a full recovery, although the toddler had been touch-and-go at first. How my father had been drunk at the time of the accident, with a blood alcohol level almost double the legal limit, and how he was in the hospital and under arrest. The police, I learned later, had come by the house first thing in the morning; they’d brought my mother to see him and she’d left without leaving a note.

I thought a lot about it later: why Mrs. Carasick hadn’t been kinder; whether I’d misremembered; or if she’d actually been gloating when she’d given me the news. Years later, I’d imagine looking up her address, knocking on her door, and standing there with my hair loose over my shoulders and telling her what a bitch she’d been, that I was a fourteen-year-old, a girl who had no idea that her father had had a drinking problem.

Afterward, I could see the signs — the way he’d always had a beer as soon as he walked through the door after school, the wine with dinner, the tumbler full of whiskey and ice by his hand when he’d grade papers; the way he’d go out to play poker Friday nights and, how on Saturday mornings, my mother would make me and Greg talk in whispers and walk barefoot. Shh, my mother would tell us, shooing us into the kitchen, away from the closed bedroom door. Your dad’s had a hard week.

The weekend after I’d met Jared Baker of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, I made my monthly trip home. I left at four, after my last class on Friday, stopping at the Wawa, the convenience store at the edge of campus where students could buy cheap hot dogs and hoagies after a night of drinking. I filled my thermos with hot coffee and bought a ticket for the Dinky, the little train that ran from campus to Princeton Junction. At Princeton Junction I’d catch a New Jersey Transit train to Philadelphia. In Philly, I’d walk from Suburban Station to the bus terminal and buy a bottle of water and a roast pork sandwich at the Reading Terminal Market, standing in line with rough-handed construction workers and puffy-faced nurses on their way to work, and catch the Greyhound home.

When I got to Pittsburgh early the next morning, my mother was waiting for me at the station, the sounds of NPR filling the car. NPR was my father’s station — my mother favored country music and AM call-in shows. All those years later, after his hospitalization, his trips through detox and rehab, his trial for driving under the influence and attempted vehicular manslaughter and the six months he’d eventually spent in jail, she still listened to his radio stations, still kept one of his coats in the closet and cooked his favorite things for dinner, as if, someday, he’d walk back through the door, the same man she’d fallen in love with.

It would never happen. My father had lived at home briefly after he’d been paroled. Then the drinking had started again. My mother had given him a version of the speech it was rumored Laura Bush once delivered to her not-yet-presidential husband—“It’s me or Jack Daniel’s”—and kicked him out. My father had rented a studio apartment and, once that lease ran out, he’d moved in with another woman.

My mom could have forgiven my father for what he’d done, for driving drunk, for hitting an innocent woman and child, but she couldn’t forgive him for Rita Devine. It had soured my mother, who’d always been so sweet, delighted by the smallest things: a trip to the shore, a bouquet of sunflowers, a mug of mulled cider in the backyard while my brother and I raked leaves.

I dropped my backpack in the trunk, kissed my mom’s cheek, and buckled myself into the front seat. My mother drove with a light hand on the wheel, steering the car through the morning sunshine, along the familiar streets, until we merged onto the freeway that would take us from downtown to Squirrel Hill. “Classes okay?” she asked.

“Classes are fine,” I told her.

“And how is Dan?”

“Dan’s great.” Dan and I had been a couple for four months, but sometimes I thought I didn’t know him any better than I had the first night we’d hooked up. He was good-looking, well-mannered, a rower with formidable shoulders, and had a fondness for 1990s-era grunge rock…and that was it. “Well, you look great,” said my mom and I nodded.

My mother and I have the same fair skin and pale eyes, and I know, from pictures, that her hair was once like mine. But now her skin was etched with hundreds of tiny lines, blotched and splotched with souvenirs of the summers when she used to gild herself in Johnson’s Baby Oil and lie in a bikini on a beach towel in her backyard. The pink of her lips had faded to beige, her hair was a too-bright lemony color, her fingertips were permanently stained from hair dye and cigarettes, and her body was slack and soft beneath her clothes.

“I hope you’re hungry. I made a chicken pot pie for dinner.” She gave me a quick once-over when traffic slowed. “You look great.”

“I’ve been running a lot. Five miles yesterday.”

“Five miles. Wow. Good for you.” She looked at herself ruefully. “I bet I couldn’t run a mile. Not even if someone was chasing me.”

“You just start slow. Run for thirty seconds, walk for two minutes. Start with twenty minutes a day…”

She shook her head, smiling. She’d heard this before, my prescriptions for healthy living, advice about diet and exercise, and she’d listen with a smile, then ignore whatever I’d suggested. As far as I knew, she’d never been on a date since my father had left. “I’m just not interested,” she’d told me the one time I’d asked.

My father and his girlfriend lived in an apartment complex, a place called Oakwood Towers that boasted no oak trees and where the buildings topped out at three stories. The three-building complex, shaped like an H, was Section 8 housing, with a parking lot full of secondhand cars held together with Bondo and tape and baling wire, and apartments full of new immigrants and newly single men, families who’d cram eight or ten people into a one-bedroom unit, tired-eyed grandparents with babies and toddlers. My mother would drive into the parking lot, but no farther.

“See you at two?”

I nodded, leaving my backpack in the car, taking the plastic bag full of stuff I’d brought for my father. On the scraggly lawn in front of his building, two boys in corduroy pants and Tshirts kicked a soccer ball back and forth and chattered to each other in a language I didn’t recognize.

I pressed the buzzer, waited until the door opened, and then walked past the empty fountain in the lobby (sometimes there was a girl in a football helmet sitting on the lip of that fountain, rocking and drooling), down a disinfectant-scented, green-carpeted hallway to apartment 211.

Rita wasn’t there — she worked on weekends, a part-time job at a sporting-goods store. My dad was waiting for me at the door. He’d gained weight since his time in jail, and now his face was red, his fingers thick, his hands and cheeks swollen as he hugged me and said my name in his hoarse, raspy voice. He smelled like cigarette smoke, but nothing worse: sometimes when I’d hug him I could catch a whiff of whiskey or the strange, chemical odor I could only guess was drugs, but not today.

“Come in,” he said, leading me through the cluttered living room. Coffee mugs and sections of newspaper and DVD cases sat on every table; clothes were piled on the couch and the chairs. The windows were streaked with dirt; the pillows on the sofa were squashed; the knickknack shelf where Rita kept a few framed family photographs and some china plates and crystal glasses was dusty. My dad walked to the little kitchen, where there was a frying pan on the stove and three teacups beside it, one with cut-up onions, one with green peppers, and one with grated cheese. “I’m making a Denver omelet.”

“That sounds good.” I watched as he scooped a spoonful of margarine from a tub and put it in the pan to melt. His hands were shaking, but this could have meant almost anything: some of the drugs he’d been prescribed had tremors as a side effect, or he could have been going through withdrawal, or he could have been high, right at that moment, for all I knew. After all the years, I’d never gotten any good at telling.

I found forks and knives in a drawer, plates in a cabinet, and two juice glasses in the dishwasher. My father was concentrating hard on the pan. He’d dumped in the onions, which were cut in large, ragged chunks. He shook his head, then picked up a spatula, the end still crusted with melted cheese. I poured us small glasses of generic orange juice — as part of his disability payments, my father got food stamps, although they weren’t stamps anymore, just what looked like a regular debit card to use at the grocery store — and found paper napkins and a loaf of wheat bread for toast. I was starting to straighten up the living room when he called me in for breakfast. Feeling uncomfortable and out of place, the way I always did in his apartment, I took the seat across from him at the table. The eggs were burnt dark-brown in places, and he’d forgotten the peppers.

“It’s really good,” I told him.

My father sighed. “Ah, I’m no cook. That was your mother.”

I didn’t answer, watching as he maneuvered a bite into his mouth. If he missed us, this was as close as he’d come to saying so. An onion fell off and got stuck in his beard. “Dad,” I said quietly, pointing, and waiting until he’d used his napkin to get it out.

If you saw my father on the street, walking or sitting on the bench outside the duck pond behind his building, you wouldn’t cross the street to avoid him. Maybe you’d think that he was just a regular guy enjoying the sunshine, a man with a job and a family and a house to come home to. If you looked a little closer you’d see the thumbprints smeared on his glasses, the way one of the earpieces was mended with duct tape, the way his skin was unnaturally red and his eyes filmy. If you noticed that, maybe you would pick up your pace and try to put the sight of him out of your mind. You wouldn’t want to think about how many people like him there were out in the world, unsupervised, untethered, unloved. At least you’d want to believe they were untethered and unloved, that they didn’t have wives, or sons, or daughters, because you certainly wouldn’t want to think about that.

I put my fork down on my plate. “Hey, Dad,” I said, “if I could pay for you to go to rehab, would you go?”

He didn’t answer right away. I looked at him, his swollen face, his greasy hair. He used to be handsome. He used to wear suits on the first day of school, no matter how hot it was. He used to kiss my mother in the kitchen when he came home from work, grabbing her around the waist and lifting her briefly into the air as she laughed. He used to live in a house with three bedrooms and an above-ground swimming pool. . but I stopped those thoughts before they got too far.

He pulled off his glasses and turned them over slowly. “It’s not your job,” he finally said. “Not your job to take care of me.”

“I’m almost done with school,” I said, pulling out the pages that I’d printed and passing them across the table. Willow Crest: A Community of Care. I’d done enough research to show that the place was conveniently located and well-regarded, with a respectable success rate. The intake counselor I’d talked with the day before said that they’d have a bed available within the next three weeks. “I’ve got some money to spare. Would you go?”

He scratched his nose, forehead furrowed, then poked at the pages. After he had his accident, insurance paid for detox in a hospital, then twenty-eight days in rehab in a place up in New Hampshire. He was diagnosed with depression while he was in there, and he did okay for a while once he got out, even though he’d been suspended from his job and was on disability while the school board figured out exactly what to do. Then came the trial. “Area Teacher Sentenced for Drunk Driving Accident,” read the headline on page B-6 of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. My mother, who was normally a stickler about education, had let me and Greg stay home from school the day after the verdict. Greg had disappeared out the back door as soon as she’d left for work. I’d stayed in bed, not my bed but the one my parents used to share, watching game shows and talk shows and court shows, thinking it was quite possible that I would die of shame, that my mother would come home and find nothing but a girl-shaped puddle of embarrassment with, perhaps, some blond hair attached.

The school district hadn’t been able to fire him, but by the time he got out of jail, his job was gone. Downsized, they said, claiming that it had nothing to do with what had happened. I couldn’t blame them. Teachers could have a whiff of scandal in their histories — in my high school, there was a math teacher who’d left her husband for a shop instructor — but they couldn’t have hit a mother and child while driving drunk, and gone to jail for the crime.

With no job, he had no benefits. With no benefits, he couldn’t afford the hundreds of dollars of medications he took each month for the depression and anxiety they’d diagnosed in rehab, the conditions that I believed had started him drinking in the first place. Without medicine, he started drinking again, and ordering painkillers from Mexico and Canada on the Internet, and eventually moving on to the stuff you can buy on the street. One of the first times I’d visited, looking underneath the bathroom sink for more toilet paper, I’d found a crack pipe, an airline-size vodka bottle split in half with a glass pipe duct-taped into the seam. I’d dropped it like it had burned me… then I’d put it back.

I don’t make excuses. I know what he’s doing is illegal. I know that he’s a drain on taxpayers’ resources, that people who work hard at their jobs are the ones paying for his apartment and his food, for the cops who bust him and the counselors who hand him pamphlets about AA and methadone. I know that the radio talk-show shouters would hold him up as an example of everything wrong with America — how we’re entitled, how we’re weak, how instead of facing our troubles we lean on the crutches of chemicals. But he’s my father. . and I don’t believe that it’s his fault. It’s not like he’s lazy, some privileged rich kid trying to escape from some imaginary heartache or chasing some feel-good high. He takes drugs so that he can feel something close to normal, and I believe that normal is all he’s after.

“You ready?” I asked. From his apartment complex, it’s a short trip to a strip mall, with a diner and a barbershop. I walked closer to the traffic. My dad walked beside me, his gait a little unsteady, his eyes on the ground.

We went to the barbershop, where I paid for my father to get a haircut, flipping through Sports Illustrated while the barber made small talk, then sprinkled talc on the back of his neck. Back in the apartment, I straightened up some more while he made coffee and read the paper. At one-thirty I handed him the plastic bag, my haul for the month.

The shaking in his hands had gotten worse, I saw, as he opened the bag and rummaged inside, pulling out four paperback novels, a razor and a can of shaving cream, a jar of Kiehl’s moisturizer, and three bars of Dial soap, all of which I’d scavenged from campus. It was easy: my classmates were constantly leaving their buckets of toiletries in the bathrooms, their clothes in the dryer, their bookbags and backpacks everywhere. Sometimes I would slip into the boys’ bathroom and slip out with a razor and a canister of shaving cream in my bathrobe pocket, or I’d hang around the basement laundry room and wait until it was empty and I was alone with a dryer-full of men’s clothing. It wasn’t as if the boys at my school couldn’t spare a little soap or a copy of whatever book it was fashionable to tote around that semester. Because of my job, I knew who had money and who, like me, was on work-study, and I was careful to take stuff only from the ones I knew could just buy more, in the unlikely event that they even noticed what was missing. I was, I told myself, like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and entitled and careless, giving to my father, who needed it more than they did.

“What are you reading?” I asked him. This was a safe question, because he was always reading something.

“Great Expectations,” he answered. “It’s spring.”

“Oh, I loved that one,” I said, not taking the bait, not mentioning that he’d taught that book every May. “Magwitch was my favorite.” Magwitch, Pip’s mysterious benefactor. Someday, I thought, I would like to be somebody’s mysterious benefactor, too; giving gifts to someone who didn’t know me; watching, from a distance, their delight.

I looked out the window as my father went into the back of the apartment, where I’d never been, to put the soap and shaving cream away. The kids who were playing soccer had taken their ball and gone home. Now there was a woman in a bright orange sari outside, standing behind a baby slumped in the plastic cradle of a swing. She pushed him back and forth as the chains creaked. The baby sat quietly, its brown fingers gripping the edge of the black plastic, its face stoic, as if swinging was a punishment it was sentenced to endure. When I heard the honk of my mother’s horn, I couldn’t lie, even to myself, about the emotion that flooded through me. It was relief.

Twenty thousand dollars. I thought about it as I ate pot pie, as I dried my hair in the bathroom, where the shelves were filled with products my mom had bought at cost at her salon. Twenty thousand dollars, I thought, lying on the bed. Twenty thousand dollars could pay for rehab. It could buy medicine. Twenty thousand dollars could save him. . and, with that thought, I finally fell asleep.

My husband and I have fights, like any other couple: about money, about whether we’re spending too much time with my family and not enough with his, about whether or not to spank the boys — but we have always gotten along in the bedroom. From the first time I was close to Frank, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him, and feel his hands on me. I loved the muscles of his chest and his legs, the tightly curled hair on his chest and around his penis, the look of our hands entwined, his dark skin against my pale fingers.

That night I got the call from the clinic, saying that I’d been approved as a surrogate, I waited until the boys were sleeping. By nine o’clock they were both dead to the world, full of pizza and worn out from an afternoon of Skee-Ball and table hockey. I lit a candle, zapped the TV into silence, took Frank by the hand, and led him upstairs. In the bedroom he looked around, blinking. The bed was neatly made, the pillows plumped and smooth; the laundry and toys were stacked and folded in their baskets, and I was wearing a tight red Phillies nightshirt that ended about eight inches past my panties. I thought it made me look like a link of chorizo, but it was, I knew, his favorite.

Frank stuffed his hands into the pockets of his work pants and looked me over. “Did you get in another accident?”

“No, silly. I just missed you,” I said, not wanting to bring up that I’d only ever been in one accident, and it had happened because someone had parked too close to me at the supermarket. I knelt on the bed, resting my hands on his shoulders, so close that my shirt brushed against his chest. He untied his heavy black shoes, then took me in his arms, nuzzling my neck with his stubbly cheek as I giggled and squirmed against him.

“Well, hello there,” he said, brushing his palm against my stiff nipples.

“Hello,” I said, and kissed him, first lightly, then more deeply, opening my mouth and feeling his tongue slip inside like it was part of me, like it belonged there. “Hello.”

Frank had been a virgin when we’d started going out. I hadn’t learned that until later, of course. I’d slept with my first boyfriend, Brian Blundell, when I was fourteen, and then, after Brian dumped me for my friend Laurie Zimmer, I’d slept with Brian’s best friend, Fritz, although “slept with” wasn’t exactly right, because we’d had sex just once on the basement stairs and I wasn’t even sure it counted because I didn’t think he’d actually gotten himself inside of me before he finished.

Frank had wanted to wait. He was religious — he and his family were Baptists, and he went to church every Sunday morning and to Youth Fellowship meetings on Wednesday nights, and he’d taken a pledge to stay pure until he got married. His resolve lasted until our fifth date, when we were lying together on the long backseat of his father’s car, after forty-five minutes of kissing and grinding, after my bra and his shirt lay in a tangle on the floor and I was too turned on to feel self-conscious about my jiggly thighs or the stretch marks on my breasts. I’d pushed myself upright and straddled him, unzipping his jeans as he tried (not very hard) to push my hands away, and pulled his penis out of his boxer shorts, stroking it gently. Penises were so strange, in my limited experience, ugly, odd-looking, veiny things, but Frank’s was smooth and brown, hot-skinned and silky, and it felt just right in my hand, like Goldilocks’s bowl of porridge, or the bed she’d eventually settled on: not too hot and not too cold, not too big and not too small. I rubbed it up and down experimentally, tugging the loose skin over the cap. “Oh, Annie,” he groaned. “We shouldn’t. .” Then his arms were on my shoulders, and I was on my back, one hand in my purse, groping for the condoms I’d bought that afternoon at the drugstore, just in case.

Seven years later, in our bedroom in the house we’d bought, a room with high ceilings and bare floors and no furniture besides a mattress and the Tupperware bins where we kept our clothes, it was just as thrilling, just as sweet. I knew the place on the small of his back where he liked me to brush my fingertips, and he knew to put his mouth right up against my ear so I could hear his breathing change as his hips sped up, then stuttered to a stop. His sounds, his taste, the feel of his forearms in my hands, his head tucked into the hollow between my neck and shoulders, every inch of him was so familiar and so dear.

When we were done, he fell asleep almost instantly, sprawled facedown, naked on the bed. He had a better body than any of the movie stars in People, a muscular back that narrowed to a slender waist, a gorgeously curved bottom. Curled against him, breathing in the scent of his sweat and skin. I let myself doze for a few minutes. Then I settled the comforter over his back and collected my panties and nightshirt from the floor. Frank was so tired these days. He’d work an eight-hour shift at the scanner, examining the X-rays of carry-ons or beckoning travelers through the metal detectors, dealing with people who screamed and cursed and even spat at him, taking out their frustration with the nightmare air travel had become on the most convenient target. After work three days a week, he’d spend three hours more in a classroom, where he was training to do airplane maintenance. Those were union jobs; the pay started at thirty dollars an hour, plus benefits and three weeks of paid vacation. We’d agreed that the time and money he spent was worth it. By the time he graduated the airlines would be hiring again, but it meant that he left the house before seven most mornings, and on nights he had classes he rarely came home before ten.

I crept into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher and surf the Internet, looking at surrogates’ stories, pricing home renovations and wall-to-wall carpet and new couches, trying to figure out how to continue the process I’d started upstairs, the marital magic of not only getting Frank to agree to let me be a surrogate but also making him believe the whole thing was his idea.

I thought about it while I drove Spencer to nursery school, while I swept the floors or weeded the garden or folded a load of laundry, imagining the feeling of being someone who could give instead of someone who was taking. I would picture the look of gratitude on the new mother’s face as I placed the baby in her arms. Oh, thank you, Annie, we can never thank you enough. It would be so different from the look I saw on our pastor’s face when I was rummaging through the church swap bins for winter boots or the one I imagined the credit-card representative wearing when I called to explain that our payment would be late again.

For weeks, I’d been working on Frank, but carefully, the way I’d learned to do it. Instead of bombarding him with requests or giving speeches, I’d casually slip something into a conversation: “Did I tell you Dana Swede from Vacation Bible School had a miscarriage? It’s her third, poor thing.” He’d give me a look and I’d ladle another scoop of tuna casserole onto his plate and tell him I was baking Dana a pie. When the actress from his favorite TV show was on the cover of People magazine with her baby twin girls — they’d been carried by a surrogate in Minnesota — I snuck the magazine out of the pediatrician’s office and onto our coffee table, where I could be sure he’d see it. When Good Morning America did a piece on military wives making extra money carrying babies, I inched the volume up. When the toilet broke and we had to call the plumber, I allowed myself one small sigh over the bill, and I permitted myself another sigh when the doorknob on the front door came off — again — in my hands, and I’d had to send Frank Junior in through the kitchen window to open the door.

That was Part One of my plan. Part Two took place in the bedroom every night that Frank didn’t have class. Instead of collapsing on the couch as soon as I’d gotten the boys down and rinsed their toothpaste out of the sink and re-hung their towels, I’d put on something Frank liked — a pair of lacy panties or a tight tank top, the negligee I’d bought for our honeymoon. I’d light that candle and stay up in bed, waiting. Most nights I didn’t have to wait long.

On one Tuesday morning — a week after the Good Morning America story — I loaded the dishwasher, turned off the TV, and said casually, without looking at him, “What do you think about it? That surrogacy thing?”

Frank Junior and Spencer were at the table, fighting over the last piece of toast. I put the orange juice back in the fridge, shut the door with my hip, then looked at my husband. His dark-blue shirt, with the TSA patch on the shoulder, was neatly pressed, his shoes were shined, and he was freshly shaved, but he already looked tired. His ID badge was in his pocket. He hated that badge, which let the angriest passengers use his name. It was always the last thing he put on and the first thing he took off. “I don’t know. It’s interesting.”

“They pay a lot. I could look into it. What do you think?”

He looked at me closely. “You want to do that? Have a baby for someone?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe find out more about it.”

“You mean it?”

“Why not?” He frowned at the boys, at Spencer in particular, who had a pink crayon in his hand and was scribbling dreamily in his coloring book. “Sit up straight, men.” The two of them stiffened their backs, imitating the posture Frank had brought home from the service. I turned back to the sink. He didn’t look happy. I understood why: he wanted to be the one to provide for us, to give us the things we wanted. . and I suspected that seeing me walking around with my belly all big from another man’s baby would bother him, even though there’d be no sex involved, no cheating. But it had been so long since I felt like I was doing my part, and since I didn’t feel guilty pulling out my debit card at the grocery store or at Walmart.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. My hands were cold, the way they got when I was nervous or excited, or when I was telling a lie. My heart was breaking for Frank, but I was also excited, thinking about the money and how we could spend it, imagining, for the hundredth time, the moment of placing the baby into another woman’s arms, or even a man’s arms, although I doubted that would happen. My cousin Michael was gay, and he and his boyfriend were two of the kindest, gentlest men I knew, but Frank felt differently, thanks to all his years in church hearing about sinful this and sinful that, and I knew not to push my luck. I imagined, too, the look on Nancy’s face; the two of us walking together at the Franklin Mills mall, Nancy getting ready to pull out her platinum card as someone we knew from high school spotted us: Oh, Annie, I heard about what you’re doing and I think it’s just amazing. So generous. Maybe I’d take a few college classes, too, show Big Sister that she wasn’t the only smart one in the family. Maybe I’d take all of us on vacation, my parents, too, someplace that didn’t have a squash court, or maybe we’d stay on-site the next time we went to Disneyland.

I kissed Frank by the door, handing him the lunch I’d packed. I gathered Spencer in my arms and loaded him into his stroller. He was getting too tall for it, his feet dangling almost to the ground, but he was still too little to manage the trip to the bus stop and back. I helped Frank Junior put on his backpack, then walked both boys down the hill to the bottom of our driveway, where we waited, counting the cars that drove along our quiet street until the school bus wheezed to a stop. Back at home, I put Spencer down in front of Sesame Street with a bowl of raisins and pretzels, a sippy cup full of apple juice, and the remote control, which, sad to say, he knew how to work better than I did.

The farmhouse had a little room off the kitchen that had once been a cold pantry. Someday, I’d planned on turning it into an office, with shelves for canned goods and cookbooks and a desk where I could look up recipes. I’d painted the walls a creamy golden-white called Buttermilk, and cut out pictures of built-in desks and refinished flea-market chairs, but that was as far as I’d gotten.

I turned on our computer and browsed around the clinic’s website, which I already knew almost by heart. It was full of video links and fancy flash effects, words that came swimming up to the top of the screen like they were surfacing from the bottom of a deep pool. CARING. COMPASSIONATE. DISCREET. The word MONEY never showed up, but money was what I sensed. For starters, the clinic looked more like the day spas I saw in magazines than like any doctor’s office I’d ever visited. There were bouquets of flowers in the exam rooms, tables draped in real sheets, not the flimsy paper that my doctor’s office used. The women in the pictures were nicely dressed — no sweatpants and Phillies shirts for them. All of them were pretty, too, which I guess made sense, because, when you get right down to it, who wants to go through nine months of pregnancy and then hand the baby over to someone who looks worse than you do?

While Spence was singing along with “Elmo’s World,” I called up my application, trying to read it the way a woman looking for a surrogate would. Most of the questions had been fairly straightforward: Did I have a driver’s license? Did I work outside the home? Was I married? Happily married?

That one had worried me, because the truth was, Frank and I had hit a rough patch a few years ago, the summer when Spencer was a baby and Frank had gotten furloughed for eight weeks. He got to keep his health benefits but didn’t get paid for all that time. At first it had been okay. There was plenty for him to do around the house. He’d set his alarm, same as always, and from seven in the morning until dinnertime he’d be busy, patching cracks in the ceiling, painting the dining-room walls, planing a door that had never closed properly, fitting the bathroom with a new showerhead, pulling the refrigerator out from its spot against the wall and vacuuming the coils clean. He washed and waxed the car, then used Q-tips to clean the air-conditioning vents and even shampooed the carpets. In the afternoons, when Frank Junior woke up from his nap, he’d take him into the backyard and teach him how to throw a football in a spiral.

I loved having him home, and I loved that all the things that had been bothering me for months were finally being taken care of, but it wasn’t paying the bills. Finally, after an unpleasant conversation with our credit-card company, Frank and I decided that I should take a job at the new Target that had opened up in Plymouth Meeting, not too far away.

I made sure Spencer, who was four months old, would drink from a bottle, then squeezed myself into a skirt and went to fill out an application. I got hired the same day I went in, and I liked Target fine. The work itself was nothing special — stocking shelves and sweeping floors, cleaning the bathrooms and telling shoppers where to find things — but I liked the people, the jokes we had, how we got to know one another’s stories, sharing soda and microwave popcorn in a breakroom with red-and-white tiled floors and scuffed-up walls and metal lockers for our things. Most of the other employees were women like me, helping out while our men were home, laid off or furloughed or looking for work, but a few of them were college kids home for the summer, and one of them was this guy — really, a boy — named Gabriel. Gabriel was working his way through Penn State. He was tall and pale and lanky, with a narrow face and glasses and long, thick brown hair that he was always flipping off his forehead or shoving behind his ears.

I figured the college kids would keep to themselves and act like the job was beneath them, rolling their eyes at the mothers asking where to find the toilet paper or the mousetraps or the wrapping paper, and it was true that most of them were like that. Cliquey. They’d sit at their own table in the breakroom, just as if we were all still in high school, and bring things like sushi from Whole Foods for dinner, with chopsticks and little packets of soy sauce, but Gabe was always polite. That was the second thing I noticed about him. The first thing was his food. Most of us had regular stuff, sandwiches or leftover casserole or lasagna, but Gabe had interesting things: a tin of oily sardines that he’d pop into his mouth one by one, a chunk of crusty bread, wedges of cheese so stinky that they made everyone wince and crack jokes about smelly feet, sticky dates in a plastic tub, a square of black-flecked brown goo that he told me was truffled pâté and that he ate on a heel of bread, with fig jam smeared on top. “My grandma’s French,” he said. “We always had weird stuff around the house. I’d bring friends home from school, and instead of having, you know, Oreos and milk or whatever, she’d give us herring.”

“Herring’s French?” I’d never had French food, except for the one time Frank and I had gone to a fondue restaurant, where for your main course you dipped bread and vegetables into bubbling melted cheese, and then dipped fruit into chocolate for dessert.

He’d shrugged. “Not especially, but my grandma loved herring. I do, too.” He’d smiled then, offering me a bite of chicken marinated, he told me, in lemon peel and crushed garlic, which tasted like no chicken I’d ever had before.

Sometimes Gabe sat with the college kids and sometimes he sat with us. He carried lollipops in his pockets and would give them to kids fussing in the shopping carts after asking the moms if it was okay. “That’s nice,” I said, the first time I saw him do it, and he shrugged, looking a little embarrassed with his hair flopping into his eyes. “I’ve got two little brothers,” he said. “I understand the value of candy.”

Gabe always had a book in his pocket and I usually had one tucked into my purse, and at break time we’d slip into the corners to read. After I’d been there for a week, he wandered over, casually, and asked me about my book — a Nora Roberts — and told me about what he was reading, the story of a Russian rapper in New York. “But really,” he said, sitting down in the molded plastic chair beside me, “it’s about what it means to be an American.”

“Huh.” I wondered what my book was “really” about — about love, I thought, but I could have been wrong. Maybe if I’d been to college the real story of the book would reveal itself to me, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles where if you stare at it long enough a hidden picture appears. I’d never liked school: all those things like the square of the hypotenuse and the principal exports of Uruguay would, I correctly suspected, have nothing to do with my life after graduation, my life as a wife and a mother. I did all right in my English classes, and I’d always liked to read, but just for the story’s sake, for the chance books gave me to visit another world, where everyone was beautiful, where the sex was always amazing, and where, when the telephone rang, it was sometimes a handsome stranger and not the heroine’s mortgage company inquiring as to when they could expect that month’s check.

“You can read it when I’m done,” he said, offering me the book. I shook my head, smiling. “I think I’ll stick with Nora.” But two days later I found the book in my locker, next to the snapshots of my family that I’d taped to the inside of the door. When I tried to thank him Gabe just shrugged. “You don’t have to read it,” he said. “No pressure.” He held up his hands like a gunfighter showing they were empty, then tucked into his lunch, which was a salad with rice and raw tuna and a dressing he’d made of soy sauce and sesame seeds. Poké salad, he’d told me, and I’d looked it up later online.

I made my way slowly through his book, which was funny in places and slow in others, with long, twisting sentences and sex scenes that were funny and gross at the same time, and I started talking more with Gabe during our breaks. He told me he’d worked at Target ever since he was sixteen. He told me about college, how he planned on taking six years to graduate, then going for a master’s degree in hospitality and maybe, someday, opening a restaurant of his own. I told him about my boys, about Frank Junior in particular, how he was smart but a handful, and how his teacher had said, at the parent-teacher conference, that he was an exhausting child. “She wants us to ask his doctor about medication before he starts kindergarten,” I said. Gabe’s narrow face darkened.

“Don’t do that,” he told me, raking his fingers through his thick hair, then hitching up his pants. He was so skinny I wasn’t quite sure how his jeans managed to stay up at all, and his Target pinny, the one he’d had since he was in high school, was starting to come unraveled. Threads hung all along its seams. I wondered if anyone in his house sewed, if he had a mother or sister who could fix it for him.

“Why not?” I’d already decided on my own that I didn’t want Frank Junior taking pills. I’d read some articles online, on websites where mothers debated the pros and cons, and I thought that there was nothing wrong with my son except that he was a little boy with a lot of energy who hadn’t learned that he didn’t need to say, or shout, every thought that came into his head — but I wanted to hear Gabe’s opinion.

Gabe rocked back on the heels of his high-tops and gave me a speech about the dangers of doping little kids, how the purpose of the American educational system wasn’t learning but conformity.

“What do you mean?”

He paused, flipping his hair around. “Well, ‘conformity’ is making everyone act and think like everyone else.”

I nodded, even though I knew what the word meant. He went on, talking about how the drugs were designed to make it easier for teachers, not better for the children. Then he stopped, midsentence, looking embarrassed. “But what do I know?” he asked. “Like I’ve got kids.”

“No,” I told him. “This is good.” I imagined what he must have looked like when he was Frank Junior’s age. Probably his mother had kept his hair cut short, but I suspected that he’d dressed about the same way he did now, in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, only without the Target pinny on top.

Gabe had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two. “I thought you were older,” he said, then quickly added, “Not that you look old.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. The truth was I felt older than my years, like I’d been a wife and a mother forever.

Most days I drove to work, but one night Frank dropped me off, keeping the car so he could take the boys to the free concert downtown that night. At the end of my shift I went outside to wait for the bus, and Gabe, driving by in his car, spotted me.

“You need a ride?”

“Oh, no. I’m going to take the bus.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

He parked the car and jogged through the lot, back to me.

“You don’t have to do this. I’m fine.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I could use the fresh air.” We looked at each other, both of us knowing that the air in the parking lot wasn’t particularly fresh. It had been in the nineties for three days straight. The bus stop smelled like baking tar and car exhaust, and the cigarettes the workers at Target and Marshalls and the Pancake Barn around the corner would sneak out the back doors to smoke. A humid breeze lifted my hair off my neck. Thunder rumbled in the distance; heat lightning crackled in the sky. I hoped it wouldn’t rain — the last time there was a storm, Frank and I had woken up to puddles in the basement and blistered paint on the ceilings, and I’d spent all morning running around the house with empty plastic containers, putting them under the leaks so the floors wouldn’t be ruined, too.

“Did you ever think about going to college?” Gabe asked.

I shook my head, glad that he couldn’t see me blushing in the dark. It was like asking “Did you ever think about going to the moon?” I hadn’t been a great student, and, by the time high school was over, I’d been so in love that the only thing I’d wanted to be was Frank’s wife. That was what the women I knew did — they got married and got jobs you didn’t need a degree to have, and they worked in between children, or when their husbands couldn’t, or didn’t. The only reason my sister had been any different was that she’d been too fat and too unpleasant for any boy to want her.

“You should think about it,” Gabe said. “You’re smart. And there’s online classes.”

This was something I’d considered. I couldn’t imagine going to college: getting dressed, driving my car to the city, sitting in a lecture hall with all those young girls and boys — but I could do things online. I did things online already: shopping, reading the news and gossip websites, playing games on Facebook, downloading coupons, and, lately, looking things up, articles Gabe had mentioned or reviews of the books he’d given me or words he’d used that I didn’t know. He’d always tell me a definition, but it embarrassed him, so I’d started to just pretend that I knew what all his big words meant, and write them down so I could look them up later: Modified. Discordant. Ethereal.

“How do you take a class online?” I asked, and he started to tell me. He had a book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in one hand and was gesturing with the other, his face excited beneath the glow of the streetlamp. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, a receipt from the soda and three slices of pizza he’d bought at the snack bar for lunch, and was writing down the address of Temple’s website. That was when Frank pulled up to the curb. His mother had stopped by after Bible study, and he’d gotten her to stay with the kids so he could come take me home.

I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought he saw. Gabe and I weren’t doing anything but talking, me in old jeans and sneakers and a no-color cotton top with my pinny balled up in my purse, not touching at all. . but I could tell from the way Frank’s jaw bunched up that he must have imagined seeing something.

He didn’t say a word after I climbed into the passenger’s seat, but his hands were tight on the wheel and his back was perfectly straight, not even touching the seat. I remembered after the first time we’d had sex, lying with my head against his chest, breathing in the smell of his skin, feeling completely content. He’d looked at me from under his long lashes, and I thought he’d tell me that he loved me. Instead, he’d said, in a casual, almost neutral voice, “You weren’t a virgin.”

I’d set one hand on his chest and pushed myself up. “What?” I asked him. “Why do you ask? Is it. . do you think that’s bad?” He’d waited a moment before answering, “It is what it is.” That was all the discussion we’d ever had on the matter, but I thought I could hear what he hadn’t said: that I’d had other boys while he’d been a virgin; that I’d been the one who’d unzipped his pants and I’d been the one with the condoms.

That night, with the Target parking lot getting smaller in the truck’s rearview mirror and Frank’s eyes fixed on the road, I knew better than to try to explain myself. Anything I said would only make me sound guilty, and I had nothing to be guilty about. I pressed my lips together, biting back the angry words I imagined: Yes! Yes! It’s exactly what you think! Probably what you’ve been thinking all along!

Frank never said a word about it, not on the ride home, not that night or after. At work the next day, Gabe was friendly, like always, but I was careful not to borrow any more of his books or taste any more of his food, and to make sure that the next time I went to the bus stop, I went alone. I didn’t know whether he’d meant anything more than just friendliness, whether he liked me that way. It hardly seemed possible. He was a college boy, soon to be a graduate student, and I was married and a mother of two. In my jeans and work sneakers, with my hair in a careless ponytail, with not a lick of makeup on my face, heavier than I wanted to be after the babies and years of nibbling chicken nuggets and goldfish crackers off Frank Junior’s plate, I was hardly what the kids called a MILF. But maybe, I thought, remembering the way his face came alive when he was talking about a book he liked, the way his eyes lit up and his hands moved in the air. Maybe Gabe really did think of me that way. Maybe, in another world, we could have been boyfriend and girlfriend.

I got my paycheck on Tuesday, five days after Frank had seen Gabe and I waiting together at the bus stop. That night Frank said, “I think we’ll be okay for the rest of the summer.” I told him that that would be fine, and gave my notice over the phone the next morning. “We’re sorry to lose you,” my supervisor said, and sounded like she meant it. . and that was that. Why go looking for trouble, with a little boy and a new baby at home, and a husband who loved me?

I heard the music that told me Sesame Street was ending, and I turned away from my computer, looking at Spencer, still cross-legged on the floor, one hand lifting pretzels into his crumb-ringed mouth, his eyes wide, gazing at the screen. The couch cushions were shiny in their centers, the curtains dingy in the sunlight, the screen of the TV set streaked with fingerprints, even though I’d Windexed it the night before. Please, God, I thought. Please, let some woman pick me. Then I got up, lifted my little boy in my arms, and carried him to the kitchen, where he could play with the pots and pans while I cleaned, and dreamed.

When I thought of the words private investigator, a certain image came to mind — a rumpled, world-weary man in a suit and a fedora, feet on a scarred wooden desk, in an office wreathed in cigarette smoke. I pictured a name in gold leaf on a frosted-glass door, a heavy glass ashtray, a man who’d identify women—dames—exclusively by their hair color: The brunette. The redhead. The blonde.

My detective was different. I’d found her by Googling Manhattan private detectives who specialized in what they called “marital matters,” reading online reviews. It made me feel like I was taking a baby step out of my dutiful life — the tasteful, classic clothes, the art history degree, the job as a junior appraiser at Kohler’s, an auction house that was less well known (and, its loyalists boasted, even more exclusive) than Christie’s or Sotheby’s. My life had been long on ease and comfort, filled with fancy vacations, many of them spent at Caribbean resorts while my father paced the beach, barking into his cell phone and looking for the best reception.

When my appointment finally arrived, I was, perhaps, more excited than I should have been, even though the private investigator’s office was on the thirtieth floor of a featureless highrise in midtown, which put my dreams of gold leaf and pebbled glass to rest. The office had a small NO SMOKING plaque by the front door and just two last names — KLEIN and SEGAL, in sans serif capital letters — beside it. The waiting room could have belonged to any dentist or doctor or therapist, with pale-brown couches and beige carpet, a glass-and-iron coffee table stacked with magazines—Newsweek and Time, along with the week’s tabloids — and a water cooler that let out the occasional burble in the corner. I gave the receptionist my name, sat down on the couch, my legs, in sheer hose, crossed at the ankle, and pinched the pleats of my skirt between my thumb and forefinger, making sure each one was smooth.

Church lady! a guy in college had called me one night when I’d allowed my roommates to coax me out of the room and to a party in a neighboring dorm. It was true that I dressed far more conservatively than most of my classmates: after a lifetime in the kilts and knee socks of my Upper East Side all-girls’ school, I’d never felt like myself in pants. Besides, I had narrow shoulders and tended to carry my weight in my hips and thighs, so jeans gave me the appearance of a bowling pin. . and after seeing my mother traipsing around in belly-baring yoga pants and lowwaisted double-dyed skinny jeans, I’d only wanted to cling to my skirts even more tightly. The summer before my senior year of high school, when I’d been choosing colleges, I’d actually checked to see if there was such a thing as a non-military school that had uniforms. If I could have found such a place, I would have happily attended.

“It’ll be fun!” my roommate, Vanessa, had told me, slipping into her own tight low-riding jeans and the inevitable silk tank top, with a down coat on top, because it was January and freezing. I let her drag me along, in my skirt and tights, my sweater set and my loafers, even though I truly didn’t see the point of parties. If I wanted to be hot and uncomfortable in the presence of drunk people yelling at one another, it would be easy enough to arrange those conditions, but why would I ever want to?

In the dorm room, I’d stood in the corner next to the stereo speakers, sneaking glances at my watch and wondering how soon I could feign a headache and get back to my room. There was a girl I recognized from my art history seminar lying on her back on one of the desks, giggling as a boy poured tequila into her navel, then bent down to slurp it out. Maybe it was supposed to be sexy, but all I could think was germs! and disease! and belly-button lint! At another desk, a half dozen of my classmates stood in front of a computer, watching porn. That was a big thing at Vassar: girls watching dirty movies with their boyfriends to show that they were progressive and evolved. I turned away as, onscreen, a naked man with a six-pack and tribal tattoos pulled his penis out of the woman he’d been hunched over and smacked it, over and over, into her cheeks.

I must have been making a face, because when I looked up, a guy I didn’t know was staring at me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He pointed. “Church lady!” he hollered. His friends started laughing, and then the girl with tequila all over her belly sat up and started laughing, too. Even after the guy who’d first said it had wandered away, probably to poop into the host’s rice cooker, then post a picture on Facebook, people were still saying it and laughing. Of course, Vanessa had overheard, and she’d hustled me over to the porn computer so she could show me YouTube videos of a man dressed as a woman with a sour face and a blue tweed suit and eyeglasses on a chain acting offended about everything. The guy had undoubtedly meant it as a devastating insult. I was not insulted. Given a choice between being a church lady or one of my female classmates who’d have to wake up the next morning wondering whether her nipples were now online, I’d take the church lady every time.

“Bettina Croft?”

I got to my feet. A woman was standing in the doorway of an office. Through the open door I could see bright art on the walls, and a dozen framed photographs on a side table. The woman had a friendly-looking face, brown hair in a ponytail, and a white short-sleeved T-shirt on top of a pair of loose-fitting cropped linen pants the color of raspberries. She wore flipflops and a necklace of brightly colored glass beads as her only accessory. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand and leading me inside. “Now. Before we get started, one quick question, and you have to tell me the truth,” she said, after I’d taken the chair across from her desk and settled my purse beside me. “Are these pajamas?” She stood, pointing at her pants. I stared.

“Excuse me?”

“I know you’re not here to talk about my pants,” she said. “We’ll get started in a sec. It’s just, I’m so distracted! I bought them — it was this ungodly hot day, and everything was at the dry cleaner’s, so I was wearing a wool skirt, and I thought I was going to melt, so I just ran in and grabbed them off the rack. They’re really comfortable, and I liked them so much I went online to buy another pair, and they were listed under ‘loungewear’ instead of pants, and I’m worried that I’m actually out in public in my PJs.” She made a face. “If that’s true, my partner will kill me. Janie’s stylish,” she said. “She finds me very frustrating.”

I examined the pants, with their elastic waist and baggy fit, wondering if I should have requested Segal instead of Klein. “They look like regular pants to me.” In fact, the pants looked way too casual for the office, better suited to a picnic or a trip to the beach. There was no official dress code at Kohler’s, but all the women wore skirts and dresses. You could wear pants if they were part of a suit and if you paired them with heels and the right accessories, and, even then, you couldn’t wear them very often before people would start to talk.

But maybe Kate Klein was working undercover, at a preschool or someplace like that. She smelled sweet in a familiar, evocative way, and there was a dab of something golden-brown on the hem of her shirt.

“Applesauce,” she said when she noticed my stare, pouring us both glasses of water from a pitcher filled with ice and sliced lemons that sat on a table against her wall, next to potted African violets. “Kids,” she said, pointing toward all those framed photographs. I saw a pair of identical twin boys and an older girl with hair the same color as Kate’s, maybe as young as ten or as old as fourteen. It was hard for me to guess. I didn’t spend much time around children.

Kate sat down on a chenille-covered couch thick with throw pillows, with a blanket hanging over the back. “So, Ms. Croft. Tell me what I can do for you.”

“My father,” I began. On the subway ride over I’d thought about how to most concisely express my problem. “He’s recently remarried.”

Kate Klein produced a legal pad and a ballpoint pen. Her expression was focused; her posture suggested that, in spite of her casual clothes and her comfortable couch, she was listening hard. “And you’d like us to look into his new wife. Is there anything particular that concerns you?”

“Well, her name, for starters. India.” I heard the scorn in my voice.

Kate lifted her eyebrows. “Maybe her parents were Gone With the Wind fans?”

I sipped my water and thought of my father’s bride standing at the sink at the house in Bridgehampton, washing dishes like she did it all the time, and how everything about her was fake. A few weeks ago, under the guise of looking up horoscopes on the Internet, I’d asked India the year of her birth and detected — or thought I had — a brief flutter of hesitation before she came up with a date.

Kate leaned forward with her elbows on her folded knees. “You don’t think your father might have done his own check? From what I’ve seen of him, he strikes me as a pretty savvy guy.”

“In business, maybe. But this. . my mom left him, which was difficult.” I felt the familiar mixture of sorrow at my mother’s departure and fury at her for leaving rise up inside me like acid indigestion, along with shame for having to say any of this out loud.

“Do they have a prenup?” Kate’s head was bent, and she was writing on her legal pad.

“Yes,” I said. I’d asked my father, and he’d looked at me with an uncharacteristically sharp expression. Why do you ask? he’d said.

Just curious, I’d told him. Later, when he and India had gone out to dinner, I’d found the document in my father’s safe, behind a Rothko lithograph in his home office — the code, I knew, was Trey’s birthday, then Tommy’s, then mine. According to the document, in the event of a separation India would receive a million dollars for every year she was married to my father for the first five years, then two million a year up to ten years, then three million a year. If she had a baby, she’d leave the marriage with thirty million dollars, and child support up to thirty thousand dollars a month, plus school tuition at mutually agreed-upon institutions until the baby turned eighteen. That was what worried me most, even though I figured India was too old and too skinny to get her period, let alone get pregnant. A baby would make her rich, really rich, and I couldn’t imagine her not wanting to grab at that chance, to have a baby, hit the jackpot, break my father’s heart, and go off to find a guy her own age, whatever that age really was.

Kate nodded, asking more questions about India — her age, date of birth, her job, and where she’d come from — before clicking her pen and looking at me. “Did you bring a picture?”

I pulled a snapshot out of my purse. I’d expected the wedding to be a gaudy, overblown affair, three hundred guests and half a dozen bridesmaids, all featured in the Vows column in the Sunday Times, but I had to admit that India had done it nicely. They’d said their vows in front of just forty people, on a Sunday morning, in one of the St. Regis’s smaller ballrooms. Afterward there’d been a cocktail party with sushi stations and dim sum, a champagne toast, and a small, dense chocolate wedding cake with pale-pink fondant icing and praline frosting underneath. In the photograph I handed to Kate, India was smiling, wearing a knee-length white silk dress, pale golden shoes, and a single apricot rosebud tucked behind her ear. “And I’ve got these,” I said, handing Kate a folder of printouts from when India had been in the news in connection with her PR work: the statements she’d given on behalf of a client who’d drunkenly backed her Prius into an SUV, then called the other driver white trash before racing through the parking lot and off into the night (“Miss Lowry would never use such language, and we fully expect her to be exonerated,” India had said); the quote she’d given while turning away a reporter at the gates of a magazine-launch party on Independence Island (“‘Invitation-only,’ said Independence’s publicist, glam stormtrooper India Bishop”).

Kate examined each piece of paper, one finger tapping gently at her chin as she looked over the picture, the clippings, the sheet I’d typed up with the words BIOGRAPHICAL DATA centered at the top, the photocopy of India’s driver’s license that I’d made after sliding it out of her purse while she was in what had been my mother’s dressing room, where the masseuse who came twice a week kept a folding table. Kate kicked off her flipflops, turned to a fresh page in her notebook, and then leaned forward.

“When I start these types of investigations, I always tell my clients to be careful what they wish for,” she began. “There’s a few possibilities I can see. One is, we could find out that this woman is exactly who she says she is.”

“She’s not,” I said.

“Or we find out that it’s all a lie — her name, her age, where she says she’s from and what she says she’s done. We could learn that she’s really a lesbian whose three previous husbands all died under mysterious circumstances and that she’d been stalking your father for years before she finally got her hooks into him.”

I found myself nodding unconsciously. That was more like it.

“We’ll build a dossier — pictures, documents, computer files, e-mails — but you should be prepared for the possibility that your father will shoot the messenger.” I must have looked like I didn’t understand, because she continued, “He could get mad at you, not at India.”

“Maybe,” I said. My fingers had gone to my pleats again. I made myself fold my hands in my lap. It was hard to imagine my father getting mad at me, if I’d be the one to save him from heartbreak, not to mention public humiliation. If India left, it would be in the papers, and people would laugh, they way they’d probably been laughing when my mother had run off with the Baba. There’d been snarky blind items on the gossip websites (“WHICH zabillionaire’s better half has ditched spawn and hubby and high-tailed it to New Me-hee-co in the company of her guru, an extremely flexible yogini who’s been helping her unblock her chakras, if you know what we mean, and we think you do?”). I would do whatever I could to spare my father that laughter… and, maybe, spare myself another year like the one I’d endured after my mother had left. I’d keep him safe, and keep my family’s fortune intact.

“Can I ask,” Kate said, running her fingers through the fringe of the blanket that hung over the back of the couch, “why you’re doing this?”

I didn’t answer. Of course I couldn’t tell her how awful it had been after my mother took off. I’d just met her, she hadn’t signed a confidentiality agreement, and I’d never told anyone what that year had been like. But before I had a chance to say anything, the door swung open and a tiny woman balanced on black leather booties shaped to look like horse’s hooves came stomping into the office. She wore a green leather miniskirt, black lace leggings, and a bottle-green velvet blazer. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and her eyes were shadowed with sparkling silver powder.

“Oh, Jesus,” said the hoof-footed woman, narrowing her eyes at Kate. “Did you wear your pajamas to work again?”

“They’re not,” Kate said, swinging her legs onto the floor and sliding her flipflops onto her feet. “I asked.”

“Whatever they are, they’re about one step up from sweatpants,” said the lady, pulling a bottle of water out of her fringed leather hobo bag. A rabbit’s foot, dyed green, was clipped to its strap. She held out her hand to me. “Janie Segal.”

“Of the carpet Segals,” said Kate. “My partner.”

“Could you not tell people that?” said Janie. “Not when you’re dressed as a homeless person. It doesn’t reflect well on my taste.”

“I’m Bettina Croft,” I said, feeling a little dizzy.

Janie lifted her arched eyebrows. “Of the Marcus Crofts?” She raised her fist. I’d seen enough TV to know to bump it lightly with my own. “Respect.”

“Bettina is a client,” said Kate, looking flustered.

“Cool,” said Janie, getting up. “Holler if you need me. Actually, don’t holler. I’m going to have a disco nap.”

She trit-trotted away. The heels on her boots narrowed until the part that actually bore her weight was barely the thickness of a sewing needle. Amazing. “Janie works nights,” said Kate, sliding into the rolling chair behind her desk.

“Ah,” I said.

“Back to business.” Kate pulled a contract out of a desk drawer, and I skimmed it, then took out my checkbook and glanced at my watch. They gave associates an hour for lunch at Kohler’s, and while I was confident that my bosses would indulge me if I was ten or fifteen minutes late, I didn’t like to take advantage. The only reason I’d gotten the job, I was sure, was because my mother had used Kohler’s to sell some of her things before moving to the ashram: they’d handled the auction of her pearls and her cocktail rings and the little Monet, a painting of a pond with lilies washed in lemony sunlight, which my dad had given her as a tenth-anniversary gift. There’d been two hundred applicants for my entry-level job, my supervisor had told me, and that was without Kohler’s even advertising anywhere, just word of mouth. I wasn’t sure if her intention was to make me work harder, but that’s what I’d done. Most mornings, I was the first one into the Crypt, a windowless chamber filled with reference books, jeweler’s loupes, and special raking lamps where the junior appraisers did the preliminary evaluations of lots of coins or jewelry collections or paintings we might take on for auction. I didn’t want anyone thinking that I was spoiled or entitled.

“Well, let’s get down to it,” said Kate. “We’ll see what we can see. But meanwhile — and this is none of my business, but I give all my clients this speech anyhow — you should be thinking about what you’re going to do with the information.”

I nodded, but of course I’d already made up my mind. I would find out the truth — that India wasn’t really named India; that she wasn’t really thirty-eight, that she’d probably never been to college and that maybe she’d been married before. Maybe she even had children, starter kids she’d pawned off on someone else so that she could present herself as young and fresh and untainted. I would give my father the facts, and he would, gently but firmly, send India away. Then maybe someday there’d be a knock on the door, and my mother would be there, smelling of patchouli and musk, her feet bare, her hair gray and her eyes soft and regretful. I’ve made a terrible mistake, she’d say. . and my father would open the door and let her in.

I walked back to work, through the soft spring afternoon, and bought lunch from a cart on Forty-eighth Street. “Pretty lady,” said the vendor, scooping the hot dog out of the vat of steaming water.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling myself blush. I’d never learned how to take a compliment, as my mother had more than once pointed out, and I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t fat, precisely, but I was flat-chested and full-hipped, fifteen or twenty pounds more than what I thought I should weigh. I had nice skin that tanned easily, and all the pieces of my face were fine on their own — my nose, not too big; my eyes, a pretty hazel — but together, they added up to something less than beauty. My best feature was my hair, thick and glossy, somewhere between red and chestnut, that hadn’t been cut since I’d been in high school. From the back, at certain angles, I could look nice, but from the front, I had problems. My teeth were too big. Either that or my lips were too thin, or my gums were abnormally large, or something…

“Miss?” The cart guy was brandishing my dog. “Ketchup? Mustard?”

I shook my head and paid him, putting my change in my pocket and stepping into the air-conditioned, church-like hush of Kohler’s marble-floored, chandelier-lit lobby. I’d done what I could — told my story, paid my retainer. Now I’d have to wait and see.

The last man I’d loved before Marcus was a guy named Kevin. I was living in Los Angeles when I met him. I was twenty-three and had been trying to make it as an actress for four years. I had had more or less concluded that my future might hold many things, but superstardom on screens big or small was not among them.

I wasn’t great, but I’d been good enough to land a manager, a man named Travis Martin. He had olive skin and bristling eyebrows and eyes so brown they were almost black. I suspected that his name was something else, something more ethnic, but I never asked. Travis tried to get me actual paying roles. He also got me bigger boobs and a slightly smaller nose.

“No offense — I think they’re adorable,” he’d said, eyeing my breasts the same way a housewife might consider the chickens at the market as she put dinner together in her head. “But if you want to work. .” He didn’t even bother saying the rest. I didn’t have the thousands of dollars surgery would require, and I told him so. He said he’d loan me the money, and he’d take a percentage of my checks when I started working, that it was an investment that would end up paying for itself. So I’d gone into the hospital and come out with breasts the size of grapefruits, two black eyes, and a bandage over my nose that nobody in my West Hollywood neighborhood looked at twice. The bruises had faded, and my breasts sat high and firm on my chest, but the work hadn’t come. I could sing well enough; I was a decent actress, but I lacked that special something, that gloss, that glow, that propelled an infinitesimal handful of girls each year from the open calls and go-sees to bit parts to big parts to walks down the red carpet during awards season (and then, typically, to liaisons with all the wrong men and a stint or two in rehab, but that wasn’t the part I cared about back then).

When I failed to land speaking roles, Travis got me work doing background, standing in or body doubling, along with jobs that were acting only insofar as they involved costumes. I worked for three years at a real-estate office’s annual Oktoberfest, dressed in a dirndl and black leather boots, pouring beer and passing platters of schnitzel and bratwurst from eight o’clock at night until two in the morning. The only acting I had to do was acting like I didn’t mind when the real-estate agents with gelled hair and gold chains would grab my ass or ask me to sing “Edelweiss.”

It was two a.m. the third year I worked the party, and I was thinking of nothing except counting my tips (as the night went on, men had stuffed bills into my frilly garter belts), unzipping my boots, and going home for a long, hot shower, when the cops rolled in, lights blaring, paddy wagons parked outside. The story, which I learned later that night, in jail, was that a few of the girls, like me, had come from legitimate talent-management companies, while the rest were in the employ of a soon-to-be-notorious Beverly Hills madam and had discreetly made themselves available for fun and games in a vacant three-bedroom suite.

Travis showed up with bail money, and I was released after none of the men said they’d slept with me and Travis provided W-2s to show that I really did work as an actress. We collected my belongings, my wallet and my watch, and he took me to breakfast at the Griddle, apologizing as I glared at him between gulps of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a stack of syrup-soaked pancakes. “I had no idea, Samantha,” he said, gazing at me earnestly and maybe hoping I wouldn’t notice that he had the same sculpted hair and heavy cologne as the real-estate agents at the party. . the men who, I’d heard from one of the girls in the holding cell, had paid to be fellated while balancing ashtrays on the girl’s head so they wouldn’t have to set down their hand-rolled cigars for the act.

“It’s India,” I reminded him. I’d had it legally changed right after my breasts healed. I took one last bite, set my crumpled paper napkin on top of my sticky plate, and pushed it away. “No offense, Travis, but I think I need another manager.”

His fleshy face hardened. “Wait, wait. Let’s not be hasty here. You still owe me.”

“And I’ll pay you,” I told him. “But I can’t work with you anymore.”

I got Kevin’s name from a friend of a friend of a girl I knew, someone who’d actually gotten cast in a network pilot. “He’s a baby agent,” she’d confided. I said that didn’t matter. Better a baby agent than an almost pimp.

Kevin had an office in a glass-and-marble tower in Century City. He’d gone to Rice, then moved to California and worked his way up from the mailroom at one of the big talent agencies in town. He was just signing his first clients: potty-mouthed comics who barely looked old enough to have learned the curse words they spewed onstage, wannabe starlets and fresh-off-the-bus singers and geeky fanboys who just knew they were destined to be the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, mostly because their mothers had told them so.

Kevin wasn’t tall, maybe an inch or two more than my five foot six, with narrow shoulders and delicate wrists and hands. His clothes — sharply creased jeans and a checkered blue-and-white button-down shirt, a black leather belt with a silver buckle and black leather cowboy boots — were so well kept that they looked brand-new. He was losing his light-brown hair but not making a big deal about it, not attempting a comb-over or hiding beneath a baseball cap, and there was something about him, the way he looked at you when you talked, leaning close like it would hurt him to miss a word, that made you feel special.

He was a good listener, which was important for his line of work: after four years in Los Angeles I’d figured out that performers were black holes of neediness. Actors (I included myself in this tally, but at least I had good reasons to be needy) wanted to talk mostly about themselves, and they wanted you to listen, and if Kevin was prepared to do this — quietly, politely, intensely — then he’d be a success.

“Can you take me on?” I asked. He looked at my list of credits — scanty and padded, like my breasts before I’d had the work done — then gave me a look of earnest regret and shook his head. I wasn’t surprised. It was one thing to be nineteen, new in town and full of promise, but at twenty-three, if you hadn’t landed so much as a line and you’d spent four years trying, your prospects and potential had diminished considerably.

“I can’t offer you representation. However…” And he smiled, a charming grin that lit his face. “I’d love to take you to dinner.”

I figured I’d date him casually, just for fun. . a sport-fuck, as my roommate, Terri, would say, while I tried to find another agent who could get me the kind of job that meant I didn’t have to waitress, or temp, or be part of crowd scenes on cop shows, or spend all day on a gurney as an extra on ER. But then I learned that Kevin came from money. Big old family money, Houston oil money, the kind of money that meant that the art museum in town was named after your grandfather and your father had inherited one of the most legendary privately owned art collections in the world. It didn’t take long for me to abandon my dreams of stardom and decide to dream of becoming Kevin’s trophy wife instead.

Kevin lived with his brother, Carlton, who worked as an art broker. The brothers hadn’t used family connections to get their jobs, but they weren’t above using their trust funds to go in together on a spectacular penthouse apartment in an old Art Deco apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown. The apartment spanned the top floor of the twelve-story building. A fountain, with mosaic mermaids cavorting on its sides, splashed in the building’s tiled lobby, where a sad-eyed, soft-spoken Dominican man sat watching the security cameras. The boys’ place was enormous, with soaring, mostly empty white walls, high-ceilinged rooms with elaborate crown moldings, and all the latest electronics.

Each brother had his own wing: bedroom, bathroom, office. The two of them shared the kitchen, where very little cooking went on, and the den, where the wet bar got a lot of use, where Nintendo was played and the occasional bong was fired up on the weekends. Carl liked to party — sometimes I’d be in the kitchen in the morning, making Kevin a protein smoothie, watching as the parade of the Young and the Panty-less proceeded from Carlton’s bedroom to the elevator. Kevin was more ambitious than his brother, and his late nights were all work-related. He would put in a full day at the agency, trying to get his writing clients gigs on sitcoms or doing punch-up on movies in production, trying to get his actors auditions and his singers’ demo tapes into the right hands. Then he’d grab a quick bite, usually a bunless burger or a bowl of turkey chili somewhere like Hugo’s or the Urth Caffé, and head out to a club to hear a comic or a band, a showcase or a play, to check out new actors or support the ones he’d already signed.

After realizing what Kevin was, and what an association with him could lead to, I’d slowly tapered off on the auditions, redone my résumé, and landed an entry-level job at a public-relations firm that managed musicians and movie stars. Some nights after work I’d join Kevin, picking my way across the darkness of a tiny theater or perching on a folding chair in a high-school classroom or church basement for a performance of Equus or a night of Tennessee Williams monologues.

Work kept me busy, but my real job was Kevin, and my impromptu, ongoing audition for the role of Kevin’s wife.

This required editing my past. I made myself a year younger, reasoning that younger was always better and it was never too early to start. I told him I’d done two years of college before making the trip to Los Angeles. I doled out parts of my true story: that my mother had given birth to me before she’d finished high school, that my grandparents had raised me, that they were now very old and in assisted living, that my mother had remarried and that she and I didn’t see each other much. Kevin raised his eyebrows, pinning me with his gaze, but I’d learned his tricks by then and knew that he could feign absolute interest while mentally choosing his five favorite Celtics or deciding whether he’d have the sautéed spinach or the quinoa on his pick-a-plate at Hugo’s.

He brought me home to Texas for Christmas the first year we dated. I met two more brothers, one in boarding school and one in college; a cowboy-booted father; and a brittle blond mom who worked as a decorator and did ninety minutes of step aerobics every day. Kevin’s father, red-faced and beer-gutted, had grabbed my boob after one eggnog-heavy evening, but his family seemed to accept me as the kind of girl Kevin would inevitably end up with: sweet and pretty, with a job that she’d be happy to abandon after the first baby came along.

For three years I was a rich man’s girlfriend, with everything that meant: weekend jaunts to Napa Valley with Carl and whatever girl he was seeing, wine tastings and afternoons lolling in hot springs; courtside seats at sporting events; fine wine, fancy food, four-star hotels.

True, being Kevin’s girlfriend, with an eye on being his wife, required every bit of the physical effort I’d put into being an actress. I’d work out on the Nautilus machines at my gym, then jog through Runyon Canyon or put in five miles on the treadmill. The upkeep was both painful and, on my salary, prohibitively expensive, especially since I was still paying Travis back. But it was all necessary: the highlights, the bikini waxes, the weekly manicures and biweekly pedicures, the haircuts and the tan, the lingerie and shoes and clothing, the constant diet. It was an investment, I told myself, sliding my credit card across the hair or tanning salon’s counter, writing the checks. An investment in my future.

One night, three years after we’d met, Kevin came home at six o’clock, which was unusual. We weren’t officially living together then, but I spent five nights of every week at his house, using my own apartment mostly as a glorified closet. I was in Kevin’s kitchen, still in the bike shorts and running bra I’d worn to the gym, running a sponge dreamily over the marble countertops, imagining that all of this was mine, when he came through the door, whistling. He’d been away for five days, first at some kind of fraternity reunion back in Houston, then off to Vegas, where a client was opening for Jay Leno. We’d talked on the phone a little, but now he didn’t seem happy to see me. “Oh,” he said, blinking like he didn’t recognize me. “Oh, hey.”

I felt my hands go cold. I knew what “Oh, hey” meant. I’d heard him say it on the phone to clients he’d been ducking, in person to sweaty comedians and bad-breathed screenwriters he wasn’t going to take on, or was getting ready to drop. The song he’d been whistling on his way through the door was “Hey Jealousy.” This wasn’t good.

To his credit, he didn’t break up with me over the phone, any more than he’d pretended he’d wanted to represent me just to get into my pants. He walked right up to me, took my cold hands in his, looked me in the eye with his I’m-listening face and said, “I think we should take a break.”

What followed was predictable. I asked if there was someone else. He denied it. He asked if we could still be friends. I told him to go to hell. Then I dramatically crammed all of my possessions (and a few things of his that I thought he wouldn’t miss) into a half-dozen trash bags and dragged them to the elevator, then into the Corolla I’d had for years and kept parked next to Kevin’s Audi. “Hold on,” he said, following me into the underground parking lot and watching as I slung the bags into the trunk. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Come on, Indie. We’re probably going to see each other around. We should at least be friends.”

I spun around on one sneakered foot, so furious it was all I could do to keep from hitting him. He’d wasted my time, the best years of my life. I would never be thinner or prettier than I was at that very moment. My face, my body, my youth — these were my commodities, and he’d wasted them. . or, rather, I’d been dumb enough to squander them on him. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You’re never going to see me again.”

I guess I went a little crazy then, the way you can go crazy only if you’re young and female and living in Los Angeles, where there’s an entire world of medical professionals dedicated to making you look even better, even younger, when you could fill out a bunch of applications and have a fistful of new credit cards in less than a week. Using these new cards, not letting myself think about how I’d pay off their balances, I had my hair color switched from blond to a rich, glossy chestnut, shot through with strands of copper and gold. A little liposuction came next, because no matter how hard I’d worked, I’d never been able to rid myself of the jiggle on my inner thighs, the bit of back fat that bulged over the top of my low-riding jeans. From there, it was an easy step to Botox for my brow and fillers for my cheekbones, injections that would subtly reshape my face, turning me into a pretty stranger, and to implants a cup size bigger than the ones I’d initially picked.

I woke up in the recovery room, on a hospital bed, alone, with an IV needle stuck into the back of my hand, in a room with tiled floors and drab green walls that smelled of disinfectant. Tears trickled down my swollen cheeks. My forehead stung from the needles; my torso and thighs felt like an entire football team had been kicking them. The anesthesia had left me queasy. When it wore off I knew I’d be starving. I hadn’t eaten the day of the operation, and I’d been dieting for the month before; the looser my skin, the doctors had said, the easier it would be for them to suck out the most fat.

A nurse asked how I was feeling and helped me to sit up. A while later, Dr. Perez came in to see me. He touched me gently — my jaw, my nose, my cheekbones, tapping and prodding, murmuring to himself, before pulling open my gown. I’d been bandaged, bound from my breasts to just above my knees, in the stretchy bodysuit that I would wear for the next two weeks. “No mirrors yet,” he cautioned, and I smiled, even though it hurt, imagining the state my face was in. When I’d healed, I looked just the way I’d hoped: glamorous, quietly sexy, with full lips that fell naturally into a pout and a nose that seemed made to turn skyward.

I spent three months recovering. When I told my boss I was moving to New York she sighed, scratched with her capped Montblanc pen underneath the wig she’d worn since her chemo and promised me a job in the firm’s Manhattan office. After eight years in New York, years of handling actors and singers and Broadway stars who wanted you to help them pretend they were straight when they were photographed at places like the Man Hole, I went out on my own.

Six years after that, I met Marcus in the coffee shop. Less than three hours later he’d called, saying that he was on his way to Japan for a few days but would be back that weekend, and would I like to have dinner?

“Ah. Japan,” I said, leaning back in my chair, kicking off my shoes, and crossing my legs, squeezing them together to keep them from shaking. “I was just there last week.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked.

“I think,” I told him, “that it’s all about the emerging markets right now.”

“Are you free Saturday?”

“I’m afraid I have plans,” I said. I didn’t have plans, but I knew that I had to at least give the impression of being busy on a Saturday night. “But Sunday could work.” This wasn’t strictly adhering to the playbook, but Marcus was the real deal, and I couldn’t put him off long enough for some other girl who’d been waiting for her big chance to swoop in and take what could have been mine.

He took me to Eleven Madison Park, which had just gotten four stars in the Times, a fact that should have made it impossible for a civilian to get a reservation. Marcus was no civilian. “Mr. Croft! Welcome!” said the man behind the podium, sounding as if Marcus was a long-lost family member who’d come, maybe bearing good news about a dead relative’s will. I stood in the vestibule, my new dress snug around my body, and inhaled the scent of fresh flowers and buttery sauces, roasted meats and rich desserts, a fragrance that meant money. I could feel my body respond, my nipples tightening, my heartbeat speeding up. Easy, I told myself as Marcus slipped off my coat and handed it to the pretty young girl who’d materialized to whisk it away. They never hired ugly people in places like these. How they got around the civil rights laws I have no idea, but I had never seen an unattractive bartender or waitress or coat-check girl in any of the best restaurants in Manhattan. Maybe no ugly person ever applied. Maybe they all just know to stay away.

The maître d’ led us to the center of the room, past a table set with a dozen oversized glass vases, each containing a single stalk of hydrangea leaning at an angle. I ran my fingers over the creamy paper on which the day’s menu had been printed — minted pea soup, roast spring chicken stuffed with foie gras, baby suckling pig, a dozen other delicacies that made my mouth flood. All I’d had that day was chamomile tea and a wheatgrass shake. After Marcus’s call, I’d embarked on a five-day juice fast that had left me six pounds thinner and a little wobbly. . but six pounds was six pounds, and I needed every ounce of advantage I could get.

With my right hand, I lifted my wineglass. With my left hand, I gripped the table so that he wouldn’t see me trembling. Don’t screw this up, I told myself. Don’t lose this one, too.

My normal dinner was broiled fish and steamed greens, but I knew that men liked to see women eat. So I’d allowed myself an ambrosial Parker House roll, soft as a cloud in my hand, with fresh, unsalted, locally sourced butter. I’d started with a salad, but one with lardons sprinkled over the lettuce and a poached egg on top, and I had that foie gras stuffed chicken, crisp-skinned and succulent, every juicy bite of it exploding in my mouth, the flavors and textures, salty, sweet, rich, dancing over my tongue.

“You’re very pretty,” said Marcus. I set my fork on my plate.

“You’re not so bad yourself.” He wore the uniform of a successful New York businessman, but his voice was midwestern, plangent and nasal, not Chicago, like I’d guessed, but Detroit. His father had owned a garage, and his mother did the books. Marcus had invented a way to heat car seats, a technology he’d patented, then sold to the automakers, becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five.

“Confidentially,” he said, lowering his voice to suit the word, “that wasn’t my first business.”

“Oh?” I didn’t have to fake my interest or my smile. Marcus was easy to listen to and not bad-looking, for his age. While he was across the room, exchanging handshakes and backslaps with a tableful of businessmen, I’d slipped a handful of gougères into the empty zippered makeup case I kept in my purse. I was, I knew, long past the point where I had to steal bread from the basket, or crudités from the free spread at a bar, just to be sure I’d have something to eat the next day — I had money, plus a refrigerator full of fruit and Greek yogurt and a single emergency bar of dark chocolate studded with candied orange peel — but it was a habit I couldn’t break. Maybe when I was a lady who lunched, kept in the style to which I wanted to become accustomed, I could go into therapy and figure it all out.

“So what were you,” I asked, leaning forward to give him the tiniest glimpse of my candlelit cleavage, with the cheese puffs warm in my lap, “before you were a seat-heating mogul?”

He grinned, looking, with his broad, round face, like a little boy who’d gotten away with something, timing the punchline he’d clearly delivered more than once. “I sold pot.”

I widened my eyes and turned my mouth into a perfectly lipsticked O of amusement. “I’m shocked.” I wasn’t. I’d looked him up online beforehand. The pot anecdote was one he’d told before. But I knew my lines in this play.

He gave a little shrug, a charming smile. I could smell the starch of his suit, the juice from his filet on his china plate, his cologne, layered and complex. His big hands rested on the white tablecloth; his teeth gleamed in the candlelight. “It was the eighties,” said Marcus. “You wouldn’t remember.” I remembered the eighties just fine, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I bent my head over my folded napkin, soft hair brushing my cheeks. It was like a fencing match, parry and thrust, advance and retreat. Flash him a smile, then turn away, tracing a fingertip over the tines of my fork. Lick my lips, then let him hear my skirt rustle as I recrossed my legs; get him so bewitched that he wouldn’t even feel the blade slide in.

I smoothed the fabric of my dress, a three-thousand-dollar Jil Sander that I’d bought at Saks that afternoon and was wearing with the tags tucked against my skin. I’d take it off as soon as I got home, sponge off any deodorant residue, run a lint brush over it, zip it back into its garment bag, and return it the next day on my lunch hour. I’m sorry, I’d tell the salesgirl, with a sorrowful expression on my face. I adored it, but my husband, not so much.

Marcus had finished his meat and was using a bit of bread to mop up the juices, turning it in circles around the plate until the porcelain was shiny. “So how about you?” he asked. “Are you a native?”

I kept my answers short, talking about how much I loved New York: my apartment, my friends, my freedom. After the waiter handed us dessert menus, I told him about the weekends I’d walk all the way to Brooklyn (never mind that I hadn’t done it in eight years, and when I’d done it last it was because I didn’t even have two bucks for the subway). I said that I loved the theater and the museums, and that thanks to my job I got invited to premieres and parties, special exhibits and opening nights.

“No children?” he asked.

I paused, knowing I had to be careful to sound like I didn’t care one way or the other, because what if he didn’t want more kids? But saying I didn’t want them would make me sound cold. “I guess. .” I began. “Well, you know. It’s probably the same for lots of women. Maybe I was too busy, and I was definitely too picky.” That last part, the “picky” part, was important. No man wants to feel like he’s just the latest chump to buy a ticket for the merry-go-round, the last one aboard a horse that everyone else has already ridden.

“You think it’s too late?” he asked. Then, “Was that a rude question? Forgive me. I haven’t done this much — this dating.”

I looked down again, arranging my face in an expression that was just the right combination of rueful (over the kid thing) and amused (by him). “I don’t know if it’s too late. I’ve never really tried.” This was the truth — the one time I’d gotten pregnant, I had definitely not been trying. I let it out as a sigh, then raised my eyes to his. “All I know is, when I do it — if I do it — I want it to be right.” I hesitated, considering whether I was saying too much, but I’d had four glasses of wine by then, Riesling with the appetizers and a syrupy Shiraz with the chicken, and booze on top of a juice fast tends to loosen one’s tongue. “I want a nest egg,” I said. I’d started to say money before remembering that people who had lots of it rarely said the word. “More than I’ve got now. I’ve got some savings…” Again, true. I had a decent-size investment account, a nicely diversified portfolio that hadn’t taken too hard a hit in the latest downturn, but it wasn’t even close to being true fuck-you money, and true fuck-you money was one thing I was sure I wanted. Money, and what it could buy; what it could do, what it could keep you safe from.

Marcus sat back in his chair, his eyes unreadable. I imagined the feeling of a fishing line, formerly taut, going slack in my grip. Shit, I thought. I lost him. Then, unexpectedly, he leaned across the table and took my hands.

“I like you,” he announced. It had the tone of finality, like a manager saying you’re hired, or a groom saying I do. I felt my body uncoil. My head was humming with relief and the wine. His hands were big and warm and strong and dry — all the things you’d hope a billionaire’s hands would be. Even better, they felt no different than the hands of a man my own age, which was encouraging, because I suspected — correctly, it turned out — that his body, while well maintained, would reflect his age. Things drooped — his ass, his balls, the flabby little man-breasts that you couldn’t see underneath his made-to-measure shirts with his monogram in violet thread on the cuffs.

Marcus took me to dinners and on trips that made Kevin’s steakhouses and long weekends look like jokes. Together we went to the best restaurants and the fanciest hotels, spending long weekends in the George V in Paris and on islands you could only reach by private jet. We had tickets to the opera (I guzzled Red Bull in the ladies’ room to keep from dozing off during the arias) and invitations to museum openings and galas. I’d take him places, too, getting us tickets to events that I thought would amuse him and establish my hot-younger-woman-about-town credentials: a rock concert in a club downtown; out for a falafel, which he ate gamely, licking tahini sauce from his fingers, tucking a paper napkin on top of his tie.

His children, when I finally met them, were what I’d expected: overbred, overprivileged trust-fund brats with big white Kennedy teeth, thin lips, and suspicious eyes. One of the boys was in a band (of course, I thought to myself, keeping my smile on my face as he told me about how one of their songs was blowing up YouTube), the other boy was a lawyer working for Marcus (of course, take two), and the girl was an associate in the objet department at Kohler’s. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, narrowly, across the dinner table, then again while I was washing up (Miss Thing, of course, hadn’t bothered to clear so much as a teaspoon). I could practically read the balloon over her head, the one that said gold digger. Let her think it, I told myself. Let her imagine the worst. When it comes down to a battle between two women, whether it’s wife versus mother-in-law or girlfriend versus daughter, the woman who wins is the one he’s taking to bed.

After five dates, Marcus told me he loved me. True, he’d been having an orgasm at the time, but it still counted. I’d wiped off my mouth on his thigh and wriggled toward the headboard until I was cradled in his arms. I would never challenge him, never argue, never behave as if I was his equal. I’d be his comfort, his cheerleader, his appreciative audience, his unconditional supporter. Love you, too, I whispered, kissing his cheek, smoothing his hair off his forehead, acknowledging, to my surprise, that it almost felt like it was true.

One night in June, we went to an opening at the Museum of Modern Art. At the dinner, I was seated across from the honored guest, Laurena Costovya, a Polish performance artist in her sixties who’d come to America for a retrospective of her work. For three months, young artists would re-create some of her most famous pieces — the one where a man and a woman danced a topless tango, bashing their bodies against each other until they bled; the one where a man balanced naked on stilts for ten hours at a time, his face hidden behind an executioner’s black leather hood.

Stately as a statue at the head of the table, Laurena wore a kind of nun’s robe made of raw white silk, with her hair, still brown, in a heavy plait over one shoulder, and no makeup except for a single slash of red on her lips. When she was in her twenties, she’d carved swastikas into her belly with a shard of glass, and done installations where she’d run face-first into pillars until she collapsed. She’d lit her long hair on fire, and stood perfectly still for hours with her partner holding a switchblade to her throat, his thumb hovering over the button that would pop the knife into her neck. Here in New York, she was performing a piece entitled See/Be Seen, where she’d sit at a table for eight hours at a stretch, across from whoever cared to face her. After dinner, there was a preview. I remember the appreciative murmur as she gathered her skirts and crossed the room to take her seat. I thought about how silly the whole thing was, how far from what I thought of as “art,” as she took her seat, arranging the folds of her skirt. To me, art was a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, not some senior citizen sitting behind a desk.

“Go on,” said Marcus, urging me toward the empty space across from the artist. I crossed the floor, heels clicking, and sat down, my smile firmly on my face, my hair swept into an updo, my makeup professionally applied (at two hundred dollars a pop it was an unwelcome expense, but I couldn’t skip it, not with photographers on hand).

Laurena regarded me. I looked back, legs crossed, hands folded in my lap. My eyes were on hers, but my mind was wandering. I was thinking about how many calories I’d consumed that day and whether the walk I’d taken at lunchtime, twenty blocks up Fifth Avenue with a circle around Bryant Park, had burned most of them off. I was wondering how soon Marcus would ask me to marry him, whether he’d ask me what kind of ring I wanted or just buy something himself, and thinking about my little apartment and whether I’d keep it, whether he’d give me the kind of allowance that would let me slip twenty-three hundred dollars to the landlord each month unnoticed, and whether there was anything besides my clothes that I’d take with me. Probably not, but I wanted to keep that apartment. It was my secret lair, my bolt-hole, my hideaway, in case I ever had to run, to go to ground. Thoughts like this were running through my head in a pleasant, lazy loop when suddenly the artist’s gaze caught me and pinned me. My face flushed, and my eyes widened. I felt as if I was being X-rayed, like my skin had been stripped off, like this woman with her plain, strong-boned face knew not only everything I was thinking but everything I was, and everything I’d done to turn myself into the woman who was sitting before her, all the parts I’d manipulated, reduced or amplified, edited and changed.

Before I could stop myself, before I knew that I even intended to speak, I found myself blurting, in a husky whisper that hardly sounded like my voice, “It wasn’t really a baby.”

Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. The moment seemed to spin out forever. I felt my skin prickle and my mouth go dry as I sat there, trembling, every muscle tensed, waiting for. . what? For her to say something? To stand up and yell liar, or fraud? For her to proclaim, in the accented voice I’d heard on tapes of the performances she’d given, that she knew my real name? She couldn’t speak, I reminded myself. Silence was part of her shtick — her performance, to use a nicer word, but shtick was what it was. She sat. She observed. She could see and be seen, but she would never say a word.

I sat, forcing myself to hold still until my heartbeat had slowed and my legs weren’t shaking, until I was sure I had control and that no one in that well-dressed crowd had heard what I’d said. You might see things, I told the artist in my head. But I go out, I walk in the world, I do, I change. Then I gave her a smile — more of a smirk, really — and rose from the chair. With my head held high and my face composed, I crossed the enormous room, gliding over the marble floor, feeling the lights that had been set up for the taping burn against my skin. Marcus slipped his arm around my waist. “Welcome back, gorgeous,” he whispered into my ear, and I felt adrenaline surge through my body. I win, I thought. I win.

A few days later, we woke up in bed together, and I put my arms around his neck and murmured, in my sleepiest, sexiest voice, “You know, we can’t keep doing this. It’s not a good example for your children.”

“Well, then,” he said, and reached across me, opening the drawer of the bedside table and pulling out the little velvet box I’d been waiting for since I’d spotted him in Starbucks: my diamond as big as the Ritz. “I know it’s early days,” he said, his voice curiously humble, “but I’m sure about you.”

I spent three months planning a wedding — his kids, my friends, a few of his business associates and all of his assistants, who probably knew him better than any of us. Then there was the honeymoon, moving into his place, which spanned two entire stories of the San Giacomo, one of New York City’s grand old apartment buildings that stood along Central Park West. It was months before I had occasion to think of the artist again, the way she’d looked at me, the mocking curl of her lips, the way her eyes had widened as she’d stared and seemed to say without speaking, I know what you are. I know exactly what you are.

I was in the basement of T.I., one of the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, standing in a circle of three other couples with a beer in my hand, nodding while my boyfriend Dan Finnerty talked about a hockey game. Whether this was a game he’d played in or merely a game he’d seen I wasn’t quite sure, and it was too far into the conversation to interrupt and ask him, so I nodded and smiled and laughed when laughter seemed required. When my telephone buzzed in my pocket, I tried not to look too eager as I grabbed for it.

“Excuse me,” I shouted in the direction of Dan’s face, then trotted up the stairs to the second-floor ladies’ room. You could feel the bass of the stereo thumping through the floor, but it was by far the quietest place in the building.

“Hello?”

“Julia?” It was my father…and he sounded like he was drunk. Even in that single word I could hear the edge of his voice, the way the I of my name sounded mushy.

My heart sped up. “Where are you?” I asked as I imagined the possibilities. In a bar. In a bus station. In a car accident, on the side of the road, in a spill of twinkling glass, with an ambulance’s light washing his face in red.

He didn’t answer. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“No, it’s not.” He sounded stubborn; a little boy refusing to believe it was bedtime. “It is not okay. It’s not okay what I did to you guys…what I did to you mom. I’m so ashamed of myself.” He was crying now, horrible choked-sounding sobs, and even though it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, called me up apologizing and crying, I could never keep from crying myself.

“Dad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and I could hear the sound of something slamming. Was he pounding his fist against a table? Was he hitting himself? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Dad.” I leaned against the wooden wall. Somewhere not far away, normal college students were enjoying a normal college night. Soon someone would suggest a game of croquet, where you chugged a beer every time you whacked your ball through the wickets. Dan would be the game’s most enthusiastic participant.

“You deserve better than me.”

An icy blade slid into my heart. “Dad,” I said carefully. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”

He managed a chuckle. “More than I have already? Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

“You’re going to be okay,” I told him. “Just hang on. You’ll go to Willow Crest. They can help you there.” But I was talking to a dial tone.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. Where was he? Was he all right? And who could I call to ask? Not my mother. She wouldn’t go looking. Not the cops, because what would I say? He called me and he was crying? I sat on the toilet, cradling my face in my hands. How had it come to this?

“Jules?”

I peeked through the crack, and there was Kimmie Park, a girl I knew slightly. She’d been one of my first-year hallmates and, this year, a coworker in the admissions office.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, still sitting on the toilet. Here I was, five weeks away from graduation and the bright future my degree was supposed to ensure, and I was huddled in a bathroom, crying. Maybe it was the hormones.

I’d called Jared Baker three days after I’d met him in the mall. The questionnaire, all twenty-five pages of it, had arrived in my mailbox the next day. I’d sent in the forms, and then, a week later, biked to the clinic for an interview and another lengthy survey. What was my favorite movie, my favorite food, my favorite song? I gave answers that were somewhere between the truth and what I thought would please the customers, saying Hitchcock and Jane Austen instead of Pretty Woman and the occasional trashy celebrity biography, writing that I loved listening to classical music, which was true only on nights I couldn’t sleep.

The next week I’d undergone the most thorough physical of my life, plus an interview with a psychologist, an earnest young woman with curly brown hair and small round glasses. A middle-aged nurse with an iron-gray bob and, I eventually learned, disturbingly cold hands showed me how to give myself hormone shots, right underneath my belly button. A doctor wrote me a prescription for the needles and the medications I’d inject, drugs to maximize the number of eggs I’d produce. “You may experience some mood swings, or feel like you’re having really intense PMS,” he told me, but what I’d noticed was feeling weepy all the time. Alone in my room, the sounds of people shouting and laughing outside, a half-dozen different songs blaring from iPod speakers propped up against open windows, I’d pull out the one picture I kept of my father, from a trip we’d taken to the beach. I’d look at my younger self, the cutoff jean shorts and the braces, my father, strong and handsome in his jeans and alligator shirt, and just cry and cry, which wasn’t like me at all. My mother was the family’s designated weeper. I got angry. I made plans. Mostly, I kept myself to myself, acting the part of a normal girl, a girl who belonged here, a heedless, laughing, bright-future girl whose father had never been in the newspapers, or in rehab, or in prison.

I watched the space underneath the stall door, waiting for Kimmie’s feet to move. They didn’t. I’m fine, I told myself. Everything’s fine. But it wasn’t. It was my senior year and I was finishing four years on a campus full of people who I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. Not even my boyfriend knew how, on Mondays, I took the bus by myself to the mall and ate alone at the food court. Nobody knew the truth about my family; no one knew the story of my dad. Instead of real friends, I had acquaintances, interchangeable classmates I could sit with at dinner, who’d go in with me on a late-night pizza or walk with me to the clubs, people whose names I wouldn’t remember a year after graduation. Now it was June. Too late for fun, and instead of fond memories, I’d be left with nothing but regrets.

Suddenly the tears were back. I buried my face in my hands, choking back sobs.

“Jules?” came Kimmie’s soft voice. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me, and managed to croak out an answer. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.” Peeking through the seam between the door and the wall, I could see her, standing in front of the row of mirrors. Kimmie had glossy black hair, so long it brushed at the small of her back, a sweet face with a pert nose and neat white teeth, and a figure that was notable only in the way in which it resembled that of a ten-year-old boy. She wore Keds, laced and tied in bows, and had a slightly pigeon-toed walk.

Kimmie was a biochem major, and she played violin in the orchestra. Freshman year, I’d see her in the mornings, leaving the dorm for the day, with her black violin case in her hand and, on her back, a blue backpack as pristine as the day it had arrived from the L.L. Bean store (more than once I’d wondered if she had a closet full of dozens of navy-blue backpacks and just kept rotating through them).

The two of us were friendly enough. We’d laugh as we sorted through stacks of applications, rolling our eyes at the obvious ways the high-school seniors tried to game the system. “Do you think anyone,” Kimmie would ask, pinching an essay between her thumb and first finger, “actually wants to spend a summer teaching English in Bosnia?”

“I don’t think I’d even want to spend a weekend there,” I replied. We’d trade off taking panicky phone calls from the students or, more often, their parents, and sometimes at the end of our shift we’d walk to the student center and split a slice of cake (I’d have coffee, she’d drink tea). We weren’t friends, exactly, but that winter, Kimmie had started dating one of Dan’s friends, a high-fiving, barrel-chested lacrosse player named Chet who had, in the uncharitable parlance of my classmates, a touch of yellow fever. He’d dated a series of Asian girls since his arrival on campus — Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, conducting his own private waist-down tour of the Far East. For the past few months, I’d been seeing shy little Kimmie everywhere — sitting across the table from Chet in Firestone Library, trotting lightly up the stairs to his third-floor dorm room in Henry Hall, taking little birdie sips of her go-cup of beer in the Ivy basement, her hand with its short, unpolished nails resting lightly on Chet’s brawny forearm.

I waited until I knew I couldn’t avoid coming out and letting her look at me. I flushed the toilet, rubbed my eyes, slipped the elastic off my ponytail and shook my hair out around my face, hoping it would cover up some of the blotchiness. Then I stepped out of the stall.

“Hi.”

She looked me over. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m homesick.” It was the first thing that popped into my head, and it was, of course, ridiculous — we were seniors; we’d been away from home for four years. But Kimmie simply nodded. She held something out to me — a wad of paper towels, soaked in cold water. “Put this on the back of your neck,” she instructed, in her soft, lilting voice.

I did as she told me as more tears welled in my eyes. It’s the hormones, I told myself. It had to be. Kimmie’s hand was light as she patted my back once, twice, three times, like a mother burping a baby. I waited for her to ask the obvious questions, about why I was homesick and whether that was really what was making me cry like this, given all of the other, much more obvious reasons — I’d been dumped, I’d gotten a bad grade on my thesis, someone had called me ugly on the Internet, I’d found out that I was pregnant. That last one brought a bitter smile to my lips, and it was that bitterness that finally stopped the tears. I walked to the sink, splashed more cold water on my face, and finger-combed my hair. Kimmie watched all this silently, standing a polite distance away from me, the bumps of her vertebrae showing through the fabric of her T-shirt, a few freckles dotting each cheek.

“Want to go to Ivy? Chet and Dan are there.”

“I don’t know if I’m up for that.”

“Still life with oafs,” she said. I blinked, sure that I’d heard her wrong. She lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug and gave me a surprisingly sly smile. “That’s how I always think of it. Dinners there. Parties. These boys.”

“You think Chet’s an oaf?”

When she smiled, a dimple flashed in one of her cheeks. “He’s a sweet oaf. But an oaf, yes.”

“So it’s not true love.”

She shook her head, hair swishing. “I just wanted to have some fun before I graduated.”

I was startled at how closely what she’d said echoed what I’d been thinking, about how time was short and how I should have some fun, too. “And is he? Fun?”

She smiled, shrugging again. “If you like beer. He took me to the beach once. Atlantic City.” She hummed a few bars of the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name, surprising me. I’d have figured Kimmie with her violin as someone whose knowledge of contemporary music ended at around 1890. “And to Six Flags for my birthday.” This was interesting. Princeton students made trips to New York City, for parties, or off-Broadway experimental theater, or museum exhibits, but no one I knew would ever admit to visiting an amusement park, waiting in line with the teeming, sunburned, flabby masses, unless maybe they’d taken mushrooms first and gone as a joke.

Her smile widened, displaying small, even white teeth. “Chet’s afraid of roller coasters.”

“He is?”

She nodded. “Come on,” she said, and linked her arms with me, like we were schoolgirl chums. We walked through the soft spring night across the street to Ivy, Princeton’s oldest eating club, one that had always been home to the sons (and, since 1991, the daughters) of privilege, the future kings and queens of America, a club you had to go through a rush-like evaluation process called bicker to join. It was a gorgeous, blooming spring night, but I felt awful: my breasts ached so much I winced whenever my shirt touched them, and I had an acne cyst throbbing beneath the skin above my right eye, making me feel like my forehead was trying to give birth. The grand brick mansion halfway down Prospect Avenue, entering the dining room, with its wood paneling and high ceilings, the mellow gleam of lamplight on the tables brought me back to myself. I’d be done with the hormones soon enough, and besides, I was doing a good thing, a generous thing. All of this would work out: some poor infertile woman would get her baby; I’d get my money; my father would get another chance.

Dan and Chet were out back drinking. Dan pulled me close, squeezing me too hard. The first time we’d had sex, he’d fallen to his knees in front of me, his arms wrapped around my legs, his face buried between them. “God, you’re hot,” he’d groaned. Looking down at him, his broad, muscled chest, his penis, moist and sticky at the tip, jerking in the air like a hitchhiker’s spastic thumb, a wave of something surged through me, a feeling that felt nothing like desire and a lot like nausea. I’d had to peel his hands off the backs of my thighs and run to the bathroom, where I’d bent over the sink, positive I was going to throw up, even though all I’d had that night were two glasses of Champagne. Once the urge had passed, I’d lifted my head, looking at myself in the mirror and thought, What am I doing? I don’t want to sleep with him. He’s a dolt. Of course I’d slept with him anyhow — at that point, it would have been rude not to — but as I’d felt him push his way inside me (“Tight,” he’d announced, like he was paying me an enormous compliment), I’d felt sick to my stomach, disgusted with him and disgusted with myself.

We’d slept together a few times a week since then, and Dan had been polite and accommodating each time. He was, I had to admit, nothing if not well-mannered. “Can I come on your tits?” he’d ask, in the same solicitous tone as a waiter asking if I wanted fresh-ground pepper on my pasta. He’d go down on me until I was sure his tongue was numb and his jaw was aching; he’d try his best to please me, and tell me I was beautiful. . but it never felt right, and I’d never been able to figure out why. He just wasn’t the guy for me, I’d eventually decided, and when he headed out west after graduation, I didn’t think he’d miss me much.

I took a seat next to Kimmie, knowing how the evening would unfold. There’d be a game of pool, or croquet on the back lawn, with more plastic cups of beer. I could wander down to Witherspoon Street for an ice-cream cone, or go to the movies or a lecture or a concert. Eventually, most of the students would find their way back to Prospect Avenue. They would make their way from club basement to club basement, a subterranean version of the John Cheever story where a man traverses his neighborhood by way of the backyard swimming pools.

I thought I could feel Kimmie watching me as the night went on — during the croquet game, when she sat on a plastic lawn chair and clapped as Chet smacked his ball through the wickets, then later, in the basement, where we shouted toward each other over the music. Maybe she was trying to figure out why I’d been having a breakdown in the bathroom, but she didn’t say anything. I made myself wait until eleven. Then I told Dan that I had an awful headache and was going home.

“Do you need anything?” Chet asked. One of his muscled arms was slung loosely over Kimmie’s shoulders, and as he pulled her close, I felt a stab of something I couldn’t name.

“Just some rest.”

“I’ll walk back with you,” said Kimmie, slipping out from under Chet’s grasp and looping her arm through mine again.

We crossed Witherspoon Street and passed the great gothic pile of Firestone Library, heading along a wide slate path. A sliver of moon hung above us. The sounds of an a capella group singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” underneath Blair Arch echoed through the night.

“We should take a picture for the website,” Kimmie said, and I nodded, surprised because, again, I’d been thinking the exact same thing — how the night looked like a recruiting poster for Princeton, how there was no way you could stroll through campus on a soft spring evening like this and not believe that this was the most beautiful school ever imagined, that the students here were the luckiest, happiest ones in the world.

“You want anything? Advil? Excedrin?” She gave me a coy smile, one I’d never seen in the admissions office. “Something stronger?”

I must have looked shocked, because Kimmie laughed out loud and clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, come on, Jules. Don’t look so surprised.”

“I thought you were a nice girl,” I blurted, which made her clap again, before asking, “So what can I get you?”

I shook my head regretfully, thinking of my appointment at the clinic the next morning. “I better not.”

“You don’t drink,” Kimmie observed.

Surprised again, I answered, “I had a beer.”

“You held it,” said Kimmie. “You didn’t drink it.”

I didn’t answer. At parties, I’d ask for a beer, because it was more conspicuous not to have something in your hands, but I never had more than a few swallows, and, other than Champagne, I never drank anything stronger. I couldn’t risk it. Not after what had happened with my dad.

We paused at the doorway to my dorm, Kimmie with her hands in her pockets, and me feeling, strangely, like this was the end of a date, when there’d be the predictable grapple for a kiss, or an invitation upstairs. An odd thought surfaced: that I wouldn’t have minded kissing Kimmie. In the faint glow of the lamp, with her lashes sweeping her cheeks, she looked adorable. I shook my head and told her good night, fishing my key out of my pocket and hurrying up the stairs, wondering what on earth that had been about. Spring fever, I decided. The end of college, the end of childhood, really, with real life looming ever closer — all of that could make anyone behave a little strangely.

In my dorm room, I gave myself my last shot, then carried my plastic bucket of toiletries to the bathroom. I showered, shaved my legs and armpits and bikini line, and brushed my teeth. Back in my room, I pulled on panties and an oversized T-shirt and set my alarm for seven o’clock. I didn’t have a bike, but there were dozens of them, all around campus, left unlocked at the bike racks. I’d ride one of those to the clinic, do the donation, rest for a while, then pedal back in time for lunch.

I lay in bed in the darkness, warm spring air coming through my window, and for the first time I let myself think about the result of what I’d be doing in the morning. If everything went well, in nine or ten months’ time there could be a baby, a baby who was half mine, at least genetically, a little boy or girl in the world whom I would never see, never know. It hadn’t bothered me before. Donating an egg wasn’t like having a baby and giving it up for adoption. The eggs were nothing more than possibilities. But still…

Rolling onto my side, I imagined walking down a New York City street five years from now and seeing a little girl who looked like me, holding her mother’s hand. Or being in an airport or a theater or in line at Starbucks and catching a glimpse of a baby, a toddler, a teenager with blond hair and light eyes and wondering if, maybe, that had been my baby. Would I stare, or feel compelled to say something? Would the mother turn the baby away from me, hustling her down the street or hurrying her out of the store? Would the child know where he or she had come from, that there’d been a girl like me involved, someone who’d given away (or sold, to be honest) part of herself so that he or she could exist? Would the baby grow up and try to find me? Would she look like me? Would she struggle with addiction and never know why?

I finally managed to fall asleep. When I opened my eyes I could see the line of sunshine underneath the window shade. I slapped off my alarm before it could buzz, grabbed my bucket, opened my door, and almost walked straight into Kimmie, who was standing in the hallway, fully dressed, neatly combed, her hair in two pigtails, each tied with a bright-blue elastic. Under the stark hallway fluorescents, I could see the smattering of cinnamon-colored freckles on her cheeks, and I thought she was wearing tinted gloss on her lips, something I’d never seen her do before.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re up early.”

She tilted her head. “I like it when it’s quiet.”

I nodded, knowing what she meant.

“You want to go get coffee?”

Curling my arm around my bucket, I said, “I’ve actually got an appointment.”

“So early,” Kimmie mused. “Bootie call?”

I shook my head, still startled and charmed by this new sense of humor, a raunchiness I’d never suspected when we were filing applications or sharing snacks in the student center. “No bootie for me.”

“So, what?” She gave me an assessing look. “Not a class.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not the only senior in the world dumb enough to take a nine o’clock. It’s a. .” I struggled for a moment. “A doctor’s appointment.”

I expected more questions, but Kimmie just nodded. “You want company?”

“Oh, I…” I opened my mouth to tell her no thanks, but somehow, what came out was “That would be great.”

Twenty minutes later, Kimmie and I had liberated a pair of bicycles and were pedaling through Princeton’s quiet streets, on our way to the clinic. “Are you sick?” she asked.

“I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m selling my eggs.”

She nodded. The wind blew her long hair back from her forehead. The bike that she’d taken had a metal carrier over the back wheels, and she’d stowed her violin and her backpack in there.

“I need the money,” I continued. I wasn’t sure if it was the hormones or the impending procedure, which would mark the end of my time at Princeton, but I suddenly needed to tell somebody my story.

“Loans?” Kimmie asked when we’d pulled up to a stop sign. If you needed financial aid, the university’s endowment would cover your tuition, but plenty of students — me included — took out loans for living expenses, books and travel and meal plans.

“Well, yeah. And my dad’s sick. I’m trying to get money to help him.”

“What’s wrong with your father?” Before I could say anything, she turned, flicking one pigtail over her shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No. It’s okay. He’s…” I paused. I’d never said this out loud before, not to a stranger. “He’s an addict. I’m trying to get money so he can get into treatment.”

Kimmie nodded. She’d pulled ahead of me on her bike, so I couldn’t see her face. I wondered if she was shocked, or if somehow she’d guessed this about me.

Leslie, the clinic director, was waiting just behind the desk. “I’m glad you brought a friend,” she said. “You might be a little sore when it’s over.”

Kimmie frowned at this news, her thin eyebrows drawing together. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” She squeezed my hand with her small one, picked up a copy of Town & Country, and sat with her legs crossed like she was prepared to wait for hours — all day, if that’s what it took. I went to the cubicle, where I hung my jeans and T-shirt, folded my panties and socks, and changed into my gown. Ten minutes later I was on the table, a needle in my arm, chatting with the anesthesiologist about Princeton’s basketball team while a doctor in a surgical mask and magnifying glasses threaded a catheter through my fallopian tubes.

“A little pinch now,” the nurse murmured. “Gorgeous,” said the doctor, and tilted the screen to show me the eggs, a cluster of grapes. I watched as he plucked them, two, four, six, eight, ten.

Now that the boys were older, if I planned it right, I could have a little time every afternoon to myself. Spencer took a nap after lunch. He’d stay down for at least an hour, more if I was lucky, longer, if he’d had school that morning, and Frank Junior could be counted on to entertain himself with Legos for a while, playing some complicated game he’d made up involving soldiers and rocket ships and Woody from Toy Story as either the captain or the king. One sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, with Frank at work and Spencer in his crib, and Frank Junior with his soldiers lined up on the empty living room’s floor, I pulled a pound of ground beef out of the freezer, loaded the dishwasher, and wiped down the kitchen counters, which were so constantly sticky that I sometimes wondered if the tiles oozed sap. A peek at the clock showed that I still had a half hour. I could sneak into the shower, maybe even blow my hair dry. I’d seen myself in the mirror that morning and my heart had sunk as I’d pictured my sister, ironed and combed and perfectly put together.

“Mommy?”

I turned around to see Frank Junior looking at me. “Hello, little man.”

“Snack?”

I cut up an apple and poured goldfish crackers into a blue plastic bowl. He pouted. “Cookie?”

“Growing foods first.” I made myself a cup of tea and sat down across from him as he picked up his goldfish one at a time and sent them swimming into his mouth. Watching him, I wondered: How would my sons feel, watching my belly get bigger, watching me go off to the hospital and then come home empty-handed? Spencer wouldn’t notice — Spencer didn’t notice much of anything except Elmo and his big brother — but Frank Junior would have questions, and I’d have to figure out how to answer them.

“You want to go to the sprayground?”

He chewed, frowning. “Do we have to bring baby Spencer?”

“Yes, we have to bring Spencer. I can’t leave him home by himself. You know why.”

He nodded, reciting the words that I’d taught him. “The authorities would frown.”

“Right you are. And you should be nice to Spencer. You were a baby once, too.”

He smiled, showing his perfect white teeth. “Tell me the story.”

“Once upon a time,” I began. Frank Junior hopped out of his chair, circled the table, and hoisted himself into my lap. I snuggled him close, cupping my hand over the less scabbed of his knees, inhaling his little-boy scent, graham crackers and salt and baby shampoo. “Once upon a time you were a tiny seed in my belly. And you grew and grew and grew and grew, until you were…”

He joined in, smiling. He knew what came next, because I’d told this story so often. “Ripe like a plum!”

“Ripe like a plum. I went to the hospital, and out you came. You had no teeth. .” Frank Junior leaned his head against my chest, his knees digging into my thigh, holding still for what I thought might be the first time all day. I closed my eyes, loving the feeling of his body against mine, the rapid beat of his heart. Our days for cuddling were numbered. Soon he’d be too big to sit on his mama’s lap. “And you had a tiny little cloud of fuzzy black hair, and you cried. .” I stretched my mouth wide and did my best imitation of his peeps, “. . like you wanted to go back in.”

He smiled, holding my hand, counting the fingers — one, two, three, four, five. “I liked it in there.”

“You remember it?”

He nodded. “It was dark, except when you were talking. Then I could see the light.” He tilted his head, regarding me seriously. “You talk a lot, Mama.”

“Huh.” I wondered whether this could possibly be true, whether he actually could remember being inside of me.

“Tell the rest,” Frank prompted, twining his fingers through mine.

“Well, I bundled you up in a blue-and-pink-striped blankie, and I gave you a little snack…”

His mouth curved up at the corners. “Goldfishie crackers?”

“Not goldfishie crackers!” I said, making an indignant face. “You had no teeth! What kind of mommy would give crackers to a boy with no teeth?”

He nodded — this, too, was part of the story.

“And I looked at you all over,” I said, my eyes filling with tears, back in the moment again, the hospital smells, the bright morning light through the windows, Frank looking so puffed-up and proud as he held the baby for the first time. “From your toes to your knees to your sweet little belly to your neck to your chin to your forehead, and I gave you a kiss and I said to your daddy, ‘I guess we’ll bring him home, and name him. .’”

“Frank Junior!” With that, he was up and out of my lap, dashing toward the door for his scooter and the helmet I insisted on, for the park and the sprayground and the promise of a warm afternoon with maybe even an ice-cream sandwich on the way home. “Wake up, baby!” he hollered, his footsteps shaking the floor, and, on cue, I heard Spencer whimpering from the second floor. So much for my shower, I thought, but I didn’t mind much as I went up the stairs and scooped Spencer’s warm, sleepy, soggy-bottomed weight into my arms.

“Wet,” Spencer informed me, then plugged his thumb back into his mouth. I laid him on the changing table, pulled down his miniature khakis (copies of his brother’s, which were themselves copies of his dad’s pants), and unfastened his soaked diaper.

“We have to start talking seriously about that potty,” I said, wiping his bottom and the creases of his thighs. He nodded, the way he’d been nodding for months every time I brought up the topic of toilet training. I thought, again, of my sons as infants, as newborns. I’d loved being in the hospital: the nurses fussing around me, bringing me meals that I didn’t have to prepare, on dishes I wouldn’t have to wash; having someone make my bed and mop the floor and clean the bathroom every day. I didn’t even mind being woken up every three hours to have my temperature and blood pressure taken. It had been so long since I’d been the center of attention that way, since people were taking care of me instead of the other way around. When Spencer had arrived, after a brief but grueling labor, and they’d handed him to me after his bath, I’d seriously considered asking the nurses to keep him for an hour or two so I could grab a nap and eat my lunch. It had horrified me then, but it comforted me now. Maybe I’d feel nothing but relief at the chance to pass a new baby into the eager arms of another woman. . but would it really be that easy? Would I let go without a second thought, or would I hold the baby close, turning my face away, thinking, or even saying, No! Mine! Mine!

Spencer was staring at me. “Pants,” he prompted. I fastened a fresh diaper around his waist, pulled up his khakis, and swung him down to the floor. He took off at a run, pudgy legs pumping, calling for his brother. I watched him go, telling myself that it would be easy, wondering whether it was true.

Kate Klein had told me not to expect to hear from her for two weeks, but I guess she was in the underpromise and overdeliver school, because a week after my visit to her office, she called and said she had some news.

“I could come on my lunch hour.”

I heard her hesitate before she answered, “This might take a little longer than an hour.”

I asked for a half day’s worth of personal time for the next afternoon. “A doctor’s appointment,” I told my boss, and she let me go without even asking me what was wrong, or when I’d be finished writing up estimates for the department’s latest set of acquisitions, a pair of brass vases from the Yuan Dynasty which would probably sell for a price as spectacular as they were ugly. At two o’clock the next afternoon, after a mostly sleepless night and an unproductive morning, I hurried through a steamy June afternoon to the midtown office and hit the elevator button that would carry me up to Kate’s floor.

The detective met me in the waiting room wearing a black cotton skirt (slightly wrinkled, and with an elastic waistband, but a definite step above the pajama pants), black sandals, and a white cotton T-shirt.

“This way.” Kate led me past her office into a conference room, where a manila folder sat at the center of a table. India’s name was typed on its tab. Looking at the folder, I tasted old pennies in my mouth, and felt a strange mixture of excitement and regret… except regret wasn’t exactly the right word. Pregret was more like it — the sadness you could feel over something that hasn’t happened yet.

There were six chairs around the table. Five of them were empty. The sixth was occupied by a guy about my age, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt and heavy-framed horn-rimmed glasses that looked like he’d swiped them off his grandpa’s bedside table. I distrusted him immediately. I think glasses should be glasses, worn to improve your vision, not as a statement, or a piece of installation art on the bridge of your nose.

“This is Darren Zucker, one of our associates,” Kate said.

I held out my hand. Darren got to his feet, lazily, like he had all the time in the world, and gave my hand a single limp pump. Then he sat down and flipped open the folder to display a photograph of a much younger India, with an unfortunately pouffy perm. It took me a second to realize that I was looking at a mug shot. My father’s new wife had been arrested in Los Angeles in 1991. . and I’d bet my trust fund that my dad didn’t have a clue.

I took a seat and pulled the folder toward me. “Is her name really India?”

Kate gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Darren just appeared smug, with the light glinting off his ridiculous glasses.

“It’s not,” he said. “But there’s a lot you’ll want to look at here.” He flipped the folder open, and I started to read.

Two hours later I staggered out of the conference room, into the elevator, and into the coffee shop in the lobby of the building.

The manila folder was in my purse. Part of me wanted to tip it into a trash bin. Another part of me wanted to leave it somewhere obvious in my father’s apartment, where he and his bride would be sure to see it. But what I mostly wanted to do was call my mother, my sensible, pre-ashram mother, and ask for her advice. This was impossible, insofar as my mother would no longer consent to speak on the telephone. “Bad energy,” she said. So I wrote her letters, and sometimes she’d write back, little notes in the cursive I remembered from a hundred to-do lists and school permission slips, on paper that smelled like sage and lavender, but sometimes it took weeks to get a reply, and I didn’t have weeks.

Through the plate-glass windows I could see people strolling, enjoying the warm weather after days of rain. There were women who’d swapped their heels for flipflops, nannies chatting with each other as they pushed strollers, men in suits with loosened ties, tilting their faces up toward the sun. I sat, watching, the coffee I’d purchased untouched, feeling like I’d been beamed to a different planet and was observing all of this normal from very far away.

I pulled the folder out of my bag, set it on the counter beside me, and lifted up a corner, peeking, once more, at her mug shot. India’s pouffy bangs were flattened on one side of her forehead. Her eyeliner was smeared, and she looked like she’d been crying, which made me feel like crying myself. Her whole life was on these pages, her childhood in Toledo, the year she’d spent in New London, her move to Los Angeles, the addresses of every place she’d rented, first in California, then in New York. I felt a grudging respect beginning to mix with my anger and my pity. I wondered if she thought of my father like a winning lottery ticket, the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I wondered, too, if this was what drew him to her — the painful things she’d endured. I studied her picture, trying to piece together the subtle transformation she’d undergone, the nose narrowed, the cheekbones more prominent, trying to guess at what she’d told my father about her past and what she’d kept secret. Had she been honest with him about who she was and where she came from? Could she make him happy? Did she really love him, and was that love enough?

“Bettina?”

I turned around, and there was Darren Zucker, with his statement eyeglasses and his smarmy smile.

“You moving in?” he asked, setting down his own drink and taking a seat at the counter beside me.

“What?”

“You’ve been here for forty-five minutes.”

I gathered up my folder and my coffee. “I was just going.”

He gave a pompous little nod. “You’re in shock.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ve seen this before. You think you want answers. You think you can handle the truth.” He waggled his eyebrows in what he must have believed was a Jack Nicholson impression. “You know what you need?” He answered before I could ask him, politely, to please leave me alone. “Will Ferrell.”

“I believe he’s married.”

He smiled, causing his stupid glasses to bob up and down on his face. “Touché. I was thinking more of one of his movies. Something stupid, with fart jokes, where he takes off his clothes.”

I gathered my things and walked to the door, with Darren right behind me.

“Come on,” he said. “Flabby, hairy guy, running around with no pants. . Do you have plans?”

“I do.” I’d told my father to expect me for dinner that night. I figured I’d go home, we’d have a conversation, and then he’d be in charge of the next step. I’d be there if he needed me for anything: to console him, to call his lawyer, to try, even, to get my mother on the phone if he wanted to talk to her. Now the sun was setting, people were streaming down the streets on their way home for dinner, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d been expecting duplicity, slyness and lies, but not anything at this level.

“Movie,” said Darren, following me down the sidewalk. “My treat. Raisinets. Big bucket of popcorn.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“If you’re sure. .” He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it over. “See you soon.”

“Why?” I called toward his back. “In case I need to investigate another stepmother?”

He waved without turning, and I heard his voice as he descended down into the subway station. “You never know!”

I walked home along Fifth Avenue, through throngs of tourists gawking at the skyline, past the boutiques with their windows filled with feathered hairbands, sequined purses, eye shadow, pearl necklaces. Maybe I’d just wait for a few days more. I’d talk to my brothers and try to reach my mom. But when I got off the elevator, my father and India were standing in the foyer, waiting for me, the way they’d waited in Bridgehampton. Her arm was around his waist, his arm was around her shoulders, and both of them were beaming.

I set my bag down on the antique ebonized table. As usual, there was a towering floral arrangement at its center — calla lilies and hydrangeas in shades of orange and cream. Twice a week a florist would come and distribute flowers throughout the two stories of the apartment, from the big arrangement in the foyer to the roses that my mother used to have in her dressing room, like she was an actress on opening night. The apartment had been photographed for Architectural Digest and featured in Metropolitan Home, but I’d long since stopped seeing its grandeur, the important art on the walls, the views of the park and the river and the city’s skyline. To me, it was just home.

“What’s going on?” I asked my dad.

He turned to India, beaming. “I’ll let India give you our good news.”

I studied her, wondering, again, exactly what she’d had done to go from the girl in the mug shot, with a big nose and a bad perm, to the sleek creature who’d snagged my dad; how long it had taken, how much it had hurt. I was so lost in my thoughts that I barely noticed India crossing the room until her arms were around me.

“Guess what,” she cried, sounding as happy as I’d ever heard her, “we’re having a baby!”