LITMIR.BIZ

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if she is fourteen years old. She’s on the honor roll, she’s not dating and she unloads your dishwasher. What do you have to complain about?”

      “You’re obviously forgetting that mouthy attitude she’s got these days.” Maggie crossed her eyes in apparent memory.

      “Oh, yeah, where on earth did she get that? It couldn’t have possibly been from her mother.”

      Maggie rewarded my sarcasm with a dig in the ribs. “Not me, girl. She got it from that low-down sorry skunk of a man who donated his sperm for the occasion. What I ever saw in him…”

      I left her to ponder her ex-husband in silence while I chased down the last baby-spinach leaf in my carryout bowl. A moment later the two of us made our way to the track.

      As we walked, I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Ma, and her phone call, plus the trip to her apartment. Still, not even with Maggie could I confess my real worries—my worries about Joe.

      “That mother of yours,” Maggie sympathized. “No doubt about it, Nora O’Rourke is a piece of work. It’s a wonder you even want kids after a childhood like yours.”

      “Your parents.” I glanced down at the pedometer snugged up to the cell phone on my belt. “Hey, we’ve done a half mile. Want to quit?”

      “Hell, yes. I wanted to quit even before I started. Damn crazy idea of yours. I haven’t lost a pound yet,” she grumbled. “What about my parents?”

      We trudged toward the car, the grass swishing against our shoes. “Your parents are the reason I want kids. They made it work. Your dad—he saved my life. He was the daddy I never had. Where would I be if it hadn’t been for your parents? Some kind of trailer trash strung out on meth, probably.”

      It was true. The bright spots in my childhood had been at the Boatwrights’ house. Their house had reverberated with laughter and squabbles and gospel spirituals…and love.

      Maggie’s mom had provided more than her share of impetuous genes to her youngest daughter. Excitable, a little overprotective and paranoid when it came to her baby girl, Cecilia Boatwright was still a generous woman, generous enough to know a little dishwater-blond waif needed all the loving she could get.

      I sat in the open door of my car as I switched back to my street shoes. “Thanks, Maggie. I really appreciate you doing this for me. It was just what I needed.”

      “What we need is a girl’s day out, and maybe we’ll get it soon.” She paused a moment. “Joe called me.”

      “What?”

      “When you didn’t call him, he called me. Thought maybe something was wrong.”

      “Nothing’s wrong.”

      “You’d tell me, right? You’d tell me if…something was wrong? And…I don’t mean just about the cancer.”

      I looked down at the white tennis shoe in my hand. I couldn’t lie to her, but I wasn’t ready for a tell-all confession. “I’d tell you. When I knew. If I knew.”

      But did I know anything? Or were my worries about Joe just me chasing phantoms?

      CHAPTER THREE

      I’D JUST CLICKED MY Internet icon when the phone rang. I had five minutes before I left for work, and I’d intended to check if the current DTCers had finally got their babies. All of us on the adoption message boards had been gnawing our fingernails. This crop of DTCers should have received their referrals already. The delay in referrals had stretched from one week, to two and now to three, with no real explanation.

      For a moment I thought about letting the machine get the phone. When I answered it, I wished I hadn’t.

      “Sara? I gotta talk to Joe!”

      Uh-oh. Cherie. And what’s more, Cherie awake before noon. It didn’t bode well.

      “Cherie, Joe’s already headed out to the job site. You might catch him there.” I suppressed the urge to remind her some of us had to work for a living.

      “He’s not answering his cell phone. And I’ve left, like, fifty-dozen messages. I gotta have that money, Sara! I really need it.”

      I gave up on the computer and hit the shutdown button, trying to figure out what exactly to say. The azalea blooms outside the living-room window had withered enough to look tired and weary as April came to a close. That’s how I felt, too, talking with Cherie.

      In the silence, she jumped first. “Hey, you’ll do. Can you lend me a hundred? That’ll help.”

      For a moment, her offer tempted me as strongly as if it were the map to Blackbeard’s treasure chest. The idea that a hundred bucks could make Cherie disappear for a while was a siren song. But I knew, from all my dealings with Ma, it would only lead me to crash into rocky shoals. Cherie would keep coming back.

      Not only that, but it would break mine and Joe’s cardinal rule: I didn’t give money to Cherie, and he didn’t give money to Ma.

      “I don’t keep that kind of cash on me, Cherie,” I told her, honest enough, as my wallet was down to its last twenty. And I damn sure wasn’t going to go hit the ATM machine for her. “Talk to Joe. Or maybe you could ask your boss for an advance.”

      “I quit.”

      Now my temper started to boil in earnest. “You what?”

      “Didn’t Joe tell you? That’s why I need the money.”

      Joe had not filled me in on this little detail. I gripped my forehead with my free hand and pressed my thumb and middle finger to my temples. “What happened this time, Cherie?”

      “That new shift manager made a pass at me. Not even Saint Sara would put up with sexual harassment, would you?”

      I gritted my teeth in hopes steam—or worse, foul invectives—wouldn’t spew forth.

      I was no saint. That was for sure. I wasn’t even a candidate. But Cherie liked to rattle my cage by telling me I was a Miss Goody Two-shoes. She somehow thought women who actually put on panty hose for work and drove a Volkswagen felt they were superior to the rest of the working-class world.

      “No, but…did you talk to your restaurant manager?”

      I knew the answer before she gave me a surly, “No. What good would that do? Besides, I told Dave I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to keep seeing each other.”

      “Dave?” That would be the shift manager. Apparently, Cherie had left some large, highly incriminating pieces out of her version of the story. “Were you…seeing him before he made this pass at you?”

      “Not exactly. I mean, yeah, we’d slept with each other a couple of times, but he’s got no call to—”

      The rest of Cherie’s words escaped me. I worried about her enduring single motherhood, STDs, HIV. Cherie floated through life aimlessly, with the mating habits—and standards—of a guppy.

      “Are you looking for something else, Cherie? Have you thought about going back to school, getting your GED?”

      How was it possible my serious, responsible, dependable Joe had actually come out of the same womb as Cherie? I tempered my frustration with her by reminding myself of her very real losses in life.

      She’d been almost nine when she and Joe had lost their parents in a freak auto accident. She’d lived with their aunt and uncle while Joe was in college. Once we got married, she’d begged Joe to let her stay with us—and I’d agreed. In all the years since, she’d never bothered with the tedious task of growing up, at least not emotionally.

      “I’m doing the best I can!” she hollered. “Just because I’m not a nine-to-fiver like you, you look down your nose at me. Forget it! Just forget it! I’ll figure something out! You never listen, Sara! You never take my side of anything!” With that, she banged

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