LITMIR.BIZ

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know me; I say it like I see it. Keeps life simpler that way.” She watched Stephanie take a sip from the bowl of soup.

      “Not chicken soup?” Stephanie asked. Her mother’s chicken soup was one of the great abiding memories of her childhood. Every illness from strep throat to chicken pox, every cut, scrape, and toothache received the chicken-soup treatment. It usually worked too.

      “There wasn’t any chicken in the house, so I thought I’d make it out of turkey instead. Seasonal chicken soup.”

      “Tastes great.” And she meant it.

      “Bit too salty,” Toni said dismissively. “How are you feeling?”

      “I told you, I’m fine.”

      “Billy told me you fainted, went right out cold. . . .”

      “I did not. I . . . I was sitting down on the front porch, having a cup of coffee after breakfast. The kids were going crazy opening their presents, so I thought I’d sit outside for a second of silence. Billy came out to have a cigarette. Who smokes anymore?”

      “Billy does.”

      “Yeah, well, I think it might have been the smell of the death stick that made me feel a bit woozy. That, plus all the travel yesterday and the fact that I was still awake at three thirty this morning.”

      “Your father said he’d heard a noise. He thought it might have been one of the children peeking at the presents, but instead he found you in his office.”

      “I was checking my e-mail.”

      “Still, lack of sleep doesn’t make a person pass out,” Toni insisted.

      “I didn’t faint.”

      But Stephanie knew that was a lie. There was a little slice of time she couldn’t account for: One minute, she was sitting on the porch looking at the frozen lake, and the next, she was staring up into her brother’s broad, pock-marked face, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his dark eyes pinched with concern. He had swept her up into his arms and carried her upstairs into her bedroom. Moments later her sisters had appeared and helped her into bed. Toni Burroughs stepped into the room moments after they left, carrying a tray with the deep bowl of soup and some Saltines on the side.

      “I’ve had about three hours sleep in the past twenty-four hours,” Stephanie said, “and most of that was on the plane. And I’m just a little run down, I guess.”

      Toni reached out and pressed the flat of her hand on her daughter’s forehead. “You’re hot.”

      “I’m drinking this soup, Mom,” Stephanie reminded her.

      “Are you pregnant?”

      The question took Stephanie completely by surprise. Eyes and mouth opened wide, and she spilled some of the soup onto the tray. “What?”

      Toni raised her eyebrows and tilted her head to one side. “You heard me,” she persisted.

      “How can I be pregnant if I’m a lesbian?” It gave Stephanie some pleasure to see a touch of color appear on her mother’s cheeks.

      “Well, I hear les . . . of gay couples having children every week. They let Jack adopt a little girl . . . even if he had to go all the way to Haiti to do it.”

      Stephanie put the bowl down, then moved the tray off to one side. She reached over to take her mother’s hands in hers. Toni’s hands were tiny, the joints beginning to knot and swell with arthritis, and each finger was bedecked with a ring. Gold rings on her left hand, silver on her right; it was her only eccentricity. Squeezing her mother’s fingers gently for emphasis, Stephanie said, “Mom, I’m not a lesbian, and I’m not pregnant. I’m just exhausted. That’s all. Now go and enjoy Christmas with your children and grandchildren. Let me get some rest, and I’ll join you guys in a little while.”

      Toni Burroughs got up and fussed around the bed, smoothing down the coverlet. “I believe you,” she said finally.

      “Good.”

      “About not being gay.”

      “Mom!” Stephanie said, then smiled when she saw her mother’s rare grin.

      “I’ll close the curtains,” Toni said, loosening the curtain ties and pulling the heavy drapes across the window, effectively plunging the room into darkness.

      “Maybe that’s what I should have done last night,” Stephanie said, suddenly a child again, lying in bed, watching her mother close the curtains as she had done every night of Stephanie’s childhood before wishing her sweet dreams and love dreams.

      Toni nodded. She took the tray with the barely tasted soup and leaned in to kiss her daughter on the forehead, the movement straight out of Stephanie’s childhood. “Get some rest. This is probably the best place for you,” she said, and then added, “Sweet dreams and love dreams.”

      The door clicked shut, and Stephanie heard her mother’s light footsteps move along the hall and then the squeak on the third stair as she went down. Stephanie lay in the gloom, staring at the ceiling. As her eyes adjusted, the room began to reveal itself once more, but now the shadows were deeper, and what had once been comforting and familiar now seemed strange and just a little off kilter. Emotional exhaustion—that’s all she was feeling: that horrible malaise that was a combination of the worst hangover and physical fatigue. A few hours’ sleep, and she’d be fine.

      Of course she wasn’t pregnant. The very thought of it was ridiculous.

      Or was it?

      Stephanie lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to visualize a calendar in her head. Her periods had always been irregular, anything from twenty-five to thirty-two days in between, and some months were heavier than others. She’d had her last period . . . She frowned, trying to remember.

      Oh, it was ridiculous to even think about it.

      But once the idea had entered her mind, it was impossible to dismiss. When had she had her last period? It had to have been some time in November, late in November. . . . No, it was earlier, because—she remembered now—her period had arrived just before the office Thanksgiving party had taken place. And that had been held on Friday the 15th of November.

      Which meant . . . which meant that she was anywhere between eight and ten days late.

      She slowly shook her head from side to side. She couldn’t be pregnant. She and Robert were always careful. Except that the truth, the bitter, spiteful truth, was that they weren’t always careful; she knew that. In the beginning, when they started making love regularly, Robert had suggested that she go on the pill. She refused. Her agency had just finished working on an awareness campaign about the various dangers of the contraceptive pill, and Stephanie decided that if she was eating right, not smoking, and had given up sugar, then there was no way she was introducing synthetic hormones into her system. Robert argued with her, reminding her just how safe and successful the pill was for the vast majority of people.

      Stephanie advised him that she was not the vast majority of people, and if she had given up beef because most cattle ate food full of growth hormones and antibiotics, then she was equally giving up the pill if there was the slightest chance that it could have any adverse effects on her system.

      Looking back on it now, she realized that it had probably been their first real argument. It was only later, much later, that she understood he was being selfish.

      Reluctantly and with a lot of griping, Robert had gone out and bought his first box of condoms in nearly twenty years. And in the beginning, she’d been very conscientious about his using them. But as time had gone by, he’d started only using them on those occasions when it was “unsafe.” Stephanie tried to remember the last time they’d had sex. . . . It had been last Friday, in his office. They hadn’t used protection then. And she remembered thinking that it was safe because she knew her period was due. The time before that had been . . . it had been in her apartment, maybe a week earlier. Stephanie frowned. It had been

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