Listening to his truck humming and rumbling as he plowed the driveway, I ate the cereal and looked over the pages I’d laid out yesterday, telling myself that one bowl of Count Chocula wasn’t so irresponsible; they probably spray the stuff with vitamins. And only then did it hit me what I’d done last night: got stinking drunk while four months pregnant. Four months: what did that mean in terms of how major a birth defect might be? Wouldn’t it be more major the earlier you did the bad thing? I pictured a bullet, fired at conception: deflect that bullet almost at the target and it would miss by only a little, but deflect it early on and it would veer off wide. Four months. That was less than halfway there. I slid from my chair to my knees and prayed, Dear God, since I did it without thinking, please don’t let it count. Just the kind of prayer God likes to hear. Oh, right, If it be Thy will. I listened down into my body to try to discern any damage, any change from yesterday. Nothing. Oh, God. Well, we just wouldn’t think about this. But what if Steven looked at the bottle? I remembered him saying, I want to make a baby with you. I know you must think I’ve said everything before to somebody else, but this is a first. A first. He actually said that.