[...] We ’d both learned—not from each other; we ’ve both been around the block—that the big moments you plan never work, so we decided against the French restaurant two towns over with the forty-dollar prix fixe dinner, and went to the diner on 28. We took a booth, ordered pancakes and sausage and sat waiting for the modest magic by which the everyday becomes precious. Steven flipped page after page of jukebox selections, fingering the little metal tabs at the bottom. The country songs in green. Then he flipped back through in the other direction.

“Nothing,” he said. “Zip. Unless you want to hear fucking Randy Travis.”

By this I understood that I was not to want to hear Randy Travis.

It started in the summer, one morning when Tod and I were alone in the house. He asked if I wanted coffee, then ran his index finger down my bare arm (me in that blue sundress with the yellow flowers, him in blue jeans and a T-shirt I couldn’t imagine how he kept so white) and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we put the horns on Dalton?” The horns. What more did I need to know? And yet. I heard two voices in my head, talking at me as I stood there in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room: my own voice saying This is bad for you and a man’s voice saying Do what I say. I narrowed my eyes, trying to hear which was right, and I could picture myself as Tod saw me, looking intense and tempted. This is a beautiful boy, said another voice, a voice that wished me ill, who knows how to touch you.

Did I simply have bad character, or was I a strong young woman going after what she wanted and willing to pay the price? Though how strong were you really if you couldn’t, finally, get it? One thing I promised myself, I would never again let myself in for this kind of humiliation. When Tod finally dumped me, I did the one bit of bitchy damage I could: I said I’d always known the real romance was between him and Dalton. I hope he still hears me saying that in his head.

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.

When we got home, he kissed me—on the lips, warm—and went up to work. He hadn’t had a cigarette, apparently, since sometime last night. If he was a man who could pick up a thing and then just drop it, where did that leave me? Thinking about Marilyn, I suppose. He was married to her for fifteen years, then dumped her because she got old. (He says that ’s not what happened.) She was only forty-two. I took the pad from next to the phone and figured it out. Forty-two minus twenty-nine: I would be forty-two in thirteen years. In the same thirteen years, he would be—forty-seven plus thirteen—he would be sixty. Past the point where he could get another twenty-nine-year-old, unless she was supremely stupid, and probably fat as well. Not the kind of security one might desire, but nevertheless. I put the pad back, leaving the sheet with my calculations. On the off chance he might ask what they were.

I threw my sketchbook in the backseat—that would be my alibi—and drove to Webster’s, where I bought a jar of dried mint and a pack of Care Free peppermint gum. I’d chewed all five sticks by the time I got to the liquor store in Oneonta. They didn’t have pints of Rémy, so I had to buy the next size up, which I really couldn’t afford. Then on the way back I remembered: fossil fuels. Steven wasn’t so anal that he ’d know the odometer reading, but he might know how much gas there was. I calculated forty miles at, say, twenty-five miles per gallon. I stopped at Cumberland Farms and put in two dollars’ worth. Back at the house, just in case, I pushed the little button on the trip odometer to make all zeroes come up. Let him wonder.

Standing over the rusty oil drum, I ripped out two blank pages and set fire to them. Then I ripped out the little girl and burned her up, too. When I came back into the kitchen, I heard the toilet flush upstairs. I listened to Steven’s footsteps going back to his workroom, then went out and brought the new bottle in. I brought the level in the old bottle up to something like what I guessed it had been—apparently I’d hit it much harder last night than I remembered—took a slug of what was left for old times’ sake and poured the rest into the sink, running hot water to chase it down. I put the empty bottle back in the paper bag, stuffed it into a milk carton and tucked it away in the bottom of the garbage. Okay: crisis averted. I lit the oven, unwrapped the chicken, sawed the top off the bread loaf with the good knife from Broadway Panhandler, and began clawing out the soft inside.

“In the interest of even fuller disclosure,” he said, “I must further confess to you that I nipped a bit at the cognac while you were out this afternoon. I don’t actually know why. Except that it was like, I really wasn’t craving a cigarette and that freaked me out. It was like nothing was wrong, you know? And that made me suspicious that something was really wrong that I didn’t even dare bring to consciousness, so I thought I’d better drink to sort of preempt it. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Absolutely,” I said. I wasn’t paying attention. How could he not have noticed that so much was gone out of that goddamn bottle? And now what? Try to keep him out of the kitchen and pour out some of what you just poured in?

“Now you’re talkin’,” he said. He took down a brandy snifter.

“What are you doing?” I said. “I’ll get that for you. Go and sit down.”

“I can get it.” He opened the cupboard door, took out the bottle of Rémy, looked at it and said, “What the hell?”