The Stud Book

At home, over the phone, Nyla asked, “Does it hurt more or less than the time the cops showed up and you fell out of that tree and couldn’t catch your breath, you hit the ground so hard?”

Sarah said, “You know, I was so wasted back then. That was a long time ago.…” It was a landmark in their shared ancient history. They’d been under drinking age but over eighteen—old enough to throw in jail—on a night when a party was busted. A close call.

“But that’s what it feels like, isn’t it?” Nyla said. “The one I had was quick. Like an afternoon. It was intense, but only lasted for a few hours.”

Sarah flipped her magazine closed and reached for her glass of wine, but she didn’t sit up all the way and knocked the magazine into the wine instead. The glass spilled; wine rolled across the coffee table, under magazines and junk mail, and across the old maxi-pad. “Ah, crumb!” She grabbed the first thing she could reach—more pads—and started blotting.

Nyla said, “What is it?”

“Nothing. A spill, red wine. Second one today. I’m so wiped out, it makes me clumsy.” She stood up, and when she stood she heard and felt, in a mixed sensation, the suck of blood and clots tumbling. Her head tipped back like somebody had put a palm to her forehead. She said, “Oh, jeez!” and reached for a wall.

Nyla said, “What?”

She said, “Just dizzy, for a minute.”

Nyla said, “Sit down. Right now, right where you are. Are you okay?”

She said, “The bleeding’s a little heavier.”

“Hang up and call 911. Call, and I’m coming over. I’ll call right back. When I call back, I want to hear that they’re on the way.” It was a plan.



Humble’s voice was loud when he said, in Ben’s ear, “Ever think about it, like, what if you were still with her? You’d be in politics.”

Ben said, “No way, man.” He shook his head. It seemed the thing to say. Why tell Humble about pining?

Hannah, on TV, was dressed in the worst kind of clothes, a self-imposed frump. But even in her politician costume, she was beautiful. She was hot. If he’d married her, by now he’d be the public husband lagging behind his successful, hot politico wife. It’d be good—she’s a powerhouse. And it’d be lame—he’d look useless.

His own wife was a crazy hot mix of brilliant and sexy, and she loved him in a way that made him confident. They made each other’s lives rich.

“I don’t think about that woman at all,” he said.

The girl in the sheer shirt across the way, surrounded by drunks, shook out her hair. Overhead Hannah nodded, a crease between her eyebrows, and took a question from somebody offscreen. When Ben first moved from his small town nowhere to Eugene, for college, the city felt huge. Now he knew Eugene was a relative backwater town. But then, the bars were different from the cowboy taverns at home, and he was old enough to get in, and sometimes he and Hannah would drive to Portland for a show, and mostly he remembered sex with Hannah. She was his first girlfriend. Sex was a trip. It was a hard-won prize, his daily dose of bliss.

He missed it, now. That person he’d been.

But that wasn’t about Hannah—it was about lost youth.

Ben wanted his wife, Sarah, with her stretch marks like a tiger’s stripes, and their shared squalor. They were at the start of good things. Even if they never had kids, Sarah was enough to make Ben’s life worth living.

As long as his cell phone didn’t vibrate, he knew she was fine. She was sad, at home, but they’d get through it. She wanted him to have a night out. He put a hand to his thigh, where he didn’t feel the usual lump in his pocket. His jacket hung on a hook under the bar. The phone would be in his jacket—for Sarah, at her request. It was away from his sperm. One more drink, then he’d go. At home, he’d clean up. He’d make something like dinner. If not tonight, then other nights. Sarah understood him. He pushed away his ludicrous nostalgia for Hannah and the boners of his youth. He loved Sarah. He really did. Being out in a bar in this guy way, it wasn’t his thing. He was ready to go home.



Dulcet got to the house first. She banged on the door, rang the bell, then banged again. When Sarah answered, she leaned against the wall like she needed that wall in order to stand.

Dulcet said, “Oh, darling, you look like hell.” She pushed her way past Sarah and tripped over a pair of scattered shoes in the hall. When she saw the rest of the house, she said, “It’s a bloody war zone in here!” Her breath was full of red wine. Her teeth were purple.

In vino veritas, Sarah thought, but didn’t manage to say. She slid down the wall, to the floor. There was blood on the wall in fingerprints and blood on the floor. Dulcet screamed, stumbled again, and dropped to her knees.

The paramedics pulled up soon enough. They took Sarah’s blood pressure. It was low, but it was always low. That ran in her family.

Except now it was really low.

When blood pressure reaches zero, veins collapse. There’s nothing to keep the freeways of blood and oxygen moving. Sarah was close to zero and losing pressure, losing blood.

“Hello?” a voice called, over the low roar of the ambulance’s generator. It was Nyla, trying to see around the paramedics. Dulcet stepped past Sarah to reach Nyla. Sarah was still on the floor, flat on her back.

“Oh God,” Nyla said. Sarah was in a white hall streaked with bloody fingerprints. Georgie, in her old sedan, pulled up to the curb.

Dulcet and Nyla stood under the porch light and watched as Georgie leaned into the car. Georgie’s skirt jiggled, thick with the clinging pounds of her pregnancy.

Dulcet looked out. “She didn’t, did she?”

“Yes, she did.”

Georgie unpacked her newborn baby from the car seat in the back of her Honda. She’d brought her baby to the scene.

Dulcet said, “What is she thinking?”

But Nyla had the picture. “She can’t leave the baby at home, if Humble’s out with Ben.”

Georgie hoisted the basket half of the car seat contraption, full as it was with all eight pounds of baby Bella.

Dulcet pointed one skinny finger and, in a loud, drunken stage whisper, hissed, “Leave the baby in the car.”

Georgie froze, midstride. “What?”

“Leave the baby …” Dulcet started again. Her elbow was a jagged crook, her finger a weather vane.

Nyla grabbed her arm. “Shush …”

Georgie, talking louder now, said, “I can’t leave her in the car. That’s illegal, for one thing. Like even if I would.”

Dulcet lurched into a Frankenstein walk across the front yard, a walk choreographed by a mix of drink and high heels that stuck in the dirt. “What’s going on?” Georgie asked.

“Wait,” Dulcet slurred, heading over. She shook a finger in the air.

Georgie sat back in the car. She dialed Humble again, in an effort to reach Ben.



Humble’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and the noise disappeared into the music and drunk talk and laughing. On TV, a girl lay dead and blue against a disco floor. The girl in the sheer shirt slapped Humble’s back. Ben couldn’t hear what she said over the noise, but saw her laugh and slam half her beer before it ran over her chin and onto the floor. Her friends shouted, “Skoal!”

Humble ordered a round of Jägermeister. He leaned in and said, “Here’s how you play.” They put their heads together.

The girl in the sheer shirt already knew the dead girl game. Her friends knew it. Ben, in the warm rush of a whiskey shot, went along with it all, drank and laughed and kept a body count on the TV and let himself have this night.



Paramedics put Sarah on a stretcher, pale but conscious. Her face was blotchy. One said, “You’re going to be fine.”

She grabbed Nyla’s hand. “Tell Ben. Write him a note, would you?” Sarah’s voice was a breathy whisper, almost sexy, entirely fragile.

Nyla said, “Sure, honey. We’re going to clean up a little. Then I’ll meet you at the hospital.” Sarah could see in Nyla’s face she was trying to look calm.

They carried her out past where Dulcet stood smoking and leaning against a car door, where Georgie sat in the car, where baby Bella slept in her cozy, overpriced, guaranteed-safe-forever car seat.



Ben dropped his keys. He stooped to find them in the dark and the cobwebs of their badly lit porch. He found them and dropped them again, and it took a few tries, between the booze and the pain meds, but he got the key in the lock. He hadn’t been really drunk in forever. It felt good. His face was warm, and the night was cool. He opened the door. Inside he kicked off his shoes. The kitchen light was on, and somebody was moving around. He walked down the hall, glad to be home.

He’d left the bar early, or it seemed early when he paid the tab, but now it was late, after midnight. How did that happen?

He walked into the light of the room, welcomed by the fine rear ends of three beautiful women on their hands and knees. They scrubbed his kitchen floor. Three women, the three graces—beauty, charm, and joy—showed him the loveliest of human anatomy in their rounded, Tae Bo–sculpted, kickboxing-toned asses. Okay, Georgie’s wasn’t so toned, but it was still all right. His wife was probably upstairs asleep. Ben didn’t see the baby at first. When he did see the baby he had to stop and think—a baby?—before remembering: Georgie’s. The newborn slept in a car seat carrier.

The dishwasher sang its song. More dishes were washed and stacked neatly to one side of the counter. He was glad that his wife had such good friends—that they had friends, their friends in common. He made that leap now, to think of them as his friends, too. His heart expanded. Actually, he was so full of love, he felt the blood swim to his drunken cock, a half nod to the good fortune of being surrounded by sexy women.

Hannah felt like a weird dream, an old TV show. He was over her. He tried hard not to slur or spit when he asked, so gently, “How is Sarah?”

One after another the women, beautiful, curvy women, stopped scrubbing and lifted their heads. They were cats. Busy house cats, cleaning their pretty fur. They turned toward him. Each face was a closed mouth, narrow eyes, and he saw it, plain as a billboard on the side of the road, the headline on a newspaper: He’d been kicked out of their cat paradise. Each one offered the closed face of a woman who had vowed to never speak to him, to Ben, that bastard, ever again.





Ben arrived at Emanuel Hospital with his buzz fading. The fluorescent lights were a quiet violence. Sarah sat in a cranked-up bed with a tray attached to a long mechanized arm adjusted to hover over her lap. A stack of short plastic cups rested on the tray. When Ben walked in, Sarah turned toward him and patted the mattress beside her hip in an invitation. “Ready to try again?”

She looked thin in all the wrong places—around her cheeks and under her eyes. Her hair seemed longer, lank and greasy. Her nails were painted but already chipped.

Had she been that pale when he left her at home?

Her blanched skin under hospital lights let every old scar come forward, a visual journal of the times Sarah had fallen down as a kid, when she had chicken pox, a map of her life in bruises and nicks. He looked for the scar that blamed him—he’d let her down.

She poured dark grape juice into a cup full of chipped ice. When she drank, her lips turned a deeper shade of purple. She wore a hospital bracelet, and a Band-Aid covered the spot where an IV had been.

The TV news showed a pregnant monkey. “Oh, Jesus,” Sarah said. “They’re still running that story?” There she was on TV, huddled against the garbage cans. She tortured herself by watching. “I’m not that hairless primate, am I?”

She was high on painkillers.

Ben found a wheelchair pushed against one wall. He sat in it and used his heels to roll himself closer. “Sarah, I’m so sorry—”

She flipped the channel. “It’s okay.” She drank her juice and watched TV. She found some kind of sitcom: an office, people talking. A laugh track.

Sarah said, “They didn’t knock me out, but they gave me drugs so I wouldn’t remember the procedure. That’s how they put it. Feels like I was knocked out.”

A fleck of purple-stained ice bounced off her lip and hit her blue hospital robe. Ben reached for it. He put his fingers to Sarah’s mouth even as the ice disappeared with the heat of his skin. He wanted to help her, feed her, whatever he could do. She pushed his hand away, then held it and squinted at the television.

Sarah said, “The egg sac or whatever, the ‘products of conception’ they call it—our little messed-up dead baby?—it was hanging out at the edge of my cervix. It didn’t want to go. Could’ve killed me. How was your night with Humble?”

He shrugged. What was the right answer? “He’s a little creepy.”

Sarah laughed. “He’s a sweetheart! What’s creepy about Hum?” They’d both seen Humble hold the baby and do a slow dance in the dining room until the tiny girl fell asleep on his shoulder.

Ben started to explain, then couldn’t bring himself to say “dead girl shots” to Sarah’s pale skin, with the IV tape still gummy on her hand. “The nurse tells me you’re ready to go home.”

She said, “When this show is over.”

The TV laughed at itself.

“Our insurance pays for about ten minutes in this hotel,” Ben said.

Sarah shook her plastic cup. “Can I get another drink?” She had a stack of juice cups, one inside the other. It was past two in the morning.

He said, “Your friends think I’m a jerk.”

A janitor came in. With his back to Sarah and Ben and his head down, he emptied the garbage then ran a damp mop over the floor. He mopped around where Ben sat in the wheelchair, the only chair in the room. The janitor turned the lights out when he left, as though the room were already empty, leaving them in the dark with the glow of the TV and the monitors and buttons around the bed.

Ben’s broken nose throbbed. His head ached under the ebbing of his personal alcohol tide. “We’re supposed to be out of here.”

“It’s almost over.” Sarah flicked a damp, juice-stained finger at the TV. The show had twenty minutes left. Kathy Griffin rattled around at Brooke Shields’s ankles yelling, “Calm down! Calm down!”

Ben gave in to Kathy Griffin’s demands. He felt calm. He wheeled his chair closer and held his wife’s hand. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, where thin bones lay under the skin, under the residual gum of IV tape. He said, “I can’t watch this without pain pills.”

“Meds make it way better.” Sarah never took medicine. She didn’t believe in it. She never watched TV, either. Now, with this fourth miscarriage, though, she’d changed. She tapped the piece of paper, the prescription, on her tray.

Ben said, “We have pills at home.”

She said, “Not enough. Find a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Let’s make it our best friend.”





Nyla stood in bare feet on the metal rung of a short ladder and earnestly scraped layered paint off a windowsill in her store. She wore a blue paper mask to keep dust out. Her shirt read YEAR OF THE POLAR BEAR! like it was a celebration instead of a cry for help, a big party instead of the year polar bears as a species could fall between cracks in melting ice caps.

She had enough inventory to call the room a store. She had a countertop and a green ceramic bowl filled with burnished red chestnuts off the street, and a plate of lavender shortbread. The shortbread wasn’t for sale. Nyla baked, just to give back to the world. What was more wholesome than simple, organic ingredients turned into sweets?

She chipped at the paint and hummed along to Amy Winehouse on her old CD player—because honestly, she didn’t have an iPod, and who needed all those new techno gadgets with their conflict minerals and strip-mining anyway? She chipped until she had maybe one inch of one windowsill cleared, with six more windows to go.

This chipping would take a lifetime.

Her store was just wider than a hallway and ran along the forgotten fringe of an industrial building. Amy Winehouse’s voice echoed against the cinder blocks, smooth, smoky, and contemptuous. Nyla stretched an arm for the remote. She turned up the tunes.

Her lower back moved with the crick of the car accident ten years before. Her psychic yogi healer said she held on to that pain, and even at the time she’d countered, “Why shouldn’t I hold on to it?” Her husband, her beautiful, sunny-haired kayaker, had died in the car wreck. In cold weather the memory of him beat in Nyla’s back like a cracked steering column.

Another car had crossed the line and smashed their Subaru on the driver’s side. Arena was five, in back, in a booster seat in the middle. That day, Nyla saw her daughter’s chest pour blood. An old metal camping lantern had cut through the girl’s Crater Lake shirt. Nyla had actually fallen over—had learned what it meant to be weak in the knees.

When she tried to look at the disaster of her husband’s death as a cosmic lesson she knew only that she could pull a little salvage from the wreck. She built a life for her kids. Nyla had the gift of finding her husband in her daughters’ gestures and the color of their hair. They grew more like him all the time. If she could hold their lives together after that accident, adapt and move on, humanity could sure as shit band together, wise up, and head off the disaster of climate change. The trick was to stay positive.

Amy Winehouse’s voice wound its way through the room like smoke.

The secret of Nyla was that under her layers of cotton and Gore-Tex, under her fleece vests and scarves, her body was muscular, sleek, and flexible despite her car accident. She did everything possible to keep the synovial fluid washing her joints, and her muscles strong. She was in the slim minority demographic of women over forty who could still do the splits, both ways. She was practical in the way she dressed, and a hardworking machine, but under those clothes she was built for pleasure.

Her store pressed up against a boarded-up dry cleaner’s. Crack addicts curled in the recessed doorway and cans of OE8 littered the curb, but there was a Starbucks practically next door. Starbucks, with their market research, was an indicator the neighborhood was poised for an upswing.

She stopped chipping long enough to give her throbbing callus a minute off. She hadn’t been on vacation since forever, not even to Dubuque, where her cousin lived. But at the same time she’d barely ever held a steady job, so every day was kind of half vacation, right? She got by through teaching yoga classes and substituting in a cardio-kickboxing gym. Her husband’s life insurance policy made the house payments and supplied a basic college fund for the kids. Now she’d have her store, LifeCycles.

Paint flakes gathered on the cement below, loaded with lead and chemicals. Nyla had a vacuum with a HEPA filter. She’d soaked the windowsill because wet paint gave off less dust than dry. None of this was healthy, but somebody had to get the work done, and Nyla was invested in that store.

With the singing and the roar of the vacuum and the rush of her own thoughts, she didn’t hear the door open behind her. She didn’t hear it close.

It was hot, breathing behind the blue paper. She lifted the dust mask and went back to vacuuming. She swung her hips, giving a fling to the vacuum cord. She shook her hair out. There was a tap on her shoulder. Nyla screamed!

She dropped the vacuum handle and her upright Kenmore fell on her foot. A hand jostled her. She couldn’t turn fast enough. It was all in slow motion, a Hitchcock scene.

When she did turn, there was Georgie, smiling, holding a green bottle of prosecco. Nyla’s heart squeezed under her ribs. Her face flushed. Dulcet loomed behind Georgie, white bobbles of earrings swinging.

Nyla switched the vacuum off. Instantly, the phone rang. Maybe the phone had been ringing for a while? Her hands were still shaking, her heart tight. She said, “First business call! It’s official. You’re here to witness it.”

She turned down the music, reached for the phone, and tried to put a smile in her voice. “Thank you for calling LifeCycles.”

Nyla gestured for Georgie and Dulcet to use the coat hooks. Amber candles burned on a side table. There was a couch covered with a blanket. Into the phone, she said, “Pardon me? No, we’re not a bike store. No, I understand, sure. That’s okay.”

When she got off the phone she gave her friends a hug, a real hello. She said, “Welcome to LifeCycles!”

Dulcet pulled out the bottom of Nyla’s T-shirt to straighten the image. YEAR OF THE POLAR BEAR. She said, “Nice. That comes just before the Year of No Polar Bear, right?”

Georgie said, “You shouldn’t leave the door unlocked.”

Nyla said, “It’s a store. People have to come in.” Then she looked at Georgie and added, “Where’s Bella?”

“With Hum. Their first time home alone. We’re practicing, with the conference coming up.” Georgie lifted a hand to her breast as though adjusting her bra; it was the gesture of a nursing mother. “I should go back.”

“You just got here!” Dulcet said.

“It’s hard.” Georgie almost whispered this, into her own hands.

A sound like a sudden rain cut in and added to the low notes of music playing. It was a splatter on the window, a man peeing. A drunk. It was an old man, or maybe only a man weathered enough to look old. A “hard liver,” as people said—but did that mean his liver, or his life?

“Jesus,” Dulcet said.

Georgie squinted at the glass.

Nyla waited it out. “Sometimes that happens.”

Dulcet opened the door. She said, “Look what you’re doing.” The man’s wrinkled face was red, his eyes so swollen and narrow he seemed practically blind. Dulcet, in her heels, towered over him. She said, “Go on, get out of here. Go!”

The man struggled to zip up as he stumbled in his slow dance away.

“The neighborhood’s in transition,” Nyla said.

Dulcet asked, “From what to what?”

This neighborhood had been in transition since 1805. It had been a working-class German settlement, an African American community, and home to many a quinceañera celebration. Now it was a hipster corridor mingled with drug house holdovers and a lot of hardworking families. It had an edge of racial tension.

It was what Nyla could afford.

The sky was an evening bruise. The stooped man pushed a shopping cart, and the rattle of loose wheels over ragged macadam drowned out Dulcet’s question.

Nyla said, “Look at all the great parking!” She flung her hands wide. The street was nearly empty. “You don’t get parking like this downtown.”

Across the street sat a Ford truck with a camper shell on the back, makeshift curtains, and an orange tow sticker on the window. A back tire had been replaced by a stack of cinderblocks. Another car was stripped: no hood, no doors. Wires hung out of the exposed seat covers.

Ever optimistic, Nyla said, “I’m practically next door to Starbucks.”

Her friends looked up and down the block. Nyla pointed. They followed her hand. Far off down the street, up a shallow hill, there it was: the green double-tailed mermaid, a siren.

Dulcet said, “The Safeway kind of Starbucks.”

It was indeed on the side of an old Safeway. It wasn’t the kind that meant market research. It was the kind that came blindly, one corporate franchise tied to another in parasitic relations.

The phone inside rang again. Nyla went to answer. Sarah, the last of their party, stepped off a passing bus, breathless and expectant, holding a fistful of mums in green paper.

Inside, Nyla said, “Hello?” Then, “No, I’m sorry. We aren’t a funeral parlor. Yes, end-of-use planning. It’s a little different.” She pushed the plate of lavender shortbread toward Georgie, and into the phone said, “End of use? It’s about objects. Recognizing planned obsolescence, factoring disposal in.” There was a lull while she listened. Her friends crowded into the tiny store. She said, “That’s all right. Thank you. Sorry for your loss.”

She put the phone back into its cradle and held it there. She leaned on it as though she might keep another call away if only she held it down tightly enough. She said, “It’ll take a while to familiarize a clientele.”

Sarah said, “The place is gorgeous!” The walls were painted deep ochre and decorated with bundles of dried lavender. Candles burned in small golden glass orbs. One wall was a dusky blue. Sarah ran a hand over it.

“Pipe Dream,” Nyla said. “That’s the paint color.”

“Of course it is,” Dulcet added.

Sarah nodded, offered a smile, and handed over the mums. It was the first time they’d all been together since the night of the miscarriage. She’d already made it clear she wasn’t sentimental about that loss—she was determined to not be sentimental. A baby that dies at eight weeks gestation old is a collection of cells that hasn’t come together right. It wasn’t a thing meant to live. And that was the end of the baby conversation. She picked up a horse chestnut from a ceramic bowl.

“Lovely, aren’t they?” Nyla said.

“Like a testicle.” Sarah moved the nut through her fingers as though kneading a petrified ball sac. It was an embryonic plant. Everything was reproductive.

Nyla sold cloth bags made out of undyed hemp canvas, with the words THE NEW RULES OF LIFE screen printed on one side over a silhouette of a genderless human seemingly giving birth to a bush. Sarah picked the bag up. A tag said the bag was meant to be used a thousand times then buried—given back to the earth.

Who would keep count?

Nyla lifted a basket full of notebooks. “A hundred percent sustainable. Recycled paper, vegan glue. There are tiny wildflower seeds in each page, the seeds of honeybee-friendly flowers.” She passed the notebooks around. “I’m waiting on a delivery of organic tea in compostable tea bags. No packaging at all, coming by bicycle.”

Sarah flipped through the notebook and saw the flecks of seeds embedded. Each page was laced with embryonic plants waiting to be born.

Dulcet cracked open the prosecco. The cork flew, knocking into a bundle of dried lavender and sending leaves flying. Georgie pulled a pomegranate from her paper bag and split it open in her fingers. Juice ran down her hand and over her wrist and dripped onto the cement floor.

There were so many seeds inside that fruit, each one white as a tooth, wrapped in its translucent, garnet coat. The edible part of a pomegranate is an aril. Sarah had studied pomegranates in school. They used them as models. “A pomegranate is like an ovary,” she said.

They were the image of fertility both literal and symbolic.

Georgie’s fingers were pink with juice, her body round with baby making. Dulcet poured four glasses of prosecco. The booze whispered and hissed, tiny bubbles bursting. Georgie said, “It’s decorative. We don’t have to—”

“Throw them in,” Sarah urged. Who was she to censor fertility signs?

The arils hit the bubbly and laced the light drink with red, like blood in clear water.

Dulcet asked, “What’s the theme of this store?”

Nyla had found a rag and rubbed at a spot on the floor where pomegranate juice seeped into the concrete. Now she sat back on her heels. She said, “To go beyond sustainability. Beyond recycling and the common cycle of consumption.” She used the side of her arm to brush hair away from her face, and held her rag on her lap, where it bled a damp spot. “Reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle—we say that all the time, teach it to kids, but what’s ‘reuse,’ really? A purse made of fifty plastic bags? That’s crafts, not environmentalism.”

Sarah’s bag was made out of fifty used plastic bags. The bag was cute. It was plastic and crocheted. She felt a little ashamed of it now.

Nyla said, “Before the industrial revolution sustainability was a whole other question. People produced what they needed.”

Dulcet looked around the room. “So, the plan is to sell what people need?”

“The plan is to showcase what I value.”

Dulcet said, “Honey, you can’t make a living anymore selling hippie bags and clover. The seventies are dead.”

“It’s not about money. It’s about taking a stand.” She stood and brushed off her paint-marked yoga clothes, ready to pledge allegiance to her own dream. “Money is a construct, a made-up system, a fiction next to the reality of water and air.”

And the anthem that played behind Nyla’s speech was Amy Winehouse crooning, “No, no, no …” It was a CD set to repeat.

“I’ve got a development grant. I can promote the world I want, here, in this cheap spot. People buy what’s for sale and designers pave the way. I’ll be a positive link in that consumer chain.”

Sarah expected Nyla to break into song, complete with hand gestures.

“Cheers!” Georgie said. She raised her glass. She said it quickly, having found that spot to interject.

Dulcet refilled her own glass. Sarah lifted a glass, too. Nyla was the last to reach. Then the four clinked their glasses, spilled prosecco, and sipped in celebration—only Nyla put her glass down without drinking.

Sarah knocked on the wood of their small tabletop.

Dulcet grabbed her wrist. “Stop knocking.”

“It’s bad luck to not drink for a toast,” Sarah said. She knocked to call on good luck, to offset the bad.

“Why aren’t you drinking?” Georgie asked. “I broke my no-booze-while-nursing rule for this.”

Outside, a bus broke wind in a cloud of diesel and pulled away from the curb. A short woman with heavy bags in each hand had climbed off the bus and walked away like a slow-moving windup toy, a roll to each side with every step. Wind shook the leaves on a skinny tree. The world was toxic, dark, and cold out Nyla’s window.

After a thoughtful pause—a pregnant pause?—with the determination of a mother ripping off a Band-Aid, when a swifter move could mean less pain, Nyla said, “I might be pregnant.”

“What?” Sarah squawked. She couldn’t help herself. Nyla had two kids already! She was old. Older than Sarah. At least two years older.

Georgie said, “That’s fantastic!”

“Ugh. I can’t even imagine.” Dulcet drank again, without putting her glass down.

“It’s either that or menopause,” Nyla said. “Missed a period, and that old familiar feeling.” She gave a squeeze and a lift to one of her boobs.

Georgie said, “Who’s the father?”

Nyla waved a hand, then picked at a spot on her table. “This man.”

Dulcet said, “Obviously.”

Nyla said, “Speed dating.”

Georgie said, “Five minutes?”

“You move fast,” Dulcet purred.

Nyla said, “He was nice.”

Sarah didn’t say anything. Her face had turned splotchy below her eyes. Her ears were red.

Nyla said, “I’ve been a single mom a long time. I can do it again.”

Sarah knew the stats—women became pregnant more often after one-night stands than in long-term monogamy. Right before menopause. It was an evolutionary strategy.

It was a desperate move.

Sarah was desperate! Precisely. So why was she so monogamous? Because she wanted an actual family, that was why. Her ghost babies gathered around her, all of them clawing at her, not one of them alive.

“How do you feel about—” Her voice cracked, but she went on. “Population, and the environment?” She nodded at the store, the slim eco-merchandise. Sarah didn’t have one baby yet. Nyla would have three. That was edging on baby hoarding.

Nyla said, “This could be the child who saves us.”

Dulcet laughed. “That’s a lot of pressure on one kid, darling.”

Georgie said, “Have you seen a doctor?”

Nyla shrugged it off. “I’ll find a clinic. But I’m pretty versed in pregnancy.”

The phone rang. She said, “Probably somebody wanting a bicycle, or a funeral, or a funeral on a bicycle.” With a smile in her voice, she answered, “Hello? LifeCycles.” Then she said, “Yes, that’s me,” and she listened.

She turned her back to her friends. She turned the music down until Amy Winehouse was a whisper.

She said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Arena wouldn’t sell drugs. She doesn’t do drugs.” There was a pause. “I’m sure all parents do say the same thing, but this time it’s true.”

When she got off the phone, she found her keys. She said, “I have to go. Lock the door on the way out.”

Dulcet asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I think it’s fine, but the police detained Arena. They say she sold kids crystal meth. Where would she even get that?” Nyla grabbed her purse, though it wasn’t really a purse. It was one of the hippie bags.

Georgie called, “Want me to go with you?”

Nyla was at the door, then out.

A sprig of dry lavender fell from the wall in a discreet hiss and rattle. The women sat together at the high, small table. Sarah rapped her knuckles against the wood of the stool she sat on, wanting to bring anything like luck her way.

Georgie said, “Crystal meth?”

Dulcet said, “At least Arena has a product.”

Georgie said, “That’s my future babysitter.” She reached for her keys, too, as though to run home and protect her child.

Sarah said, “She’s pregnant? Nyla’s pregnant? She’s almost forty-five.” Sarah’s face was still blotchy. Her shoulders slumped. She said, “That’s just not fair.”

Dulcet’s phone rang. She checked the number then silenced it. “Mr. Latex.” She added, “This guy wants to see me in my rubber skivvies. Private show.” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together: money.

Georgie asked, “Are you going to do it?”

Dulcet said, “Are you crazy? For all I know, he’s a cop.”

At the word cop, Georgie scanned the street. It was a nervous tick, since the day they’d showed up at her house. A flash of paranoia made her want to run home and clutch her daughter. Instead, she put a hand on Sarah’s wilting back. She asked, “Sarah?”

Sarah waved her away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Dulcet reached for Sarah’s hand. She said, “Honey, sometimes the worst things in life are free.”

Sarah straightened up only long enough to reach across the table for Nyla’s untouched drink. She wasn’t pregnant. Maybe she never would be. She poured Nyla’s drink into her own glass, and she drank.