“Always,” he agreed, from around her tongue.
A short time later, but not too short, Claude happened, in the way these things do, though none of the three of them knew it at the time. It always struck Rosie that it would be a useful human evolution if the female could feel the sperm enter the egg. That way she could stop drinking and eating sushi and the good kind of cheese a whole month or more before she generally actually got around to doing so. Such an important part of life, conception, and you missed it altogether. Also once upon a time, sex was followed by napping in a heap together, tangled legs still tingling, or by deep, meaningful philosophizing late into the night, or sometimes by more sex. Now Penn fetched back his food shortages article and gave himself seven minutes to read it nakedly against the headboard before going down to start dinner for thirty-five minutes before driving to preschool to fetch Rigel and Orion. Rosie got dressed and then ready for work and then went to the bus stop to meet Roo and Ben. All the while, Claude worked quietly at becoming, first arriving together and then, in the days and weeks and months to come, dividing and dividing and dividing.
*
What people always said to Rosie was, “What are you, Catholic?” though without raising their voices at the end like you do when you’re really asking a question. Or they said, pretending to be joking, “You know there are ways to prevent this sort of thing.” Or they said, “Better you than me,” which they needn’t, since this was obviously true, or they said, “Are they all yours?” They all were. A mom at a PTA meeting the year before had taken Rosie aside to advise her not to tack condoms to a bulletin board next to the bed, no matter how convenient a storage solution that seemed, a lesson she confessed, nodding at a first-grader in the corner licking paste off his fingers, she had learned the hard way. Making a family seemed just as intimate to Rosie as the usual kickoff to that process and just as impolite to discuss—never mind openly judge—in polite conversation with acquaintances. But that’s what happened to her, usually several times a week. And that’s what was happening at the bus stop while she waited for Roo and Ben and one half of almost-Claude raced frantically for the other half.
“I don’t know how you do it.” Heather. Her neighbor. This was another thing people always said, criticism disguised as compliment.
Rosie laughed. Fake laughed. “Well. You know.”
“No, I mean seriously.” But she did not mean seriously. “I mean, I guess Penn doesn’t have a job. But you do.”
“Penn works from home,” Rosie said. Again. This was not their first time through this particular conversation. They had it every time the bus was late. Which was every time it snowed. Which was every day some months. She thought Madison Wisconsin’s Public Schools should specially train their bus drivers for snowy conditions—was this not just common sense?—but apparently she was all alone with this idea. Now it was September and hot and smelled like a late-afternoon thunderstorm, so who knew why the bus was late.
“I mean, I know he works.” Heather started almost every sentence with “I mean,” which Rosie felt was implied. “But it’s not a job.”
“Writing’s a job.” Penn’s work in progress—he called it DN for Damn Novel—was not yet feeding them, but he wrote diligently, every day. “It’s just not a nine-to-five sort of job.”
“Does that really count?”
“My job isn’t nine to five.” She looked at her watch. In fact, she had to be at the hospital in just more than an hour. Night shifts were brutal but easier to schedule around. Sometimes, it was just less painful to forgo sleep than to try to find child care for all the early dismissals and vacations and holidays and staff developments and parent-teacher conference days. It was also true that nights in the ER were often more peaceful than nights at home with her family. Sometimes they even involved less blood.
“Yeah, but I mean, you’re a doctor,” Heather was saying.
“So?”
“So doctor’s a real job.”
“So is writer.”