Hilfiger, she thinks she’s the butch one.” He turned to Lily and Charlotte. “Any objections to the kid calling me Big Daddy? It’s what Ben used to call me...once upon a time.”
Ben looked down to hide his red cheeks. “Shut up, Dez. It’s the girls’ turn to draw.”
Lily held out the egg hat, and Charlotte shut her eyes, selected a slip of paper, and glanced at it.
“Omigod! It’s me!” she whooped.
Ben laughed. “The queen and the diesel dyke! What kinda morphodite are you two figuring on making?”
Lily smiled. “Fortunately, a normal child was never what we were shooting for.”
“Well, I, for one, am completely comfortable with the idea,” Dez said. “This child will be yet another fine collaborative effort between Dr. Charlotte Maycomb and Dr. Desmond Reed.”
Colleagues at Atlanta State University, Charlotte and Dez had collaborated on a number of academic papers and one book, The Lust That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A History of Nineteenth-Century British Homosexual Scandals.
After another round of wine, Lily, Charlotte, and Dez retreated upstairs while Ben flipped on the TV to catch the financial report on CNN. Once they were upstairs, Lily presented Dez with a glass jar.
“Oh, so now that you’ve wined me and dined me, you want me to put out, is that it?” he said.
“I guess that’s about the size of it. Uh...maybe you’d like to use the spare bedroom. Charlotte and I will be in our room whenever you’re, uh, ready.”
“Give me that issue of Premiere with Mark Wahlberg on it, and I won’t be a minute.”
Four minutes later, Dez knocked on Lily and Charlotte’s bedroom door. “Here it is, ladies — my cuppa, cuppa burnin’ love.”
Lily gingerly accepted the jar, and Desmond bowed out of the room, with the comment that he was confident they had things under control from there. Lily did her business with the turkey baster, and then Charlotte stood on her head because she had read somewhere that it aided conception.
But the evening of eggplant parmesan was not to be the night of conception. Only unlucky teenagers get pregnant after just one ejaculation. Soon Charlotte, Lily, and Dez had done the jar-and-baster routine so many times that they lost all their self-consciousness. It became a running joke. One afternoon Lily had rung Dez and Ben’s doorbell and greeted them with, “Excuse me, but could I trouble you for a cup of sperm?”
On their last attempt, Dez delivered his jar to their door and said, “This better do the trick. The hair I’m growing on my palms is starting to cause some painful friction.”
It did the trick. And nine months later, little Artemesia Gentileschi Maycomb (Mimi for short) was born. Lily, Dez, and Ben were all present in the birthing room, although Ben had to excuse himself to throw up when he saw the placenta.
Charlotte and Dez had lived long enough to see Mimi’s first birthday. And if it hadn’t been for Dez’s morbid fear of airplanes, they might be alive still. But he refused to fly, so if he and Charlotte were going to attend a conference, no matter how far away it, they always rented a car. So instead of flying into Miami for the gay/lesbian studies conference, they drove, and the rainy roads of southern Georgia robbed Mimi of her Mommy and Dezzy, Lily of her lover and her friend.
Lily gently shook her daughter’s shoulder. “Wake up, sweetie. Time to go see your grandma
