Sing You Home

from work so that she could ask him about his day and feed him a meal. Max used to say we should go out shopping, or to lunch, get to know each other-but I figured we’d run out of things to talk about before we’d backed out of her driveway.

She seems, though, to have developed a little bit of a spine. It’s amazing what taking away someone else’s embryos can do for one’s self-esteem, I guess.

“Thanks, but I’ve reached my prayer quota for the day,” I tell her.

“No prayers. Just… well…” She looks up at me. “Max isn’t trying to hurt you.”

“Yeah, I’m only collateral damage. I get it.”

“I know how you must be feeling.”

I am amazed at her nerve. “You have no idea how I’m feeling. You and I,” I spit out, “have absolutely nothing in common.”

I shove past Liddy, Angela hurrying beside me.

“You giving your clients lessons in charm, Counselor?” Wade calls out.

Liddy’s voice rings down the hallway after me. “We do have something in common, Zoe,” she says. “We both already love these babies.”

That stops me in my tracks. I turn around again.

“For what it’s worth,” Liddy says quietly, “I always thought you’d make a great mother.”

Angela loops her arm through mine and drags me down the hallway.

“Ignore them both,” she says. “You know the difference between a porcupine and Wade Preston driving in his car? The prick’s on the outside.”

But this time, I can’t even crack a smile.

I do not remember my mother going on many dates when I was growing up, but one sticks out in my mind. A man had come to the door bathed in more perfume than my own mother had on and took her out to dinner. I fell asleep on the couch watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island and woke up sometime during Saturday Night Live to find her in her stocking feet, with mascara smudged under her eyes and her hair tumbling out of its updo. “Was he nice?” I remember asking, and my mother just snorted.

“Never trust a man who wears a pinkie ring,” she said.

I didn’t understand, back then. But now I agree: the only jewelry a guy should wear is a wedding band or a Super Bowl ring. Anything else is a clue that it isn’t going to work out: a high school ring says he never grew up; a cocktail ring says he’s gay and doesn’t know it yet. A pinkie ring says he’s too polished for his own good; a Truman Capote wannabe concerned more with how he looks than with how you do.

Wade Preston wears a pinkie ring.

“You certainly have had your fair share of health complications, Ms. Baxter,” he says. “One might say it’s almost Job-like.”

“Objection,” Angela says. “One might not say that.”

“Sustained. Counsel will refrain from personal commentary,” Judge O’Neill says.

“Many have been life-threatening, isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” I say.

“So there’s a chance that, if this court awards you the pre-born children, you might not even be around to see them grow up, right?”

“Right now, I am completely cancer-free. My chance of recurrence is less than two percent.” I smile at him. “I’m healthy as a horse, Mr. Preston.”

“You do understand that, if the court somehow awards you and your lesbian lover these pre-born children, there’s no guarantee a pregnancy will occur?”

“I understand that better than anyone,” I say. “But I also understand that this is my last chance to have a biological child.”

“You now live with Vanessa Shaw in her home, is that correct?”

“Yes. We’re married.”

“Not in the state of Rhode Island,” Wade Preston says.

I fix my gaze on him. “All I know is that the state of Massachusetts gave me a marriage certificate.”

“How long have you been together?”

“About five months.”

He raises his brows. “That’s not very long.”

“I guess I knew something good as soon as I saw it.” I shrug. “And I wanted to be with her forever.”

“You felt the same way when you married Max Baxter, didn’t you?”

First blood. “I wasn’t the one who wanted a divorce. Max left me.”

“Just like Vanessa could leave you?”

“I don’t think that will happen,” I say.

“But you don’t know, do you?”

“Anything’s possible. Reid and Liddy could get a divorce.” As I say the words, I glance at Liddy in the gallery. Her face drains of color.

I don’t know what the story is between her and Max, but there is one. I could feel threads between them, invisible as they were, during her testimony, as if I’d walked through a spiderweb stretched across an open doorway. And then her words downstairs in the snack room: Max isn’t trying to hurt you. As if she’d discussed this with him.

Max couldn’t be in love with her.

She’s as different from me as a person could possibly be.

At that thought, I have to smile a little. Max could clearly say the same thing about Vanessa.

Even if Max has a crush on his sister-in-law, I can’t imagine it going anyplace. Liddy is far too caught up in being the perfect wife, the ideal church lady. And as far as I can tell, there’s no wiggle room for a fall from grace.

“Ms. Baxter?” Wade Preston says impatiently, and I realize I have completely missed his question.

“I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?”

“I said that you resent Reid and Liddy for the life they lead, don’t you?”

“I don’t resent them. We just place importance on very different things.”

“So you’re not jealous of their wealth?”

“No. Money isn’t everything.”

“Then you resent the fact that they’re such good role models?”

I smother a laugh. “Actually, I don’t think they are. I think they buy what they want-including these embryos. I think they use their Bible to judge people like me. Neither of which are qualities I’d want to pass down to a child.”

“You don’t go to church on a regular basis, do you, Ms. Baxter?”

“Objection,” Angela says. “Perhaps we need a visual.” She takes two legal books and smacks one down in front of her. “Church.” She moves the second book to the opposite edge of the defense table. “State.” Then she looks up at the judge. “See all the nice room in between.”

“Cute, Counselor. Please answer the question, Ms. Baxter,” the judge says.

“No.”

“You don’t think much of people who go to church, do you?”

“I think everyone should be entitled to believe what they want. Which includes not believing at all,” I add.

Vanessa doesn’t believe in God. I think her mother’s attempts to pray away the gay in her closed the door on organized religion. We’ve talked about it, in the folds of the night. How she doesn’t really care much about an afterlife, as long as she gets what she needs in her present one; how there’s an evolutionary component to helping people that has nothing to do with a Golden Rule; how even though I can’t subscribe to an organized religion, I also can’t say with certainty that I don’t believe in some higher power. I’m not sure if this is because I actually still cling to the vestiges of religion, or because I’m too afraid to admit out loud that I might not believe in God.

Atheism, I realize, is the new gay. The thing you hope no one finds out about you-because of all the negative assumptions that are sure to follow.

“So you wouldn’t plan to raise these pre-born children with any religion?”