“I will be forty-one,” Fiona said, mournfully.
“But you know,” Pru said, bracingly. “A baby.”
“Three babies. You just can’t imagine what that means. It would be nice if even one of them could, you know, tie their own friggin’ shoes. Imagine, getting the two oldest ready for school while I’m still nursing the third . . .”
“Can’t you not nurse this one?”
“Oh sure.” Fiona rolled her eyes. “I’ll just tell him when he grows up that I nursed the first two, and not him. Maybe I’ll have the other two baptized and leave them trust funds, while I’m at it.”
“Well,” Pru said, delicately, “have you thought of, you know . . .” There was one thing that hadn’t changed in twenty years, she thought: “You know,” the universal euphemism for abortion.
Fiona closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know if I could. It’s not just mine to do with whatever I want anymore, you know? I mean, before, when I didn’t have any children, that was one thing. But now, I don’t know. It’d be weird. I already know the date this one is due, you know? I’ve already pictured telling the kids. But thanks for asking. These moms, you know”—she gestured downstairs, toward the kitchen—“I feel like if they knew I was even considering it, they’d have me forcibly sterilized.”
“I know what,” Pru said, brightening. “I’ll be your nanny. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”
“Still no work?”
She lifted up her empty hands, shrugging. “I think soon I may qualify for Meals on Wheels.”
She wanted to tell her about John, and last night, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to spring fresh, hot new love on Fiona. They went back downstairs and Pru moseyed into the living room, the other conversational black hole. The talk among the NPR people was all snow-removal budgets, federal funding for the arts, and digital versus analog tape.
Noah was talking to one of the better-known on-air personalities, and clearly flirting with her. Fiona knew that he had a big crush on the personality. When Pru had asked her if this didn’t bother her, Fiona had shrugged and said, without a smidgen of doubt, No, it’s cute. Pru secretly coveted Fiona’s relationship with Noah. It was a tacit understanding between them that she did. A husband like Noah would love his wife so much that it’d be okay for him to flirt with other women. Fiona, however, coveted the time Pru had for manicures and movies. At least, Pru hoped it was a tacit understanding. The problem with tacit understandings was that they might all be in your head.
Pru pictured herself and John here, in Fiona and Noah’s fashionable row house. That was her in the kitchen, putting more lemon in the hummus and complaining about the cost of preschool. That was her husband, John, flirting with the NPR personality. Well, maybe not flirting but talking with her in his amiable, friendly way. It was their baby upstairs, in her crib. Her stomach lurched. What if she was pregnant? It seemed unlikely, but it was possible, of course. It was the first time she hadn’t been flash-frozen with fear from the inside out, thinking of that possibility. Maybe the timing wasn’t ideal, but they could handle it. Just like being stranded out at Shenandoah, they’d make the best of it. They’d learned that much about each other during that night in the woods. It was something they’d always have going for them—no matter what happened, they could count on each other to try to make the best of things. It wasn’t such a small thing, either. With Rudy, she’d believed in her own abilities to make things work. With John, she trusted him, too. Trusted him absolutely.
The sole other person at the party who seemed to be unattached was an unpublished novelist named Elliott Barstow. She met him while he was anchored at the buffet table, mowing through Fiona’s baba ghanoush. He was a stocky, hairy man, and Pru had never heard of him. She asked him what he wrote, and he said he was working on a series of detective novels based on “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
“You have to have a gimmick like that,” he said, gesturing with a triangle of pita bread. “Stand out from the crowd. The letters of the alphabet, numbers, the cardinal virtues—already taken. But no one’s done the Twelve Days yet.”
He’d said it as though that was what everyone called it, the Twelve Days. She wanted to remember that, to tell McKay.
“Will you hold my drink?” Elliott said. “I’ve got carpal tunnel, so it’s hard for me. From all the typing, you know.”
He handed Pru his drink and she stood there, holding both his drink and her own.
“It’s an automatic twelve-book deal, see?” Elliott continued. “It can’t lose.”
“Are you starting at a partridge in a pear tree? Or—what’s number twelve?”
“Drummers drumming. Yes, from twelve to one, to mimic the song. Each holiday season, see, I come out with another. Oh, and I have the TV ad already worked out. Can’t you just hear it? Clink clunk. That prison-door closing sound. Clink clunk. A quiet band camp in a sleepy upstate hamlet is ripped apart by a series of mysterious teen murders. Clink clunk. Twelve Drummers Drumming. The latest Sydney Pearson murder mystery, from crime writer Elliott Barstow.”
He took his glass from her hand and drank. “Available this Christmas at fine bookstores everywhere,” he added thoughtfully.
She spent half an hour listening to the plot outlines of Elliott’s books. Although Five Golden Rings, about brutal murders in the porn industry, was certainly titillating, her personal favorite was Ten Lords A-Leaping. “Why are members of the British Parliament committing suicide by jumping off London Bridge? Detective Sydney Pearson investigates,” Elliott recited, in a low voice.
“Clink clunk,” Pru added.
She danced with Elliott when Noah put on some music, then called it a day and walked home by herself. She felt charmed by everything, Elliott and
