“We’re not doing it,” Nick said.
“But we can’t unring that bell,” Freddie said.
“Typical Gran,” Nick fumed. “In one swoop she—”
“We’re going to figure it out, Freddie,” I interrupted, anxious not to follow Nick’s train of thought. “This is an absurd suggestion.”
Freddie got up then, and grabbed a bottle of scotch. He took a sip and winced as it went down his throat. Then he ran a hand through his hair and faced us.
“Is it, though?” he asked. “Is it really?”
“What?” Nick asked. His mouth hung agape. “No. We can’t…no, Freddie. Surely you see it. We can’t…we’ve just gotten each other back, and…”
Freddie tilted his head for another drink, then stared down the bottle neck. “You should have a baby,” he said. “You deserve to have a baby, and now I can do something concrete to make up for the worst mistake of my life.” He chuckled bitterly. “It’s poetic, actually. Isn’t it? That the best way, the final way, I can apologize for trying to sleep with your wife is by getting her pregnant?”
Nick froze, and the movement of the train buffeted him to the right. He caught himself on the back of a chair.
“Freddie, stop it,” I said. “It’s not funny.”
“That’s true. It isn’t,” Freddie said. “It is elegant. It’s practical. It’s foolproof. Gran is right. Let me do this. Think about it, Knickers. We used to talk about being better fathers than ours was to us. You can have that chance, and I can make up for nearly ruining your family by helping give you one.”
Nick shook his head. “We have put that behind us. There is no karmic debt to pay,” he said. “It is over. Let it stay over.”
“Bex, please make him see,” Freddie said, turning to me.
“Stop it,” Nick burst out. “You can’t turn on your special Freddie-Bex bond to try to get me to roll over on this one. This is impossible. That is why this is impossible. What about you? What if this stirs up…”
“It won’t,” Freddie said.
“Of course it will!” Nick exploded. “How can it not?” He was borderline frantic. “You act like this is so easy, but Bex was the one thing you wanted enough to throw your life away, and we nearly lost each other over it.”
I will never forget how still Nick looked then as the train rocked around us. He simply stood rooted to the spot, fighting with whatever was burbling inside him. His hands clenched and unclenched.
“Bex cannot have your baby,” Nick said. “I don’t think we can survive it.”
“And yet she can’t not have it,” Freddie said. “And you know it. Do you really think we can survive that, either?”
My mouth tried to form words. Any words, any at all, from the cloud of them swarming my head. The thousands of logical objections to this. The countless reassurances that they were both overreacting. The pleas to sleep on it. The promises that we were tough enough that none of this could touch us. But I couldn’t figure out which of them would be the truth. Instead we sat there, silent, each of us breaking in our own ways as the train kept hurtling through the dark.
ACT FOUR
When my journal appears, many statues must come down.
—The 1st Duke of Wellington
CHAPTER ONE
Are these the amber waves of grain, or the fruited plains?” Nick asked, staring out at the low land on either side of the car, dotted with only the occasional farm.
“Both,” I said. “Mostly the former. And corn. Lots of corn. If you ever wondered why I’m corny, here it is.”
The harder we tried to start a family of our own, the more I wanted to show Nick a little bit more of what mine had been like. He’d never seen me on anything approximating my own turf—a gaping hole in his mental Library of Bex that I couldn’t just fill with Twinkies and Cracker Jack and tales of the Coucherator. If we did end up having kids, a jaunt to Iowa would become harder—double the heirs, double the stress—so Nick and I got permission from Eleanor to spend Christmas with my mother. At long last, I was taking him to a corner of the States that truly belonged to me.
There are airfields near my small hometown, but they aren’t trafficked enough for us to slide into Muscatine without anyone noticing, so Nick and I flew to Des Moines with our baseball caps pulled low, and Margot rented a white Ford Focus for the two-plus-hour drive to my house. We cruised out of the capital and through Iowa City, past the Herbert Hoover presidential home and library—Lacey, an Annie fan, had once proudly vomited there from carsickness—and then down Route 38. Eventually the fields along that rural road gave way to white clapboard houses, roads with more stop signs than stoplights, and the modest two- and three-story square brick buildings that made up Muscatine’s business district.
“That’s Pete’s Hardware,” I said, pointing to a sun-faded, green-and-red-striped awning over an old metal cursive sign. The decal in the window had been scrubbed away years ago by some local teen idiot so that it only read P HARD. Pete had left it that way, figuring a reaction would only encourage more local teen idiots. Pete was now running for Congress. “Oh, and Joey’s Tacos. Joey is famous for his bread taco, which is, wait for it, meat and toppings inside a shell made from a piece of bread that he’s folded into a U shape and deep-fried.”
“So…a sandwich,” Nick said. “Oooh, can we go to Pizza Ranch?”
“Ironically, I’ve never liked their ranch dressing,” I said.
“I love it here,” he announced. “Let’s relocate. We can be Knitwear Nick from Nick’s Knitwear and Pottery Bex from Bex’s Pottery, and eat bread tacos forever and ever.”
“Nick,” I said, “I love you, and I love your Demi Moore in Ghost fantasies of pottery wheels…”
“Mmm,” he said dreamily.
“But we would go broke if we had to rely
