It wasn’t my mother. It was Annie.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said as Rory batted the bottle out of her mouth. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“We’re fine,” I said. As if to disprove me, Rory started to wail. I popped the bottle between her lips again, but Rory turned her head. The nipple stabbed her in the cheek. Milk leaked out, pooling in the crease of her neck. I tried to wipe it away with my sleeve as the bottle fell out of the car seat and onto the floor, just out of my reach.

“Did the milk come this morning?”

“I’m not sure. We had an appointment. I got a box yesterday…”

Rory was turning an alarming shade of purple. Her mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, even though she was shaking with what I guessed was indignation. Was this normal? As soon as I got off the phone I could go online to the websites I’d bookmarked, look up crying and shaking and purple and see what the experts had to say. “Can you hold on for just a moment?”

I put the phone down on top of the baby, bent, grabbed the bottle, and popped it back in her mouth. This time, she started sucking. I exhaled, realizing that I was sweating. I wiped my forehead against my shoulder and used one hand to keep the bottle in the baby’s mouth and the other to bring the phone back to my ear. “Okay. I’m back. Sorry about that.”

Annie sounded faintly amused. “Listen. I know you’ve got a baby nurse, but I’d be happy to come up and help out for a few days. It would save a lot on the cost of shipping my milk.”

Honestly, I did not care about how much the milk-shipping was costing. God knows I’d never see the bill. But the idea of another set of hands, hands belonging to the woman who’d carried Rory for nine months and might, theoretically, have some idea of what she wanted when she started shaking and turning purple, sounded wonderful. “How soon can you be here?” I asked.

“Tonight?” she asked.

“Perfect,” I said, and hung up before she could change her mind.

Tia met me in the lobby, where she wrinkled her nose and diagnosed the problem. “I think she pooped.”

“Ah.” Upstairs, the mess was startling, both in color and in quantity. I stood by the nursery door, trying not to cringe, as Tia wiped off Rory’s legs and bottom, applied diaper cream, fastened a fresh diaper in place, and put the baby into a fresh outfit. Her formerly peony-pink pants were a yellow-brown ruin; even the car seat had gotten splattered. Tia whisked everything away and, somehow, I ended up in the rocking chair, with the baby in my arms. When she fell asleep I sat there, too terrified to move, until Tia came back and eased the baby into the wicker bassinet.

Five hours later, Annie arrived. For someone who’d just given birth, she looked remarkably normal, in khaki cargo pants and a T-shirt and sneakers, with a wheeled suitcase in one hand, a cooler balanced on top of it, and her breast pump packed in a carrying case and slung over her shoulder. By then I was feeling foolish. Annie had caught me at a bad moment, but I was managing just fine. Now I knew that silent scream and turning purple and not hungry meant pooping, and I was sorry to have wasted her time. But as soon as Annie took Rory out of my arms and cradled the baby against her, I changed my mind. Everything she did, the way she held the baby, jiggling her gently up and down, the way she patted her bottom in a way that even I found soothing; the way she knew, instinctively, to support Rory’s neck, made her look like an expert, and made me feel like the rankest of amateurs.

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Why don’t you take a break?” I looked down at myself. I was still in the same green top and blue skirt I’d worn to the meeting on Wall Street that morning, and I hadn’t showered before I’d put them on. I went to my bedroom and shucked off my clothing. I’ll take a shower, I told myself. I’ll call Darren, see if he’s tracked India down. I’ll call Tommy, ask if he wants to come visit, and Trey. . and then, before I knew it, I was facedown on my bed. When I opened my eyes again it was ten o’clock at night.

I scrambled into the shower, then into a pair of sweatpants one of my brothers had left behind and an old T-shirt of my father’s. Annie was on the living-room couch, the baby asleep in her arms, the television tuned to an episode of Real Housewives. She turned around, looking guilty, and turned the TV off when she saw me.

“Tia’s having her dinner. I nursed her,” she said.

“Rory, not Tia, right?”

Annie looked too worried to smile at my attempt at a joke. “I hope that’s okay. I probably should have asked you first…”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

“… but you were sleeping, and it just seemed silly to pump it and then feed it to her, so I just…”

“Really, it’s okay.”

“She’s an angel,” said Annie, gazing fondly at the baby. I looked to see if Rory had undergone some sort of transformation during my nap, but she was the same, wrinkly and red and bald and disagreeable-looking, even in a very sweet white-and-pink one-piece outfit with a matching hat. “Here.” Annie lifted the baby, holding her out to me. Before I could think about it, I shook my head. I braced myself for rolled eyes or laughter, or, worse, disgust, but Annie just said, “I remember when I had Frank Junior. I felt like I was babysitting. I think I spent the entire first year of his life waiting for his real parents to come get him.”

At her mention of her son, I realized I had no idea what she’d done with her children. “They’re staying with my parents,” she told me. “My folks know what’s going on, and I’m fine to stay for a few days.”

I took a seat on the couch beside her. “Did you always know you wanted kids?”

Annie looked thoughtful. “I guess I always knew I’d have them. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it?” I shook my head as she continued. “That was just what everyone I knew did. My mother, my aunts, my cousins. . everyone had babies, and most of them ended up raising a baby or two that wasn’t even their own.” She looked at me. “Did you always know you wanted to go to college?”

I considered before answering. “I guess it’s the same thing. It’s what everyone I knew did.”

She nodded. “It’s not so bad, though, is it? I mean, you had fun in college, right?”

Because it was late, because I was still foggy from my nap, because, in the past weeks, my life had changed so radically that I barely recognized it anymore, I told her the truth. “Not so much. Not really. I’m not even sure I know how to have fun.”

Annie looked at me, startled. “Really? Huh. I always thought. . I mean, if you had money. .” Her voice trailed off.

“Money can’t buy you social skills. Or friends.”

“True.” She sat quietly, maybe thinking that, in some respects, she was richer than I’d ever be. Rory started to stir, stretching and waving her fists in the air. “Want to hold her?” Annie asked. She handed over the baby, and this time, I took her. Rory opened her tiny, toothless mouth and yawned before settling herself against me. “Cute,” I said, and meant it. It wasn’t great, but maybe it was a start.


JULES

Once you’re done with school, summer doesn’t mean what it used to. Every day was a workday, and the only way the seasons mattered was whether it was light when I left for the office and when I came home, and what I’d wear from Kimmie’s apartment to the subway. Once I was at work, time and weather disappeared. The office seemed to generate its own climate, hot and humid, the air thick with stress and gray with unhappiness. In an effort to recognize summer as summer, Kimmie and I would try to eat outdoors once every week. We’d take turns picking the spot: bistros with sidewalk seating, pocket parks, museum courtyards, restaurants with backyard gardens where we could sit and imagine we were someplace other than New York.

This week, we’d grabbed street food and were dining on the benches outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was hazy and warm, the sky a washed-out white, the trees thick with glossy green leaves, a Friday afternoon, which meant that Rajit was probably halfway to the Hamptons already, and I wouldn’t be missed as long as I stayed late enough to finish my research (today’s enthralling topic — a sneaker factory in Paraguay). People had kicked off their shoes and rolled up their sleeves and pants legs (and, in the cases of some of the girls, their shirts) in an effort to make the most of the sunshine.

I bought a plate of halal chicken and rice. Kimmie had a container of fruit salad, a big bottle of water, and a black-and-white cookie. We spread napkins over our laps, traded plastic silverware, and split the cookie so that we each got black and white.

“We should go to the beach,” I said. “I’ll bet Florida’s cheap right now.”

“I bet Florida’s hot.”

“No hotter than this,” I said.

Kimmie speared a bite of kiwi and held it out to me. I looked around to make sure no one was looking, then ate the kiwi off her fork. “JetBlue’s got good deals.” She held out a chunk of pineapple. I looked around again and, when I noticed a trio of guys in ties staring at us, pulled away. Her sigh was so soft I almost didn’t hear it.

Since that first night — the night we played show and tell, as I called it — we’d spent almost every night together. I still paid rent on my apartment, and my roommates thought I had a serious boyfriend. I wasn’t in a hurry to disabuse them. It was none of their business. Kimmie and I woke up together, snuggled on her futon, and made tea in her tiny kitchen. We showered together, hip to hip in her narrow tub, washing each other’s hair under the spray. She’d sleep in my Tshirts, which fell to her thighs, and we wore beaded bracelets we’d picked up at the Brooklyn Flea, but we didn’t hold hands in public, let alone kiss. When we’d visited her parents for Christmas, they put us in Kimmie’s room, which had a single bed, and spread blankets and a sleeping bag on the floor for me. We’d spooned in the bed, whispering and giggling as Kimmie’s mother rattled around in the kitchen, preparing lasagna, the most American dish she knew.

When we were together, at dinner, at the movies, or strolling through a store or a street fair, we looked like best friends. I wasn’t sure what I was — if I was gay, if I’d always been attracted to women and had never managed to figure it out. All I knew for sure was that I was in love with Kimmie. With her, I felt safe in a way I hadn’t in years, maybe not ever, and certainly not since my father’s accident. She was so small, so fragile, with her little bird bones. I could span both of her wrists with one of my hands, could buy clothing for her at Gap Kids, but she was stronger than she looked; smart, and fierce. When she got a cold, I bought her Theraflu and Gatorade and chicken soup from the deli. When I lost my wallet, she called my credit-card company and figured out how to get the DMV to FedEx me a replacement license overnight.

On the bench Kimmie ate the pineapple herself, then pressed her lips together. I wanted to pull the elastic out of her hair, to bury my hands in its cool silk. If she were a boy I wouldn’t have thought twice. I used to rub my palm against the smooth skin on the back of Dan’s neck after he got his hair cut. I’d sit on his lap in his eating club’s common room and carry on conversations as if he were an anthropomorphized chair. I wasn’t wild about public displays of affection, but I wasn’t averse to a little hand-holding, an arm around a waist or over my shoulders, a kiss hello or goodbye. Kimmie and I didn’t do any of that. We couldn’t, without people labeling and judging. . and even in a city as big as Manhattan, where there were plenty of gay men and women, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of publicly declaring that I was one of them. Given my long hair, my high heels, the skirts and blouses and makeup I wore to work, people gave me the benefit of the doubt. They gave it to Kimmie, too, I figured, if they stopped to think of her as sexual at all. With her clothes on, she still looked more like a little boy than a woman. With her clothes off. . I gave a little shiver, thinking of it.

“You know I love you,” I said. My voice was low.

She touched my cheek. I felt myself tense. Women touch each other this way, I told myself. They do it all the time. But, out of the corner of my eye, I saw, or thought I saw, that the guys in ties were staring. They’d been joined by a construction worker in workboots and khaki pants white with drywall dust. He was holding a falafel folded in his hand, and he was definitely looking at us, staring like we were a porno movie that had just started playing, one that he could hardly wait to rewatch alone, in private.