God, Joan’s entire life she’d been asking that question, hadn’t she? Was she okay? She had been looking around every room she was in to survey the people around her, compare herself to the way she saw them, trying to gauge where she didn’t fit, trying to find where she could. Trying to see if she was okay.

And she was.

She was.

Joan wanted to say something—anything—but there was no air in her throat.

“You should be more scared of what’s happening to you and Hank,” Vanessa said, raising her eyebrows. “That gorgeous miserable bomb that’s going to blow up your life when it arrives, any minute.”

Donna laughed. “I’m not scared of that. I’m scared of what NASA and everybody else in the world is going to try to tell me I can’t do once I’m a mother. ‘How can you leave your child at home while you’re in space,’ even though fathers have been doing it for, let’s see, over two decades. ‘Should mothers even be in space?’ ‘Who takes care of your child when you’re at work?’ That I’m scared about. But I’m not scared of being a mother.”

“Why not?” Joan asked her.

“Because it feels good to love someone,” Donna said. “It feels better than anything on this Earth. And I bet better than anything up there.”

—

Donna gave birth to Thea four days later, after only eight hours of labor. Hank called everyone that night. By the time he called Vanessa, it was two a.m. Vanessa answered it bleary-eyed as Joan sat up next to her.

“Aw, congrats, Hank. Tell Donna we’re proud,” Vanessa said. “That I’m proud, I mean.”

Joan knew she probably had a message on her answering machine.

That weekend, they drove over to Hank and Donna’s with an oversized teddy bear and a frozen lasagna.

When they pulled into the driveway, Jimmy was leaving the house.

“Oh, nice,” Jimmy said when he saw Vanessa get out of the car with the lasagna. Joan was trying to get the teddy bear out of the back. “It’s good how you women do that, the ‘taking care of each other’ thing.”

“You could have just as easily brought food,” Vanessa said, and Jimmy laughed.

Vanessa was holding the lasagna, and Joan waved her off, encouraging her to go ahead inside without her.

After Vanessa walked away, Jimmy stopped at his car door and turned to Joan.

“It’s early,” Jimmy said, “in the morning, don’t you think?”

It was nine a.m. on a Sunday.

“What do you mean?” Joan asked.

“No, nothing,” Jimmy said. “Just that you two are always together. Early in the morning. Late at night.”

Joan looked at him. “Oh, no,” Joan said, her voice as condescending as she could muster. “Little Jimmy Hayman has never had a friend.”