Padgett leans forward as if at the long taut end of a leash. Her napkin has vanished from her lap—maybe thrown—and her hands are at her expensive little dress, flippant and stitched with little stars or flourishes or whatever the fuck they are. “I don’t drink,” she says, “nearly as much, hardly at all lately, or fairly lately, and I happen to know a lot, I’ve learned a great deal, about wine.”

“Don’t spin this at me, dear. I married into the Bottles knowing they were all animals for liquor, your father included, God rest his liver. He was the brass ring, with my grandfather’s money turning to cardboard. All my life I was told this, told exactly what to do. And I did it. Our house, the Padgett house, would be long gone had I not schemed my schemes. You think I loved him, Gail? All the time? I did what we wanted, best I could. What we wanted was a boy and a girl, Gail. What he wanted was you. And look at you now. You think the world loves you fierce and independent, believe me from the bottom of my years of experience, Gail, nobody does. And all I’m trying to do is to impart a little—”

“You have no knowledge, none, of what you’re talking about.”

“All the knowledge in the world,” her mother says, the word knowledge rolling in her mouth like cancer, “won’t make anything easier. Suffer less, Gail. Have his baby. Every night when you take your first sip”—and here Lil strong-arms across the table and empties the warm white wine into Padgett’s glass all smudgy with her fiddling fingerprints—“I know you’re not pregnant and it breaks your father’s heart.”

“He’s dead,” Padgett says, blocking too late her mother’s tremulous pour. “This is crazymaking.”

“Finish the wine while I finish the coffee.”

“No, the wine’s not what I mean.”

“I tell you, you are making a mistake without another baby.”

“We just got married.”

“Three, what is it, years ago, you had no prospects and I was scrounging for you. Catering jobs. Without a kid of your own, his lawyers could throw you right back there like a snake.”

“Nobody throws snakes,” Padgett says. “I made some bad choices. Yes. I wish I could make them again. Also yes.”

“You can’t go back, but you can go forward,” her mother says, with the triumphant use of something she saw tacked up someplace. Padgett’s brain grinds around. She can’t go anywhere listening to her mother, it’s some difficult seat belt, her mother’s hand crackling toward her, look, like it’s made of wicked twigs. “Have a baby with him,” she says, and her bright, bright eyes become, to Padgett, even nastier things to say. “Act like a real wife, Gail. Act like a mother.”