“There was alcohol in that, you know.”

“Ben.”

“There was. I’m sorry. It’s midnight and you’re talking, all I’m picturing is a pagoda.”

She has to laugh at this. Maybe it’s only a little tipsiness, her tolerance way down from ten weeks of, basically, sobriety. He smiles too. “The school,” she says. “You know, the one the Vic started.”

“He didn’t really start it, but yeah, right by that shitty grocery where I bought the peas.”

She looks hard at him and gets out of the chair. They are standing together in the middle of the room. If this story is about two couples, two marriages, this surely is one of them. “You did?”

“That rainy day,” he reminds her, “when the rain chased us out of the park. You had a craving, pea soup.”

“I did,” she says, in considerable amazement, remembering his soaked face in the kitchen, holding out the can like a trophy.

“But there was a man?”

“He was hiding up there.”

Her husband is really trying to follow this. “Why would he be hiding?”

“Why would anyone? And then he was shimmying down.”

“Shimmying?”

“They always say that about drainpipes,” she says glumly. Now the whole story is getting swept someplace, the terror of her midnight street-walk just particles to be brushed away with a broom, not worth worrying over. It’s mutual. She is helping her husband decide that it was nothing.

“So after he shimmied away from the solar panels?”

“I was just scared, is all,” she says, and she lets this spread around them, the is all, and she feels the toddy in her belly, gurgling around the baby. Let it have a sip, let them all calm down. She was frightened, is all, she thinks, tell him this. Or else tell him what? This is a man in whom she has complete if reckless confidence, who will believe, basically, anything she tells him, at midnight at least. So what can she tell him?

“When I was a little girl,” she says, “I saw a really creepy horse.”

It’s like the wind is rising, outside the bungalow, but everything still stands. Of course it stands. There was not a horse outside, not tonight in a residential neighborhood in San Francisco. There was a man, maybe, but there are men everywhere. Right here for instance, listening to her as best he can.

“I think it had something wrong with its neck,” Rachel tells him, “or maybe it was just a creepy species.”

This must be how Ben nods when he’s in a meeting. “Breed.”

“Breed!” she says. “Yes! Thank you! A decorative neck, I guess. Decorative, or cancer. But it scared me and”—she sighs, because here is where she would order or pour another drink, before this baby cock-blocked that strategy—“I think about it all the time.”