There is this one thing about having a baby—I don’t get any sleep, so I am very tired right now. I want to write more. Tell you (whoever You are) more about the year and the birth and the wedding. But I have a feeling you already know. And I am so tired I feel like my bones are made of water and that my eyelids are made of concrete.

I need to say that I hate Vietnam. Lulu’s brother was killed over there. If only I could wish for it to stop. Everything seems to be going crazy—race riots, Martin Luther King, Vietnam, the 10th street hippies and flower girls—and then I look at Ellie and I am overwhelmed with how lucky I am.

Oh, and Redmond had a portrait painted of Ellie and me by the Grande Dame of southern portraits, Miss Kate Edwards. My friends are so jealous. Like I said, I am so lucky.

Maybe my lesson is nothing what I thought it was and I need to learn this: to be happy with what I already have. To be content with what I have and stop yearning and weeping and gnashing my teeth for something I don’t have. Isn’t what I have enough? DO I really think I deserve more???

But this is what loss is—the constant realization that what you thought was possible is not.

So this is the year …

I will learn to be the most perfect mother ever. That’s all I want right now. It is just all I want. I will do everything just right. Exactly right. This I will not mess up.

Twenty

Twenty

That next morning after Rusty left, I stood in the kitchen, Melody Gardot again playing from my iPod, and I saw the gift Rusty had left. I’d forgotten about it. I picked up the small, baby blue box—the Tiffany signature known by every woman, wrapped in a white satin ribbon. I shook it lightly and heard something shimmy inside. I undid the ribbon and allowed it to fall to the table as I lifted the lid. Inside, staring up at me with one accusing, sad eye, was a single, at least three-carat diamond atop a platinum band.

I still wore the engagement ring Rusty gave me—it was a simple one-carat diamond set onto a gold band. He’d asked me many times, as had my friends, if I wanted an “upgrade.” I’d always said I did not, that I liked my ring: a promise made. There was no note or letter with this new diamond, and I could only believe that he’d had a speech about recommitment and promises.

I sat on the ladder-back chair and lifted the ring from the velvet. He loves me, I thought. I am so mean and cold, and he loves me.

Then I said it out loud: “He loves me.”