When the man was finished packing me with cotton, he told me to sit up and handed me a container of brown pills. I should remove the rubber tube before tomorrow evening, he said, but I needed to take the first penicillin right away, even though it would be a few hours before anything started. “What happens now?” I wanted to know. “Now you go home,” he told me. “And on your way, if someone asks what’s wrong, you tell them you had too much to drink.” He pulled a stick of rouge from his pocket and rubbed it on my cheeks. “So you won’t look so pale,” he said.

I was worried I’d stain the seat, so I sat on my coat for the taxi ride home. The pain wasn’t too bad, and I hoped that having given birth once might somehow spare me the worst of it. The driver kept looking at me but didn’t say anything. I wondered how many pale, silent women he’d picked up from that corner. When I thought of the words “make the baby come out at home,” I kept picturing that cuff link lying on the floor.

As I rode home with my legs crossed, sitting on a coat I couldn’t afford to replace, I wondered how you and I would begin our new life. I was scared, and I was sad—for you, for Ken, for me, and for the family that couldn’t be—but I was also relieved. Does that make you angry, Squirrel? Or does it help you to understand?