“Belle used to hate all that stuff. She was way too much of a realist for it. We once got into a fight because I took her to get her tarot read. This was when we were young. We weren’t making any money, and she felt scammed.” Nance chews her piece of cheese thoughtfully, gracelessly, her mouth moving like a cow’s. “Come to think of it, she was probably right about all of it. No one ever said my best friend would die so young. And I’ve been to my fair share of psychics.” With that, Nance leaves, taking the block of cheese with her, not even waiting for Annie’s answer, as if she’d been talking to the wall.

But her words echo around Annie’s head, bouncing off the steam still rising from her mug of tea. You’ll be a great mother someday. Not someday. Now. She’d make a great mother now.

Four years ago, in February 1993, a couple months after she had stopped seeing the boy from the ice cream parlor, Annie had thrown up murky green sludge three mornings in a row. She bought a pregnancy test, peed on it at a Wendy’s, and threw it out there, covering the stick with so many scratchy brown paper towels that she used the whole roll. By her own calculation, she was due in September.

It never even crossed her mind to have an abortion, hypnotized perhaps by the legacy of her Catholic grandmother, whose book of recipes she always cooked from.

She wore sweatpants, heavy sweaters. She didn’t feel like explaining anything quite yet. It was winter. It should have been easy. One day, though, the furnace in the house went haywire. The electrician couldn’t come until the morning. The temperature crept up to ninety-five degrees. Her siblings were out of the house, in the snow. Annie, in charge of cooking dinner, felt herself slip, her eyes roll back, her legs, slick with sweat, wobble and almost slide out from under her as she stood over the stove.

So she took off her sweater. And her father, in one cataclysmic moment, hobbled his way into the kitchen to stick his head in the freezer.

He noticed her tiny bump right away. Annie had always been skinny. They’d called her Chicken Legs when she was a kid. Even at three months she was showing.

He shook his head, resigned rather than angry. “Of course,” he said more to himself than to her after glancing at her stomach. Then he’d taken a frozen lamb chop to hold against his perspiring forehead and a beer and headed back to the TV.

Annie was sixteen. She didn’t care what her father thought of her. But she hated the idea of being a cliché. She still had some fight left in her, a desire to leave anything associated with her bloodline behind.