“It’s scary having kids in this climate,” she says, without turning her head, speaking out into the city. “And I mean literal climate. One of my clients, she’s a professor at Columbia. She told me it’ll all be over in 2050. It gets hotter. The glaciers melt. The Amazon collapses. We all die in droughts and wildfires and floods and from each other. Nuclear war, like some science fiction book.” She shakes her glass lightly. “I don’t think I’d have had kids if I knew all that was on the table. You and me, we’ll be old, or old enough. They’ll just be starting their lives. How sick is that? How sick are we to continue breeding when all that shit is just ahead, on the horizon?”

I nod. “A lot of my friends won’t have kids for the same reason. I probably won’t have any. You’re right. What’s the point? It’s doing them a disservice, like we’re punishing them for our own selfish need to become parents.” Acquiescence is easiest if I want her to like me, I’ve decided. I don’t say that a sliver of me is jealous of Gabby, that she has these two little people who love her unconditionally. Who fight for her attention the moment she’s home.

Out on the street, a car alarm goes off, and we wait for it to die down. She rolls her eyes at me, a gesture of solidarity as the ringing continues on and on until finally, thank God, it stops. “I wish we didn’t live like this. My childhood was bad, but at least we weren’t all waiting for the world to end.” She grabs the bottle by its neck and pours more into my glass before helping herself. “You were silver-spooned, though? Big house and new clothes and Mommy and Daddy always home to bathe you, tuck you in?” She says it matter-of-factly, like pointing out the label on a juice box or commenting on the weather. Though it throws me, I remember what Anneliese said, about how Gabriella felt abandoned.

“Yeah, I had a pretty good childhood. Can’t help but thank Anneliese for a little bit of that, though.”

“She’s great with my kids, too. Well, obviously you know that. They don’t make a peep when she’s around. Some kind of iron grip shit, who knows. She even learned how to do their hair right the first day she moved here. I mean, that should be a given for any caregiver of Black kids, but it touched me, you know? That very first day, she went to this Black salon on 30th Avenue and got a lesson from the women there.” She takes a sip of wine, then another.