It has been largely unspoken between Patrick and Juliana, they will be married if/when she becomes pregnant. They are deeply in love—(at least Patrick thinks so)—and Patrick wants children, he has said. And Juliana too, of course Juliana wants children. She has heard herself say.

Marrying is only logical, practical. Neither is so young—Juliana is twenty-nine, Patrick thirty-one. Juliana thinks of thirty as a kind of waterfall: once you plunge over those falls, you are gone. On your way to gone. Badly she wants the firmness, the security of marriage. Knowing that as you descend a flight of steps, each step is firm, will hold your weight and not collapse beneath it.

The next step in their lives, indeed. As moving into a ruin of a town house was the next step. Debris they’d swept from the upstairs rooms, down the steep staircase in a flurry of dust that set them sneezing, laughing. Stained tumorous wallpaper they’d stripped and flung into piles peaked like tents. Tearing up faded and filthy linoleum in the kitchen. Dangling electrical cords, broken wall switches, hardwood floors looking as if someone had dragged barbed wire across them. A kind of madness had come over them, a fever to strip the house of its former tenants, who’d let the property lapse into such decay that a practically penniless young couple could acquire it with a loan from relatives and a mortgage.

Watch us! We own this.

Last winter she’d ceased using birth control. Must be, then, she tells herself, she wants a child. Since she has given up drinking, she has been so lonely, it’s a loneliness that begins in the mouth, a terrible thirst and a hunger, of which it is impossible to speak to anyone who doesn’t understand.

It isn’t that you yearn for a child, nor even to be pregnant, but to accomplish a feat small enough to have been accomplished by so many without effort at all through the millennia—in short, the history of the world: increase and multiply.

It’s not quite six o’clock. She is not late returning home, will not be late for another hour at least. And if Patrick is not back, she will not be late until he is there, in the kitchen, preparing the evening meal, always something of an improvisation, a joint project that has become a nightly ritual: rich Italian sauces, special olive oil, capers, fine-cut onions, fresh tomatoes, fresh-made pasta from the Italian food store.

Blue Moon Café. All neon by night is exciting to Juliana, but blue neon most.

The earliest neon in Juliana’s life. When she’d been a young girl.

That café, too: Blue Moon.

Ridiculous, of course. Juliana isn’t a sentimental person, Juliana knows better.