All that I have lost. But—what is it I have lost?

Even if she were still drinking, Juliana reasons, she’d have stopped by now. Since learning she was pregnant. She’d have stopped on the very day she’d found out.

The pregnancy is still something of a shock to her. When she wakes in the morning and the realization sweeps over her. As if in her dreams there is no pregnancy, her body remains a girl’s body, untouched.

Waking, she is stunned to realize her situation. Her condition. Not an idea, a physical fact. On the calendar there is marked the (probable) due date—July of next year …

So far away! Juliana feels a touch of panic that she will not be able to bring this pregnancy to term. Already she has found out, no reason except wishing to know, mere curiosity, how late in a pregnancy a woman can safely have an abortion.

She hasn’t yet given much thought to childbirth, to an (actual) infant she will be nursing. She has thought fancifully of the upstairs room in the house on Mill Street, which she and Patrick will convert into a nursery.

At less than six weeks it’s too early to determine the sex of the baby. An ultrasound has been scheduled for Juliana’s eighteenth week. They will postpone painting the nursery walls—rosy pink for a little girl, sailor-blue for a little boy.

Since the pregnancy, there has been a renewed energy in their life together. Focus, Patrick has said happily. All lives require focus.

Each commutes to work, but in contrary directions. Juliana hasn’t yet given much thought to what she will do after the baby is born, in what ways her life will be altered.

She hasn’t informed her employers, not just yet. Possibly next week.

The Delaware River is the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In this former mill town on the river a young couple can afford a down payment on a renovated row house (originally built in 1922).

Thrift-shop furnishings, wallpaper bought at a discount. An overgrown backyard they’d cleared of debris—children’s broken toys, rotted lumber, even a pair of thigh-high fisherman’s boots. It would be a forty-minute drive from this house to the Wild Goose Tavern, the Shamrock Inn. The Black Rooster, across the river in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is slightly closer.

Since she moved to the former mill town on the Delaware River, Juliana has not returned to these taverns. Not since meeting Patrick.

Since she has ceased drinking, Juliana has lost interest in bars, taverns, cafés. Though, admittedly, the sight of neon is a strong attraction.

Especially, Juliana would never drive to the Black Rooster alone, without a companion.

Solitary women seem to be more at risk now than they’d been when Juliana was in her early twenties. Risks she’d taken walking alone late at night, those nights she’d returned at midnight from the Mon ey Bar, she would never take now.

Has the world changed, Juliana wonders. Or has her perception of the world changed.