They say a pregnant woman looks radiant. Lynn went around for two weeks, agitated and angry and with an upset stomach, but she really did look radiant—it was like a cosmetics expert had done something to her face. Her cheeks were flushed all day, and her eyes were as bright as green candy. I can’t explain the difference. I kept catching myself staring. For those two weeks she was nauseous and pissed off. Added to that, I was still in training for my job, we were not married or engaged or anything, and Lynn really didn’t know, ha-ha, was she maybe ready to be a mother? Maybe she wasn’t and maybe she was. Is twenty-two too young? She toyed with the idea while lolling around in the bath, conditioning her hair. Well, I knew. I’m sure. Please ask me.

Out the window now the sun is setting. It’s the summer of 1995. I see Lynn is crouched between the vegetables, picking peas and pulling up weeds.

This garden is a pretty thought—it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever done. We have snap peas growing along one row. I read in the paper that they like to climb, so I built a trellis beside the row, crisscross lattice-wood slats, about two feet tall. I painted it white. We have eggplants, squash, tomatoes, and yellow flowers, and next year we’ll plant tubers. When I hate Lynn, or when I can’t stand to look at her or be near her, when I feel putrid, when I wish God would just erase me, I look at the garden. When she gets angry or yells about something terrible I did and we’re fighting, I look out the window at that thing we made, the garden, at the lawn when it’s been mowed and raked and looks like a putting green, cool and flat and smells sweet. You want to lie down on it and tear the grass up with your hands. Sometimes I think I’m just about ready to kill her.

How come I never do what I’m supposed to do? How come everything I do is such a fucking disaster? Doesn’t anybody get what they want? And that line of hers about how she might want to have it. She came out of the bathtub with a towel on her head, fluffing her hair. “Honey,” she said. She never called me “Honey” before in her life. “Honey, I’ve been thinking about our child.” I could feel all the blood draining from my head. White flecks on the edges of my vision. There was a narrow window of opportunity there, before I calmed myself, where different pictures whizzed into my mind. Blood, knives, handcuffs, that sort of thing. I told her, You have it alone, honey darling, in your own purple dream world—I’ll be in Australia by the time the thing comes out.