“You need all us straight squares just to exist,” Adam said. “Without us you couldn’t do your thing at all. We feed you, pal, and make your clothes and the houses you live in. We put the things in the cans you buy when you sell enough flowers and posters to buy cans, and we deliver the fuel oil that keeps your pads warm during the winter. We make you well when you screw up the fine bodies God gave you.” He looked at Ralphie and smiled. “Anyhow, if we all became like you, you’d want to be something else. You couldn’t stand being like the rest of us.”

“That’s guano, man.”

“Then why the hell are you sitting like that, way up there like a high guru looking down at the world?”

“This is the way I like to sit. It doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“It hurts Gaby and me,” Adam said. “Your shoes have made a mess of the seat of our chair.”

“Don’t psych me,” Ralphie said. “I can turn that thing right around. You’re a real aggressive cat, you know? You’d probably be working as a butcher instead of a surgeon, taking out all your aggressions sticking knives into cows instead of people, if you hadn’t had wealthy parents to send you to college and medical school. Ever think of that?”

Gaby and Adam had been unable to control their laughter, nor did they attempt to explain it.

Janet never brought the other diggers back or came again herself in the evening, but she continued to drop in occasionally for morning coffee. She was sitting on the couch one day when nausea drove Gaby from the room. When finally she returned, white-faced and apologetic, Janet looked at her with a face like Mona Lisa. “Are you preggers?”

“No.”

“I am.”

Gaby gazed at the girl and then spoke very carefully.

“Are you sure, Janet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Let the family raise it.”

“Like Midge?”

The girl looked at her coldly. “My real family. Here on Joy Street. Everybody will be its parents. We think that will be lovely.”

The conversation haunted her. Would Carl be the child’s father? Or Ralphie? Or a more frightening thought: Did Janet know who the father really was?

Of one thing she was sure. The girl would need medical care, starting immediately. When she spoke to Adam, he closed his eyes and shook his head. “Damn. Somebody didn’t know how to do his thing.”

“We’re hardly in a position to make remarks like that.”

“You don’t see any difference?” he asked her.

She wilted. “Oh, Adam, of course I do. But I won’t sleep nights unless we do something for that little fool. Shall we tell Dorothy?”