I only chimed it once.

“What do you need?” she said. She smoothed my hair. “You want some ice?”

I shook my head. I just wanted her to stay.

I stopped at the bathroom in the Lovelock bus depot, full of the clotted smell of week-old urine. The walls were covered with phone numbers and scraps of slang. Some I couldn’t even understand: Jenny Razormouthed My Squad Car. I’d felt my period on the bus, a warm wet seeping. Lucy claimed that all the women in our family knew it deep down before they started bleeding, but she never said “bleeding,” only “it” or “that way.”

Turned out my underwear was bleach-white. Which was funny because I’d been waiting for a couple weeks. I wasn’t worried about getting knocked up, I’d had years of sex and nothing to show for it. But now I was waiting. I kept waiting for weeks, started throwing up nearly every day. I drank mint tea even though it was so fucking hot because it was the only thing that kept my stomach quiet. I finally bought a store test, not as fancy as the ones they sell now. The tiny pink cross was like the neon sign of a highway church. I pictured the fetuses I’d seen on television. Their skin glowed like dawn was breaking behind them.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the bus driver. His fat smooth skin had made me want to touch it; his big fingers; that little bell. His eyes had been dark like television screens. This was all I had in the night: the big ghost of a bus driver behind my eyelids, the shabby kindness of a perfect stranger.

When I told Fiona, she gave me a big smile and then ashed over the arm of her dirty yellow recliner. “We’ll celebrate,” she said. “You’ll buy champagne.” Her voice was flat, but I was glad for the permission. I couldn’t imagine an entire pregnancy without getting drunk. But here she was, saying, Tonight, at least, we can have this.

At the grocery store, I got pink champagne wrapped in cellophane, a big log of raspberry coffee cake, a whole rotisserie chicken in mashed gold foil. Watch that junk, Lucy would have said. You’re eating everything your little baby will be made of.

We curled together on the love seat and picked chunks of cake with our fingers. We fed each other, our bodies so snug we forgot about them. We were weightless and warm. Fiona drank so much she fell asleep. She was too big to get tipsy, but when her blood got drunk, she was done, out cold. Snores so big they wobbled her whole body.