And the truth was, she didn’t mind any of it, not really: not the being pregnant, which was easy right until the end, nor the delivery itself, which was bad but fast, nor, especially, having a baby, her little Amy. To tell Jeanette he’d decided to forgive her, her father had done up her brother’s old bedroom as a nursery, carried down the old baby crib from the attic, the one Jeanette herself had slept in, years ago; he’d gone with Jeanette, in the last months before Amy came, to the Walmart to pick out some things she’d need, like pajamas and a little plastic tub and a wind-up mobile to hang over the crib. He’d read a book that said that babies needed things like that, things to look at so their little brains would turn on and begin to work properly. From the start Jeanette always thought of the baby as “her,” because in her heart she wanted a girl, but she knew that wasn’t the sort of thing you should say to anyone, not even to yourself. She’d had a scan at the hospital over in Cedar Falls and asked the woman, a lady in a flowered smock who was running the little plastic paddle over Jeanette’s stomach, if she could tell which it was; but the woman laughed, looking at the pictures on the TV of Jeanette’s baby, sleeping away inside her, and said, Hon, this baby’s shy. Sometimes you can tell and others you can’t, and this is one of those times. So Jeanette didn’t know, which she decided was fine with her, and after she and her father had emptied out her brother’s room and taken down his old pennants and posters—Jose Canseco, a music group called Killer Picnic, the Bud Girls—and seen how faded and banged up the walls were, they painted it a color the label on the can called “Dreamtime,” which somehow was both pink and blue at once—good whatever the baby turned out to be. Her father hung a wallpaper border along the edge of the ceiling, a repeating pattern of ducks splashing in a puddle, and cleaned up an old maple rocking chair he’d found at the auction hall, so that when Jeanette brought the baby home, she’d have a place to sit and hold her.

The baby came in summer, the girl she’d wanted and named Amy Harper Bellafonte; there seemed no point in using the name Reynolds, the last name of a man Jeanette guessed she’d never see again and, now that Amy was here, no longer wanted to. And Bellafonte: you couldn’t do better than a name like that. It meant “beautiful fountain,” and that’s what Amy was. Jeanette fed and rocked and changed her, and when Amy cried in the middle of the night because she was wet or hungry or didn’t like the dark, Jeanette stumbled down the hall to her room, no matter what the hour was or how tired she felt from working at the Box, to pick her up and tell her she was there, she would always be there, you cry and I’ll come running, that’s a deal between us, you and me, forever and ever, my little Amy Harper Bellafonte. And she would hold and rock her until dawn began to pale the window shades and she could hear birds singing in the branches of the trees outside.