Studying me on the examining table from where she sat on the rolling stool, her purse on her lap, she wore a look on her face that I had never seen before. When one is fourteen years old, it is really something to see a brand-new look on one’s mother’s face. That blankness, I know now, is the expression she wears when she has so many emotions she doesn’t dare let a single one show. I give her credit for that. She was as strong as I had ever seen her. But that was because she didn’t know what I was thinking.

As we got in the car together that day, I thought about Sunday school. I thought about what Mrs. Applegate said about God’s will, about how he’s always telling us what we need to know if we’ll just be still and listen. God was sending me a message now.

“How about some ice cream?” Mom asked.

“Okay,” I said. I turned up the radio. I was trying to act nonchalant, like the news didn’t faze me.

Mom turned to me as she pulled out of the parking lot. “You can always adopt, you know.”

I looked at her then and, without so much as a crack in my voice, I let the dream—the certainty, the platitude—that I would have children one day fly out the sunroof as I opened it. “You know, Mom, I think maybe this is a sign. I’m just not meant to be a mother.”

I knew the look she gave me then. Shock. Dismay. Disappointment. Those were looks with which I was well acquainted. She patted my hand. “It has been a big day, darlin’. And you are only fourteen, after all. You have plenty of time to decide.”

The cold of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard helped to numb my pain. When we got home, I walked straight upstairs, my mom calling, “I’m here if you need to talk.” But I didn’t need to talk. I needed to act. I needed to plot a new course. The first step? Pulling the giant Rubbermaid container of baby dolls, the Madame Alexanders and American Girls, the ones I’d been saving for my daughter, out from underneath the bed. I dragged them out, let the container drop, with a thud, step by step by step, down the stairs, and put them in the closet by the back door. That closet held all the things we never wanted to see again, which The Salvation Army dropped by four times a year to collect. By next month, all my dolls would be gone. I closed the door, brushed my hands off, and turned back upstairs.

Needing to take my mind off of the day, I opened the Vanity Fair magazine that Mom had left on my dresser. She always left her magazines for me, but I rarely read them. I was surprised to find myself lost in the pages, in the stories of Hollywood glamour, presidential scandal, the loss of a golden couple.