Sharkey had a child’s impatience, a need for news, the mildly cranky are-we-there-yet? sigh of frustration. She knew his hatred of waiting, yet with his harping on the fact that the world was overpopulated—“man is an invasive species”—it seemed odd to her that he clung so fiercely to the notion of having a child of his own. Maybe his age was a factor, the realization that he could have an heir, someone to carry on in his name. He was protective of her because the child was within her, and at times he was so single-minded about the baby she had to remind him that she was only in her second month—there were months more. She knew she didn’t look pregnant, and were it not for the bouts of nausea and sleeplessness she would have paid no attention.

Yet he talked of little else. He still surfed when conditions were favorable, and always begged her to come with him, something new for him. Or was it that his memory was faulty, that he could not remember that he’d asked and been turned down? She sometimes regretted that she’d broken the news of the baby so soon; but he had to know, because it was his too, and if he had objected, or lectured her, she might have considered a termination. She didn’t want to raise a child alone—that she imagined to be a lonely and difficult road, in spite of what girlfriends, being brave, telling her what she was missing, had said to her. But to raise a child with Joe Sharkey—that would be an adventure. His enthusiasm now was a pleasant foretaste of what his involvement would be, like those parents of surfers who stood on the beach during the Triple Crown, screaming at their kids in the lineup, hugging them when they came ashore. Sharkey had always shaken his head at them—“My mother never did that for me”—but now he promised to be one of them, while the child, months from being born, was smaller than a peanut in her womb.

“You’re happy,” she said, grateful for his mood but still suspicious.

“Totally stoked.” His pride in his potency was unmistakable.

“This is good for both of us.”

“For the three of us,” he said, his hand on her belly.