“But whose is it?” That was the question, once her period was three weeks late and she was waking up nauseated. “Who did you make love to at the right time?” He was shouting over the pay phone beside a highway, straining to hear, his finger poked into one ear and clouds of last winter’s salt and sand, pulverized by rushing tires to a fine dust, billowing into his face. He said “make love” instead of their usual frank verb as if a telephone operator, that obsolete eavesdropper on village life, were listening.

“Neither of you,” came the faint answer.

“Oh my God. You’ve been seeing somebody else?”

“No, no, you silly. I mean it could be either of you, but I don’t see how. The Pill was making me feel bloated, so I went back to the rhythm method, but Ian and I used it successfully for years before he let me have Norman. He said he was an artist and children were hostages to fortune.”

“It must be me,” Owen said gamely, “the great way we fucked.”

“Darling, it doesn’t take great to make a baby. If it did the population crisis would be no problem.”

“I’d rather believe, of course, it was Ian. I thought you said he was impotent.” This was a slip: he remembered that it was Phyllis who had said it.

“Did I say that? I may have said he was discouraged. But he’s only forty-three, he’s not ancient.”

“Don’t tell me about it,” Owen begged. It was repulsive. Her blood, Ian’s semen, his own. His insides were feeling watery; he was on the edge of the doom that waits, bottomless, where the skin of the humdrum tears. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What do you want me to do?” He had to repeat the question; an eighteen-wheeler had been roaring past.

“Can you get an abortion?” he shouted, there by the dirty highway.

“I don’t see how,” came the faint answer. “How would I explain it to Ian? He knows about my period already. Where would I go without telling him?” Her faintness was increasing; she was getting smaller, sinking down into the transparent depths, away from him, forever away. “Owen, I’m going to have the baby,” she called. “We must never see each other again.”