“Next month.”

“Early or late?”

“Late.”

I said, “Okay. I have a few things I need to work out before then. That’ll probably be the next job I take.”

She joked and asked me, “What if I got an offer for you for a hundred thousand dollars for next week?”

“I’ll be there next week,” I joked back to her. I had never been paid that much money for one job. There were very few male supermodels in that six-figure range. Women had a lot more designer clothes, magazines, runway shows, and opportunities to make that kind of money, but the most I ever made in one pop was a seventy-five-thousand-dollar weekend years ago in the prime of my career. That was when Andrea was around.

I said, “Anyway, you can book me for Houston. But I was actually calling you for something else.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“Well, I know you can’t talk to me about it while you’re still at the office, but I wanted to have another conversation with you about the whole baby situation. I just wanted to talk to you about it.”

She said, “Oh, well, we’ll talk. Yeah, I’ll call you up later about that.”

“That’s what I figured,” I told her. “And you can call anytime. I’ll be here.”

“Just kicking back today, hunh?”

I mumbled, “Yeah, I need to.”

“All right, well, I’ll call you later then.”

I hung up with Kim and thought about calling Juanita at her job as well, just so I could get her mind right for a conversation that night. But when you are a manager in a department store, unless there was no one in the building, you seemed to be pretty busy working out all of the sales problems. It was hard to imagine my sister being the problem solver from what I knew about her personal life, that was for sure.

I was anxious to talk to her about my situation, in code language of course, so I went ahead and gave her a ring to set it up for later.

As soon as my sister answered her cell phone, she said, “You know I’m at the job, right?”

“Yeah, I just wanted you to know that I’ll be calling you later on to talk to you,” I told her.

She immediately jumped to conclusions concerning the purpose of my phone call. “Yeah, well, I’m leaning toward doing what you said now, but I’ll talk to you about it later.”

She was referring to getting an abortion, and she sounded positive about it.

I asked her, “You are?” That surprised me. I guess I wasn’t thinking about it anymore. If Michelle could have a child on her own, then why couldn’t my sister? Then again, those two women were miles apart in personality. Michelle was organized in every way to handle raising a child by herself, but Juanita…Maybe having a child without help would force her to make changes, but I doubted it. My sister never had a problem when it came to leaning on her family, and I didn’t expect her to shy away from that anytime soon.