stopped. Kora knew her so well. Was there something she wasn’t seeing that her best friend could?
“We’ve always done everything together,” Kora said now. “Can you tell me that you aren’t suddenly feeling this acute need to get pregnant because you know Danny and I are trying?”
Yes.
No.
She couldn’t.
Kora was at least partially right. The acuteness of her desire to do this, the fact that she didn’t want to wait, might be because Kora was getting pregnant. Because they’d always said they’d raise their children together. Because she didn’t want to be left behind.
But the choice to have a child alone? That was Bailey’s true choice.
Wasn’t it?
* * *
I wasn’t just sitting around that whole summer trying to get pregnant and fighting my best friend’s attempt to—as I saw it—sabotage her life. I wasn’t focused all day long on changing Bailey’s mind about artificial insemination. Nor had I tried to set her up with Jake or any of the other eligible men Danny and I knew.
I was working on lesson plans for the next school year, making colorful bulletin board displays to accompany the upcoming major events over the next year, incorporating specific lessons into them. I painted our bedroom and the living room. Tried out new recipes for quick and easy meals that would come in handy when school was back in session.
I attended Thursday night fitness class religiously, and hoarded whatever other time I could get with Bailey. I drove in to meet her for lunch a few days a week—the days Danny had business lunches. She and I spent an entire Saturday at a new outlet mall, went to a couple of movies and she joined us for a Fourth of July barbecue at my folks’ house.
I had hot sex with my husband, went out on the town with him, both of us skipping the alcohol because I’d read that it could inhibit fertilization, attended several major league baseball games, enjoying the box seats his company had provided for us, and saw my parents and his mom, every chance we got.
And twice I drove by the small house rented by Mary Ephrain’s mother. I’d looked the address up online and could see from public records that it was a rental. I could see the landlord’s information.
The house had two bedrooms and at least one mother with three kids living in it. Mary’s older brother had been a student of mine in my first year of teaching and I knew there was another sister, younger than Mary.
The first time I drove by no one was home. I’d hoped that Mary had been off to visit grandparents for the summer. Or was on vacation at the beach. Both things I might have been doing had I been her age.
But spending the summer with grandparents and taking vacations at the beach didn’t usually produce troublemaking nine-year-old girls who asked their teachers if they could see them over the summer.
That last Tuesday morning in July, three weeks before school was due to start, and only two weeks before I was due back in my classroom, I saw lights on at the dingy little rental set in the middle of a block of similar houses. Pulling my Ford Mustang to the curb between an old mattress and what looked to be part of a bumper, I stepped slowly out.
I was glancing around, trying to take in a three-sixty while appearing perfectly calm and comfortable, all the while telling myself that nine-year-old Mary walked these streets every day. And if she could do it, I certainly could.
It wasn’t defaced with graffiti. There weren’t obvious criminals or gang members hanging out, leaning against trees. Scoring drugs.
A young mother walked a baby in a stroller across the street. Further down, a couple of preschoolers played on a porch that was blocked off with makeshift baby gates.
I could hear someone screaming.
The air smelled like stale onions.
With my mace key fob clutched firmly in one hand, I started up the walk. I probably should have texted Danny, told him what I was doing. But I already knew what he would’ve said.
Don’t. If you’re concerned, call the authorities.
I didn’t want to call the authorities. Not yet, anyway. I’d met Mary’s mother, who clearly loved her children and had been willing to do whatever it took to keep Mary in my class, despite the child’s problem behavior. It was also clear that she was doing whatever she could to hold her family together. I saw potential in the little girl, too, who got straight As when she applied herself. Mary’s older brother had been a conscientious child—old before his years, watchful of the other kids in class, too quiet maybe, but nice.
All the indications were that the family didn’t have it easy.
Having social services poking around might just tear the family apart. I raised my hand to knock and stepped back as the door opened before I made contact.
“Can I help you?” A man stood there, in (or wearing)black shorts and a short-sleeved denim shirt that hung over his waistband. He was clean shaven, with a mustache, and his hair flopped over his forehead above eyes that were peering at me suspiciously.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Ephrain,” I said, glad I’d worn my oldest jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. At the moment, the last thing I wanted was to be taken for someone there in an official capacity.
Maybe I should have listened to Danny, telling me not to come. Well, if I’d actually told him I was coming. Or told anyone where I’d be...
“She’s busy. What do you want with her?”
The man didn’t raise his voice. There was nothing overtly menacing about his face. Still, I was...uncomfortable.
I tried to peer past him anyway. Like maybe I’d see Mary peeking around the corner, or her mother or brother in the background. “I actually just came by to say hi,” I improvised. “Are you Mr. Ephrain?”
“I’m Bud Lenowski,” he said.
I wanted to ask if he lived there. But I couldn’t figure out a way to do it without sounding like I was checking up on him. Why that mattered I wasn’t sure yet, but I knew it did.
“My name’s Koralynn,” I said, totally flying by the seat of my pants. “Would you tell Liza I stopped by?” Mrs. Ephrain and I had never addressed each other by our first names. Thank God I remembered hers from Mary’s records.
“I’ll tell her,” the man said and shut the door in my face.
* * *
Bailey was in one of the smaller conference rooms when Diane, the middle-aged receptionist at Mayer and Mayer, buzzed to let her know that Koralynn was in the lobby.
The difficult session she was in—a pretrial conference with opposing counsel, during which she’d hoped to work out an agreement allowing her client, the young mother of two, to move across state lines to be close to her parents, who wanted to watch the children for her while she finished her college degree—wasn’t going well. The soon-to-be-ex-husband had not kept a single one of his visitation appointments since leaving his wife for another woman three months before. But was blocking her at every turn as she tried to get on with
