I admit it:  I’ve never been dull.  There was the time I accepted that art award in college, for my abstract rendering of a blind O’Keeffe fondling stones (gray-pastel chalk), and wore, to accept the award, a Laura Ashley dress, the pink-and-blue one that reminded me of a cloud, above shit-kicking Doc Martens.  You could hear the steel toes striking the stage as I crossed, hands behind my back.  My mother said it then, after the audience laughed and I returned, grinning, to my seat:  “You just can’t be ordinary, can you?”

     Of course I didn’t respond though she was mortified, wouldn’t look at me then or later at our small, celebratory dinner with Dad, where both of them kept muttering about my “seven-league boots.”

   I mean, shit.   What did she want me to say?

    But even I have to acknowledge that the gun on the mantel’s too much.  My husband’s left it there, as, he says, a reminder of “the awful violence that exists in the world all around us.”  How to tell him that I don’t need the reminder?  Especially when I have to live with him everyday?  Stepping over the blue-and-gold Budweiser boxes that furnish our living room like--well--furniture?

   Fact:  I’m thirty-nine.  My breasts are succumbing to a slow but inevitable sag; if I crane my neck, look behind me in the mirror, I can see that my buttocks droop a little, too.  So it’s really time to do this thing.  I have two cravings in life:  one for a kid, another for adventure, neither of which the husband--Jack--has been willing to satisfy.

   The child, I know, will be a struggle.  Even though I have her earmarked:  Maya Baylor, born nine months ago in Saint Elizabeth’s hospital, Lincoln, Nebraska, at 6:10 p.m., after the portly Mrs. Baylor (AKA “Tina”) screamed about cutting off the father’s testicles and then, thanking the Lord, delivered that beautiful baby girl.

    How do I know this?

    Mrs. Baylor told me.

    We’re neighbors.  She lives down the street.

   And Jessica’s going to help me fulfill both my life dreams.

    Jessica’s been friends with me since high school.  You have to count it as a major act of luck when you actually never get separated from your best friend, when--in fact--she lives three blocks away.  So you have to say, at this point, that Jessica and I are a fixture.  Have even developed certain routines to keep us close:  brunch at Village Inn; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery; raucous nights at Tippertone’s, one of the last remaining drive-ins in the Midwest, when Jack’s passed out on the carpet and I need only step over him to escape.

    So last Friday we were sitting in an orange booth at Village Inn when Jessica came up with The Plan.

    She’d ordered the usual:  pancakes with syrup.  And, for me, a slice of French Silk pie.  We were waiting for the waitress to bring our food when Jessica started talking about it. 

    “I’ve been thinking a lot,” Jessica said, tapping her fork against her spoon and looking at the booth top instead of at me, so I knew something big was coming.  “About those dreams of yours.”

   I was sitting in a crack; I readjusted myself, started shredding my napkin.  “The adventure dream? Or the baby one?”

    “Both.  And...I think I have a solution.”

    I went quiet at that.  I should have been excited, I guess, that Jessica was pondering the problem.  But lately, some part of me had gone numb, snapped off quietly in the night when Jack was reading a creased paperback in bed and--unbeknownst to him--I was circling the living room because I couldn’t shut my brain off anymore.

    I knew that I should leave him.

    But I could never work up the nerve.

    He’d been good to me, Jack had, when he wasn’t drinking.

    “I think we should run away together,” Jessica said.  “Get us a job.  And then--get you a baby.”

    “A job,” I said.  “I don’t need a job to make me happy.  And as for the baby....I’m infertile, you know.  And Jack doesn’t want kids.”

    “That’s not what I mean,” Jessica said, and speared some pancake on her fork.  “Maya,” she said.  “I mean Maya,” and chewed moodily, staring me into silence.

                                                                       ****

     She gave me a tape to watch.  Some HBO documentary.  I studied those women for a while, in between sloshing hot water and dish soap and picking up the Kleenex Jack’d left on the floor when he was done with his latest drunk and had to hack up all that phlegm. I always kept the blinds pulled.  I didn’t want the neighbors to see him…didn’t want them to see me.  It wasn’t that I’d let myself go so much, though I’d packed on a few pounds.  It was more that, like a vampire searching for her reflection in her mirror, I’d disappeared.

    So I sat in a Lotus on the living-room carpet, ate red-and-green popcorn out of a bag, and watched the ladies gyrate.  They all had to sit on a tall stool, first, while they talked about their careers, and I’d end up staring at the muscles pulling along their thighs while they flexed their legs in skimpy spangled shorts.  Not all of them were attractive, but makeup--combined with larger than average heads, charismatic--exaggerated their presence, gave it a certain staying power, so they were beautiful in the way a cartoon character is:  larger than life.

    I didn’t feel sorry for them.  Never felt sorry for them.

    Because I was living with Jack.

    “A gun on the mantel,” Jessica was saying, as she tilted the bottle over my scalp, applied a thick dribble of cream.  Coming out of the bottle, it looked jet black, which made me shiver:  I didn’t want to end up looking like Cruella de Vil.

    “Yeah, but it’s not even loaded.”

    “’It’s not even loaded.’”  Jessica smiled, even after mocking me, tried to close the bottle, splashed ebony on her arm.  “Shit.  How d’you handle this stuff?  I’m getting it all over the bathroom.”

    I crossed my legs, rocked back on the toilet, handed Jessica the applicator gloves.  “You’re not supposed to save it.  You’re supposed to throw everything away.  Fucking mess.”

   Jessica tossed the bottle in the wastebasket.  “So what do we do if this doesn’t come out?  Think you’ll shoot down your chances?”

    “No.  I really don’t think they care what you look like.”

    “How can you say that?  You’ll be taking off your clothes.”

    I snorted, tucked the towel up higher around my splattered sweatsuit.

    “Oh, you think they’ll just take anybody then, right?  Well...they wouldn’t take Mrs. Baylor, I can tell you that.”

    “That’s not fair.  She just had a kid.”

    “Not for long,” Jessica said, “not for long,” and wet her own towel under the tap, wiped Loving Care off my neck.

    “Don’t talk like that.  How can you say that?  I bear that woman no ill-will whatsoever.”

    “Oh,” Jessica said, “well, then--I’m sure she’d thank you,” and set the timer for twenty minutes.

                                                                          ****

    The first time I saw Mrs. Baylor with Maya, I was looking at a can of asparagus and fell in love.   I still remember the shock of the asparagus on the label, its scintillating green.  It didn’t matter where they stopped, Mrs. Baylor and her baby, because shit, baby, I was high.  I knew Mrs. Baylor was trying to shed some poundage when she paused by the Morningstar freezer section and loaded up her cart with Veggie Burgers, fake sausage patties, soy Canadian bacon, tossing them in the cart with a single deft wrist flick.  But I still couldn’t see the baby.  I trailed Mrs. Baylor and her progeny to the Blue Bunny yogurt section, through Nabisco crackers, caught up with her, finally, in the bakery.

    A glass dome protected cookies that the bakery served to kiddies.  I knew they served them to rugrats because the sign read, “Children only, please.”

    Mrs. Baylor lingered, studying the baker (his cheeks coated with powder) as he sleepily scratched his neck, opened an industrial-sized oven door, slid a long-handled implement in.

    Quietly Mrs. Baylor lifted the dome, plucked a chocolate-chip cookie out.

    It was time to make my move.

     I approached on cat feet.  Mrs. Baylor was already biting in.  I could see the glint of her nicotined teeth, her gently sagging jowls. Could see the purple shadows beneath her eyes, the mark of a new mother who’s been up too many nights, and my blood surged in a weird pity-rush despite what I wanted, despite what I knew, even then, I planned to try to take from this sad, homely woman, whose baby probably meant more to her than the boyfriend she didn’t have, the lovers she’d never keep.

    She saw me and started.  No twinge of familiarity:  only a vague criminal nervousness.

    “I’m--sorry,” she said.

    “What?” I asked, edging closer.

    The baby was lying down in the front part of the cart.  Dangerous, I thought.  To have her there.  But I couldn’t see her, exactly, just slight, sleepy movements under an oversized pink blanket.

  “I know the cookies are meant for the kids.  It’s just--
“What?” I said, and looked at her.

    “I don’t know,” Mrs. Baylor said, in a rush.  “It’s just that I get so bored, sometimes.  So--”

    I watched her steadily--and then I really felt awful.  Her eyes were puddling up.

    “Look,” I said.  “I don’t think you recognize me.  Mandy Jacobs.  I live down the street.”

    She stared.

     “But I guess you don’t get out much.  I mean...since the baby.”

    “No, that’s true,” Mrs. Baylor said, and laughed.

    “Look,” I said, “do you really need to shop?  We could get out of here, go next door to Target.  I could...buy you a cup of coffee.”

    She was looking at me.  Smiling.  “What’d you say your name was?”

    “Mandy.  Mandy Jacobs.  And--bring your cookie,” I said.

    My heart quickened when she laughed.

    She let me hold her.  That was the most amazing part.  We sat down at one of those plastic orange tables in the cafe area at Target.  Then Mrs. Baylor, smiling, leaned forward and placed that miniscule bundle in my arms.  I stared at her, just for a second, loving this small sign of trust.  Then, fingers trembling, I peeled back the blanket gingerly, gingerly, away from her face.

    “Maya,” Mrs. Baylor said.  “We call her ‘Maya.’  It means--of course!--’hope.’”

    Her skin was as radiant as any I’ve ever seen on a human being.  She glowed, that baby, as if she were radioactive.  Plump cherry lips, dark eyes you could slide inside, those black waters closing like a midnight death over your head.  And yet—such a death would be pleasurable.  I was certain of it.  Nothing about this baby invited anything but rapture.

    “She’s gorgeous,” I said, stroking her cheek.  “Does she--look like her daddy?” I bit my lip.

    Mrs. Baylor, thank God, was slow on the uptake.  “Yes,” she said.  “He’s Armenian.  Since I’m blonde, it’s quite a combination, isn’t it--in the coloring.”

    Then she must’ve seen something in my face she didn’t like.  Because she leaned forward suddenly, scooped Maya out of my arms.  I could feel the absence where she’d been like a vacuum; it took me a second to put my hands back down on the table.

    “Let’s order,” Mrs. Baylor said, casting down her eyes.

    “No, no, you’re a mom now.  Bet you never rest.  Tell me what you want, and I’ll get it for you.  Buy it.”

    She looked up at me then, nodded, loneliness spreading across her face like a map I could read.  A territory I’d visited.

     We drank too much coffee, got a little high.  After my third cup of French Vanilla, I was willing to call it a day.  But I couldn’t stop Mrs. Baylor from wolfing down all those fries.  I could see why she was carrying a wide load, but I couldn’t criticize her without criticizing myself.  Not for the few extra pounds I was carrying, but for my lack of focus since I’d stopped painting.  I used to want to be a great painter.  I was going to help revive realism, as Wyeth had done, restore art to the level of representational detail it had abandoned since Pollock, become a darker second Rembrandt.  And what happened?

   I couldn’t figure it out.

   All I knew was this:  Maya was the only thing I wanted now.

    “Call me ‘Tina,’” Mrs. Baylor said, when I walked her out to her car.  She drove me home in her battered Ford Escort.  Unbuckling Maya from the car seat while I fidgeted, Tina swayed on the sidewalk as if drunk. Seeing my look:  “Coffee gives me the shakes,” she said, and tugged Maya out, carried her inside the house--four houses down from mine.  She waited until I entered, too, then shut the door.

   It took seconds for my eyes to adjust.

   The house was trashed.  Dirty diapers everywhere, a strong stench of urine from the carpet.  Hamburger wrappers, piled-up newspapers, cracker crumbs littering a playpen shoved against one wall.  The TV was on.

    I looked at her and she was cradling the baby against her shoulder.  Tears pooled in her eyes.

   “Tina,” I said.  “Are you...depressed?”

    She nodded, jerkily, gnawing her lip.

    “Where’s your husband?”

    “We’re not married,” she whispered.  “I--made that part up.”

    “It’s o.k.,” I said, patting her shoulder.  “Everything’s o.k. now, because--do you see, Tina?--I’m here.  And I’m going to help you.”

    Gently, very gently, I took Maya away; Mrs. Baylor’s rounded shoulders seemed to sink into themselves.  I carried Maya to the playpen, set her there; Maya looked at me with black eyes, clung chubby-fingered to the mesh.  “It’s all right,” I said, turning back to Mrs. Baylor.  “I’ll take care of everything now.”  It took little effort to steer her, my palm pressed against her back, into the kitchen.

   It was the first of many visits.  Visits I devoted to Maya, rocking her, holding her, though Tina thought I was there only to talk.

    The next night I was sleeping when headlights roused me.  I crawled out of bed, my nightgown clinging to my back, the yellow highbeams pulsing through flimsy curtains.

     Shielding my eyes, I advanced.

     As I stood peering out, the headlights switched off, and I recognized Jessica’s car, her cream-colored Chevy Nova.

    I glanced back at the bed.

    Jack was sleeping on his back, a mass of greasy black hair tangled across his nose, his mouth lifting with phlegmy breaths.

    Wrapping my arms around my breasts, I went outside, crossed the lawn, stood by the car, peered into the passenger side.  Jessica was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.  When she spotted me, she got out.  Both of us stood there shivering under the streetlamp.

   “What’re you doing here?  It’s three in the morning, friend.”

    She hesitated.  Pushed damp hair back from her forehead.  “I don’t know.  I just suddenly thought that--if we’re going to do this thing--well, then, we should do it.”  She looked at me then, her eyes a little filmy.  “I got us an appointment,” she said.  “I mean, an audition.  For a club out in Frisco.”

    I studied her.  Finally, I breathed.  “You’re putting me on.”

    “What.  Didn’t you think we were going to do it?”    “Well, sure.  I mean, I hoped we would.  It’s just that--”

    “No.  Don’t tell me.”

    “I sort of befriended Mrs. Baylor.”

    Jessica sighed.  “Depends on how much you still want the kid.”  She flicked her fingers back at the car.  “I got it all.  Diapers, baby wipes, crackers.  Do you know how to take care of her?”

    “Tina taught me.”

    “Oh, so now it’s ‘Tina.’”

    I glanced at her, the streetlamp imprinting white aureoles on her cheeks.  “I guess that part of me never thought it was quite real.”

    “Long as I’ve known you, you’ve wanted a kid.”

    “Well, I wanted to be an artist, too, but it didn’t work out.”

    “This will,” Jessica said, “this will,” and gripped the top of my head, lowered me into the back seat.

  “I’ve got to leave Jack a note,” I said.

   “Haven’t you ever heard about Chekhov’s gun?” Jessica replied, before she slammed the door.

    I waited till she got in, stared at the dark tangle of her hair back. “Lit class.  High school.  Miss West?  The redhead?”

    “Short skirts.  Hose, yeah.  And freckles--on her knees!”

    Several boys in that class had said they’d liked to eat her—that I remembered.

    “When she told us about Chekhov’s gun.  If the gun’s on the wall in Act I, it’d better go off by Act III.”

    “Hair all over them there walls.”

    “Huh?”

    “Dick and Perry,” I said.  “In Cold Blood, right?  That’s literature, too.”

    But I was glad it was dark.  That she couldn’t see me shiver.  Watching her long white fingers glow by the dashboard light.

                                                                      ****

    We pulled up to an Easy Eight motel in the seediest part of town.  Not a promising start since I’d packed nothing for the trip.  But the familiarity with which Jessica greeted the clerk suggested not only that she’d chosen the motel carefully but that she was intimately familiar with its workings.  While I waited beside the car, Jessica pulled out a Winnie-the-Pooh diaper bag from the trunk and a suitcase she foisted on me.

    “Hey hey hey,” I said, and repositioned it on the gravel.  “This really isn’t a good idea.”

   “What?”

    “The kid.”

   Jessica looked at me.  “You always had pretty big balls before.  No offense.”

    “In my imagination.”

    “Look.  I have it all worked out.  Both these things.  And if you get in there, in the house, and decide you’ve changed your mind, we can just forget about everything.  Capiche?”

    I looked at her.  She was my friend.

    “But we don’t have to do that,” I said.  “I mean kidnap her.”

    “What’re you talking about?”

    “There are other ways to get what we want.”

    We moved into that room as if we owned it, though Jessica assured me we were only paid up for three days.   I’d always had a thing for motels.  When I was tiny, my family’d taken me on a trip to see LA.   Then, we always stayed in a Travelodge, so the symbol of the sleepy-time bear, of wrapped little soaps and long paper strips protecting toilet seats, became a sign of comfort for me, of hope.

    Though I saw it in her eyes.  My mother’s.  The dazed expression she’d turn toward my father when we were supposed to be vacationing.  When he asked her a question about the kids, about the job, and collecting her thoughts became the equivalent of holding a rainbucket out to a searingly blue sky:  nothing could be deposited.

   And, in the Easy Eight with Jessica, it was as if I glanced around at the orange-gold bedspread, the wall-bolted TV, the walls with their English-hunting prints, and saw my mother’s eyes superimposed.  How dark they were.  Quiet and dark, like a brackish pond, and I knew what I had to do.

    So I told Jessica.  I required one hour only for my task.  Jessica looked at me, nodded, played with the remote, searching for HBO, Cinemax, free porn.  Didn’t glance at me again when I grabbed the car keys and left.

   When I got to the house, it was quiet.  I parked the Chevy on the street, walked up the broken cement steps to the house; Tina always left the door unlocked, was one of the last remaining few who held onto the mindset that The world is good; nothing in it can hurt me.

    I walked down the hallway to Maya’s room.  Barney dolls in the hall.  Legos, which hurt my sneakered feet.  Dirty, discarded baby clothes, a rich warm pungency of shit.  I stepped on a urine-soaked diaper, pried it off my foot.  Passed Tina’s room, avoided it for now.   Let her sleep an extra ten minutes or so, I thought.  It’s the kind thing to do.

    A glimmer from Maya’s room.  A nightlight…or her lovely Chernobyl skin?

     I stepped inside.  A sparrow-shaped nightlight shed a soft yellow haze across her onesied body, all fat and half-curled in its crib; her face shone perfectly beautiful when she turned it toward me, her dark eyes fluttering as I scooped her up, sat down in the yellow Windsor rocker next to her crib, rocked her, rocked her, then unbuttoned my shirt, pulled my breast out of its bra cup, held it to her lips, which she took with a small gasp that sent reverberations shuddering through my pubic bone, my clit, though nothing was coming out, I was dry as the Mojave, the expectant murmurs changing to cries, and when I glanced up, passing my hand over Maya’s mouth to calm her, Tina was standing in the doorway, big and rumpled in her nightgown, Tina was studying me with nothing written on her face that I could read, only my mother’s blankness, my mother’s eyes.

   She made tea.  It was what she did, I sensed, when she was worried.    She made tea at the stove, and I sat on a kitchen chair and watched.  The dark crack of her ass visible through the nightgown.  Her brown-gray hair straggling down her back.  I could help her, I thought.  I could help her in so many different ways.

   “The usual?” she asked.

   “Sure, Tina.  Black.”

    I couldn’t be sure.  But I thought she stiffened at my use of her name.

    I watched her hands when they arranged the teacup.  There was no need to speak.  They were fat, those hands, pale as the underbelly of a whale.  But it wasn’t just that they were ugly, but careworn.  I looked at them and saw my mother’s hands.  Pressed to her throat, the fingers, at thirty-five, knotted with arthritis.  The fingers crawling her throat as her other hand twitched a gauze curtain aside and she gazed out at the moon-whitened lawn.

     I felt that I understood my mother, through her hands.  Through her gazing out the window, nights, when she thought we were asleep.  That I understood what her dreams were, and her days, and her fears.

    And now, Tina too.  Tina, through her hands.

    She sat down across from me.  She was naked beneath that big white nightgown, and I was careful not to look. In the tautness of my own muscle, bone, what I desired.  What I craved.

    The other half of my dream.

    We sipped in silence.  The tea was too hot, scalded my tongue. The question hovered between us.  The question she couldn’t ask.  She blew on her tea with gusto, wafted her left hand over the steam.  Lids slightly lowered, I gazed at those fingers and desire knotted up in my chest.  O’Keeffe’s fingers.  I’d painted O’Keeffe’s fingers as a student.  Long, delicate, posed with Kabuki balls.

   I opened my eyes.

   I wasn’t going to let another dream die.

    “Mrs. Baylor,” I said.

    “Tina.”

    I paused.  “Tina,” I said finally.  “You...probably wondered what I was doing in your room.”

    She shook her head no.  Staring into her tea.

     Coward, I thought.

    “You weren’t,” she said, “trying to--”

    “’Course not. It’s just, you see, I never could have any of my own.  So I guess I was--”

    “I understand.  Understand.”  The words couldn’t come fast enough.

    “But you’re overwhelmed,” I said.  “I mean--Tina, look at this house!”

    She glanced up, nodded.

    “That’s why I want to give you a break,” I said.  “Take the baby away, just for a little while.  Give you a vacation.”

    Her cowy, glassy eyes.

    “I have an interview,” I said.  “A job interview in San Francisco.  And I thought I’d take the baby with me, just for a few days.  Just--you know--to give you a break.”

    A pulse point stirred inside her left wrist.  “Oh, no,” she said.  “San Francisco?”

   Then:  “What?”

    “Look.  You know me; you trust me.  Maya and I are the best of friends!  I hope you’re not going to let...what you saw interfere with your getting a little R & R.”

     “Oh, no,” she said.  And in her eyes, I already saw it.  The tiny image, expanding, sharpening, her own big body on a bed, the thick blue covers tucked up to her chin as brilliant white sunlight streamed through the window.

     It was what I’d seen every day of my life, in Momma’s eyes.

     Her “pack of cigarettes” look, Momma called it.

    “Just a few days,” I murmured.  “Just a few days.”

     The glassy eyes brightening. 

    It’s one thing to want a baby, and another thing to figure out what to do with her.  I wasn’t lying:  Maya and I were old friends at this point, but I’d expected more help from Tina initially with packing her up.  It was as if after I’d proposed the idea, Tina couldn’t wait to put it into action.  Drifted cow-slow back to the bed where I was certain she’d pass the next few days.

    So I moved through the darkened house, changing Maya’s diaper while she wiggled on the carpet, feeling the claiming crawl of her fingers along my ankle, locating, in the boot-and-shoe-strewn foyer, her dusty pink jacket where it’d fallen; I propped her there wobbling while I zipped the jacket to her chin, her bright, dark eyes regarding me.

     Maya was a great baby.  It was like she’d never learned how to cry.  Didn’t scream or whisper as I wended the Chevy Nova through the streets, past the parked cars that went brown under the streetlamps, to the Easy Eight motel.  I cradled Maya’s head as I crept up the metal stairs.  And when I got the door open (clasping the baby against my breasts as I fumbled with the key), I discovered Jessica asleep in the battered orange easychair, her long legs in purple sweatpants hooked over the side, her head tossed back, though how she could sleep on the best night of my life was a mystery to me.

    Nevertheless, I knew what to do.  I heated Maya’s formula on the hotplate the motel’d provided.  Tested it against my wrist.  I wasn’t tired, exhausted--I was exhilarated.  I had my baby.  I had my baby, gazing at me with her wide dark eyes pinpricked with yellow light.  I knew I‘d be awake all that night, tending to her needs, and awake the next morning when Jessica roused herself.

    A flashlight.  White-glowing, assaultive.  Playing across my face.

    Beaming itself into my eyes.

    “Jesus.”  I sat up.  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

    She flicked the light off.  “Night of the Living Dead.  Thought I’d never wake you.  Didn’t you hear her cry?”

    “Uh--no.”

   “How late were you up?”

    “Till an hour ago.”  I leaned against the headboard.  The back of my neck burned.   “Did you take care of it?”

    “Yeah.  Fed her oatmeal.”

    “Isn’t she....a little young?”

    “No lumps, dummy.”

    I rose, then, pushed my feet forward to meet slippers that weren’t there, ate cantaloupe at the plywood kitchenette while Maya watched me from Jessica’s bed, and Jessica repacked our suitcase.

    “Let’s leave a little sooner than planned,” she said, and--seeing her tight face, the muscles twitching in one cheek--I nodded.

    It was bright all the way out of the Midwest.  I wasn’t sure we’d installed the car seat right, but Maya seemed content in the back as Jessica and I drove, playing with her fingers, blowing spit bubbles that popped against her chin.  Every hundred miles or so, Jessica herded us out of the Chevy, posed us against a particularly scenic backdrop of rocks, Maya’s head propped against my breasts, her face hidden from view, as some river crawled brown-green below, for--as much as I loved that baby--I didn’t want the pictures to fall into the wrong hands.

   But I wasn’t scared.  Because I felt that I knew Mrs. Baylor, a woman as lost as my own mother had been as she meandered through our house. Though she’d miss Maya at first, after a while, Mrs. Baylor’d be praying we wouldn’t come back. Why?  Because she knew me.  Trusted me.  Understood that Maya would never be harmed.

    It was a chance--seldom granted--to rectify the biggest mistake of her existence.

   We were bound for another motel, though both Jessica and I understood that staying there would be temporary.  A lot depended on whether Joe--the manager of the club--allowed us to stay, gave us both jobs.  As we drove from the wide green plains of Nebraska to the foggy gray shimmering that was San Francisco, I felt the long dream of the Midwest floating away.  It was a road trip, a road trip only.  But I was happy.  Happy enough to buy three yellow legal pads at the U-Stop when Jessica went to get gas.  All the way into the store, I allowed my gaze to rest upon the baby in the backseat.  She was safe with me, safer than she’d been with Tina; I’d kill anyone who tried to take her. Jessica bought twenty-six bucks’ worth of gas; I bought several legal pads and a blunt-tipped, chubby pencil I couldn’t wait to grip, sketching Maya’s fingers as they formed a house, a church, a steeple even before we pulled out, Jessica glancing over and laughing.

   We couldn’t find a sitter, and it wouldn’t’ve been prudent to ask.

    So we schlepped Maya along in the car to our appointment with Joe Mottola at Carmelita’s Baby Dolls.

    Since we couldn’t take her in, each of us agreed to wait for the other in the car.  After Jessica walked in, I stared at the grooved burgundy door that swung closed behind her before slipping into the back seat beside Maya.  Together the two of us watched brown-coated men crack the door open to a glimpse of crimson gloom.  It was a hot day, in the eighties, and I stood up in the back seat, leaned over the driver’s side, flipped the AC to high, and waited, playing with Maya’s fingers, eyeing the men on the sidewalk as if they could bring me harm though what they wanted wasn’t unfamiliar; I was determined to love them, I was determined to please them:  they weren’t part of my doom but my dream.

****

     When Jessica came out, she had her summer coat on, despite the heat, and was walking hunched over, too fast.

    I stared when she slid inside.  She didn’t seem to want to talk.  Maya babbled, cooed.  Jessica fiddled with the knobs on the cigarette lighter, the radio switching rapidly between AM, FM.  Finally, the Stones:  “Start Me Up.”  I listened for a minute.  Then Jessica swiveled around, leaned over the headrest, touched my cheek.

    “I thought I was going to throw up,” she said.  “But Joe told me that if you were as good as I was, we could start this afternoon.  Or one of us, anyway, while the other watches the baby.”

    I hesitated.

    Then:  “All right,” I said, finally.  “All right.” 

    The gloom was intense.  Dim, dull padding, like the shadowed sheen of black leather, on stools near the bar where a slender blonde with pasties and high, sculpted cheeks, a topless woman in a G-string, pressed the lid down on a blender.  The men were everywhere.  Clustered near the stage, their faces pale light splashes spilling up toward the long-haired brunette with the elastic breasts and lipsticked nipples who pole-danced, swung herself from palm to palm as she pushed herself out from that pole to create a slight dervish effect, as if she were going to whirl herself into the laps of the men whose hands dipped out of sight while she spun, the attendants here who, in accord, licked their lips and talked quietly to themselves.

    A fat man in a tight suit approached, his two chins bobbling.  “Joe Mattola,” he said, and thrust out his palm.

    I gripped it.  Stared hard into his rheumy eyes.  “Mandy Jacobs.  I’m here for my...audition.”

   “Your friend done great.  You dance as good as her?”

    I hesitated, staring at his flamecolored face, measuring it.  Assessing it.

     Then:  “Better,” I said quietly, but made sure that he heard me.

    “O.k.,” Joe said, and grinned.  “You’re up next.  Now, don’t do nothing fancy, ‘cause it’s your first time out, and I’d love it if you could get through shit without barfing on your shoes.  Take off as much as you want, but you gotta make sure you show ‘em a little tit, or the customers won’t be happy.”

    “Everything,” I said then, and--much to Joe Mottola’s surprise--I stepped forward, gripped both his hands in my smaller, slighter palms.  “I’m prepared to give them everything.”

    Heaven.  There have always been individual visions of Heaven.  I believe that now; I’ve always believed it.  Maya and her milk bottle, a warm baby bath, her momma, her new momma, to kiss her little fists when she cries.  Tina with a warm bed to crawl in nights, to get as much sleep as she desires, her sudden loneliness when she sits up in bed subsiding as she slides back down under covers.  Jack with his gun always at the ready, propped up on the mantel for any intruder to see, the crushed twelve-pack box lying at his bare feet, the thought forming, struggling to form...I had a wife, and now she’s gone.

    There have always been individual vision of Heaven, and, flicking the catch off my bra, feeling my breasts swing free then stiffen in the air-conditioned coolness of the bar, swinging myself around one more time so I’m dizzy as the white and brown faces whirl past, I want to believe, feeling a surge of power that moves up though my breastbone before it settles in a sudden but contained rush of euphoria inside my mind, that this is mine though already I’m thinking ahead to tonight, to Jessica lounging in our motel easychair while she switches channels from news to sports to QVC, to Maya cooing in her rented crib before she falls asleep, her tummy taut with the formula we’ve provided, her dark eyes scrutinizing the ceiling but--I suspect--really, something she can’t even see as I kneel beside the crib, peer through the bars, my yellow pad poised and at the ready, Maya’s lovely fingers sketching themselves in across the paper.