“Probably. She’s been completely devoted to Marcie and Drew for twenty-five years. That wouldn’t have left much free time. And I do know she never moved out of her parents’ house. Most young people go away to college, get horrible first apartments with equally horrible first roommates. But Erin never left home because of the kids.”

He was quiet for a moment before he said, “What an amazing woman.”

“Isn’t she? I’m so glad you two met.” She walked briskly toward the door. “See you Monday at the picnic, Aiden.”

“See you,” he said. But he was thinking, she rushed home from school for child care and chores, and did that for twenty-five years? Aiden had grown up on the poor side, but he’d never missed a thing. He’d gone to the prom; he’d thought it was a totally useless waste of money not to get laid. It took quite a few years to recognize that girls didn’t see it the same way. But the way Erin thought of it? That was way out of his experience.

He took his plate back to the kitchen and put it on the counter. “Hey, Preach. What do I owe you?”

Preacher looked at it and scowled. “Was something wrong with it?”

“It was perfect,” Aiden said. He rubbed a hand on his stomach. “I ate some fish last night that was a little off, y’know? I didn’t want to press my luck.”

“Well, hey, I can’t charge you if you can’t eat it.”

Aiden laughed. “How you guys make a living is beyond me. Pretend I ate it. What’s the damage?”

“Eight,” Preacher said.

“And coffee?” Aiden asked, pulling out his wallet.

“Eight twenty-five.”

He put a ten on the worktable. He added a dollar. He added another dollar and pushed it toward Preacher. Nowhere he’d ever lived could you get a huge breakfast like that for eight dollars. Maybe the navy mess, but that stuff could be inedible. Preacher’s food was fantastic. “Thanks,” he said to the cook.

Preacher scooped up the bills. “And that, my friend, is how we make a living.”

Ten

Jack had supplies to get, for bar and kitchen stock as well as the Fourth of July picnic on Monday. He’d convinced Preacher they should supply the ribs and beer and that got the big man leafing through his recipes for barbecue ribs.

But Jack had another mission. He had an appointment with Dr. John Stone.

Jack had a lot of respect for John. Although Jack had ended up delivering his own babies, John had been good backup. But more important, John had saved Mel’s life when she’d suffered a postpartum hemorrhage. Of course, she’d lost her uterus, but John had tried to save it and understood that would be a hard loss for Mel. But her life, her life…What was there to think about? Jack couldn’t live without her.

He only had to sit in the waiting room for ten minutes before John came out and shook his hand. “Jack, how you doing, man?”

“Good, good,” Jack said. “It’s been a while. You coming out to the picnic on the Fourth?”

“I don’t know, Jack—I heard fireworks are out…”

Jack just laughed. “Listen, idiot, we don’t like to send sparks over a lot of dry timber in the middle of fire season. You could come for the company….”

“Might think about that. Come on back. I have the office. Dr. Hudson snuck out early. Her son bit someone on the playground.”

“Ew,” Jack said. “What do you do about biting?”

“There are many unproven theories,” John said. “But no matter what you hear—don’t bite back. I think that gets you a visit from Child Protective Services.”

They entered the small office, and while John went to sit behind the desk, Jack sat in a chair facing it. “We’re totally safe,” Jack said. “Social services still has us on a wait list for the newborn baby that was left on the clinic’s porch about four years ago.”

They both laughed.

“So,” Jack said. “You know why I’m here, right? To talk to you about how natural and everyday business this whole surrogate baby thing is for you…”

“Was,” John said. “We don’t do so much of that here. We tend to refer. We did have a woman who had a baby for her sister and we handled prenatal care and delivery. The clinic I worked with in Sausalito had a very busy fertility business—we could do everything but create life in test tubes. We could harvest eggs, collect and freeze sperm, inseminate, implant fertilized ova. The subjects…or parents and surrogate had their own lawyers to negotiate the terms and we had a consultant to keep us legal, but yeah, it was a pretty regular event.”

“A good option for women who can’t have babies on their own, I guess,” Jack said.

“Really, it is,” John answered. “We don’t have many patients in the valley who are looking for help in that area. It’s expensive, for one thing. Insurance won’t cover it. But, Jack, if you’ve got all the stuff—the eggs, the sperm—and all you need is a womb…Think about it. Couples who couldn’t have children with their own DNA twenty years ago are doing it now for not much more than the cost of adoption.”

“Just a regular, standard, typical day at the office?” Jack asked with a big grin. “Tell me how that worked.”

“Well,” John said, leaning back. “We had our own surgi-center. We could harvest a woman’s eggs there and use a very high-tech lab to freeze them and store them. We sent them the father’s sperm….”

“You sent it?”

John chuckled. “We collected it and sent it. We had a very private, nice little bathroom stocked with reading material—the staff called it the masturbatorium.”

Jack burst out laughing. “You are shitting me!”

“I am not lying.”

“And if a guy wanted to stay in there all day…?”

“We could go a long way toward the respect of a man’s privacy,” John said with a little chuckle. “I mean, who knows if it’s hard for him to get in the mood or if he’s trying to beat his record, no pun intended. A little vial of sperm went lickety-split to the lab to join the eggs. The mother or, if the mother didn’t have a viable womb, the surrogate, came to the clinic and we could either inseminate or implant. We had a very good success rate.”

“And how many surrogates did this for a new house or a boat?”

“That wasn’t my department. That’s between the surrogate and the parents, and it’s the legal department’s job to make sure all the laws—strict laws—are followed, which is why we refer from the Grace Valley Clinic. I can recommend some very good clinics not too far from—”

Jack leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He clasped his hands and hung his head. The small office fell silent. Finally he looked up at John. “This isn’t the thing to do,” he said quietly. “John, this isn’t the thing to do.”

John leaned toward Jack. “What are you doing here? You said you wanted to talk about it. Mel led me to believe—”

“I know. Mel led you to believe I was on board with this and wanted to know the particulars. Listen, John—that’s not how it is. I told her I didn’t like the idea. That we didn’t need more children. I told her if she wanted to adopt a kid that otherwise wouldn’t have a family, I could probably be talked into that, but…” He shook his head.

“What part of this bothers you? Because it’s a reasonable alternative for a woman who can’t physically give birth to her own offspring.”

“What puts me off is my wife—all excited about another baby, and she’s not even having it! She wasn’t this excited or upbeat when she got caught with our own. It’s weird, John, and I’m worried about her. We were fine with what happened with the hysterectomy—disappointed, but fine with it. ” Jack rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “I don’t know what it is, John. I’d do anything Mel asked me if it meant a lot to her, especially if we hadn’t been able to have children of our own. I’d fill up your little cup in the masturbatorium. I’d probably want to pass on watching some woman I don’t know give birth to my child, but for Mel I’d go through with the thing, but this isn’t what we need. Something’s wrong, John. And I don’t know what it is.”

John was leaning back in his chair. He picked up a pen and fiddled with it. He leaned farther back and frowned more as he listened to Jack talk. Finally he asked, “Has she had a hard time accepting her hysterectomy?”

“Like how?”

John shrugged. “Crying? Anger? Just plain complaining that her gut feels empty? Loss of libido? Anything?”

Jack shook his head. “Nothing at all. She breezed right through it. I hadn’t heard a word about it until she came to the bar one afternoon and announced we were having another baby. And that we were going to do it in a very innovative thirty-thousand-dollar way with a stranger. It was like she took on a whole new, all-hyped-up personality. Not herself. Not at all.”

“Oh, brother,” John said, hanging his head. “Jack, I’m sorry. I think I might have gotten caught up in the whole thing right along with Mel. Try to understand—it made me feel so good to provide this option to couples.”

“Am I overreacting? Am I just some wimp who won’t do what has to be done? Because I don’t think I’m that kind of husband. Something about this and the way Mel is all worked up about it just doesn’t feel right. I want her to be happy, but I want her to be normally happy.”

“And it just doesn’t seem like that’s the case?”

He shook his head. “She’s all over this thing. She’s already asked Brie to look into the legalities so she can be in charge of the negotiating and the contract. It’s a puzzle to me and I keep looking for the missing pieces….”

“Missing pieces?” John asked.

“You know—if we’d talked about a much larger family before the hysterectomy I could understand this—but I always thought she was okay with our two. She’s a busy midwife and shuffling kids between the two of us is complicated sometimes. Or—maybe if she’d brought it up as a suggestion and wanted to talk about it, think about it, but that didn’t happen, either. She’d made up her mind before she came to me with the idea. What don’t I get here?”

“What she’s feeling,” John said.

“She’s feeling like she wants a baby, right now, no matter how inconvenient it is—and she wants it to be ours.”

“She might be covering up a feeling of loss with plans to have a baby with a surrogate,” John suggested.

“That’s what I told Brie—that Mel seems to be determined to beat this thing, to be in control of having a baby, even if she can’t have it herself. Did you know that Mel and her late husband had a bunch of fertilized ova stored in some freezer in L.A.? They’d tried the whole in vitro thing, but in Mel’s uterus. I keep asking myself—is it just because for someone like Mel, this is business as usual? Or is she trying to get beyond the whole hysterectomy by proving it won’t stop her from having as many children as she wants? Like she’s in denial about some things.” He shook his head. “Not only haven’t I ever been up against anything like this before in my life, I have no idea how to deal with it.”

“You have to be honest with her, Jack. You have to tell her you don’t want to.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and stretched out one long leg till his booted foot hit the desk. “There’s the problem. I told her. Several times. She’s not listening to me at all. She pats my hand like a patient grandmother and tells me to keep an open mind and talk to John about it.”

“Well, there you go,” John said, standing up. “You talked to me.”

“Not with an open mind,” Jack said, also standing. “Now what?”

“Now you have to talk to your wife and tell her the truth—you’re not going to do it because you don’t think it needs to be done. Get the cards out on the table. All the facts—this wasn’t an issue until recently. Make sure it isn’t more about losing fertility, losing an organ, than about wanting more children. You have to tell her, Jack—you’re not a participant. Have a real honest talk. Maybe she is in denial. She might be running scared from the grief that’s pretty normal in women who go through hysterectomies right in the midst of their childbearing years.”

“Aw, Jesus,” Jack said. “I’ve been through some serious grief with Mel. Her dead husband, you know. I can’t say I look forward to something like that again. Maybe it would be easier to just visit the masturbatorium…”

“Some women,” John said, interrupting, “go through a serious adjustment when they face the end of their childbearing years. It isn’t just in the case of hysterectomies. Some women in menopause feel that with the absence of their periods. When they have to use lubricants, facing the end of all that womanly stuff of youth, they feel that they’re just not as much of a woman. They feel like failures, like life is passing them by. I suggested a good lubricant to one of my patients and she said her husband rejected the idea, that if it wasn’t natural he wasn’t interested—he felt she wasn’t in the mood if she didn’t lubricate like when they were twenty. I told her to send him in to talk to me—that it was normal for a fifty-eight-year-old woman to be drier than a twenty-eight-year-old woman. Sometimes they feel old age staring them in the face…. They feel like grandmothers when they’re way too young to feel that way. One woman cried in my office and said, “I’m way too young to be this old!” They worry that their femininity and youth are slipping away. It isn’t logical, but it’s real.” He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s just hormones and we have to make adjustments. Sometimes I prescribe antidepressants for a while.”