The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,16

Alex, smiled at the side of his mouth. “Well hello, Ramon!” he said.

This happens all the time: Ramon, it should be noted, is a good-looking man.

Everyone laughed—again! What fun this was!—and said hello, and Ramon said hello back.

My heart flipped again, slippery in a hand. We are old and straight and we have tried a million other ways to have children, and we live in New York, where no one but Tiffany has ever been because, I would learn later, they think you can get shot there. And don’t even bring up Brooklyn.

And then I had another one of my preternatural thoughts: if everyone here was gay and from the South—which in a way meant everyone here was the same—then maybe Ramon and I had a good chance. Maybe, if we did everything just as we were told, if we listened very well and did all the paperwork correctly, in the right order, and if we smiled properly, and didn’t bicker in front of everyone, if we came on time, if we tried to always remember how once we had seen each other in a church and fallen in love, maybe we would get to be parents.

“Well,” Nickie said, standing, leaning in on her spread fingers, her nails long and sculpted and red. “Shall we begin?”

_______

Later that night, after finding our way back to Arrow Drive and the Crabtree Hotel that was not the Marriott Crabtree hotel but was right next to it, we turned on the news and lay back on the bed. Miley Cyrus was on, crying about her tour bus. Correction: crying about the people on the tour bus. She was grateful not to have been on it, but her band and the roadies had been, and two people had been killed. How old is this girl? I thought, doing my math. Could I be her mother? She is seventeen years old, the news tells me, and so yes, it appears that were I a different kind of woman, living in an alternate world, I could be her mother.

I pictured that man from her bus, unhinged in the middle of the road, the rolling hills green as moss against the black asphalt.

“Strange,” I said to Ramon.

“What about this day, I would like to know, has not been strange.” He took three pillows and propped himself up in bed.

I nodded slowly. I tried to be contrary, to find an argument for this day, but came up with nothing. “True,” I said.

“The drive was strange, the place was strange, the people were strange, what is happening to us is goddamn bizarre.”

“The people were nice, though. In the end. The couples, I mean.”

“The mixer-that-was-not-a-mixer was not so bad in the end, yes. I see why they did it. We all got to meet each other before we do the training, whatever that is going to entail.” Ramon punched at his pillows, readying, I could tell, for total obliteration. That’s always the way he does it.

“Yeah, who knows what it will be tomorrow.”

“I mean, training for what? The adoption ten-K?” Ramon turned onto his side, away from me, and then he said something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“More like training for more heartbreak,” he said, louder now.

I looked at my husband, taken aback, as I had been when he took my hand earlier that evening. My throat tightened, sewn shut. I tried to swallow.

“We need to stay positive.” I put my hand on his shoulder.

“That’s my line,” Ramon said. “I will use it on you, tomorrow, when you’re flipping out again.”

I nodded at his back. “I know. I have been. I can’t believe this is us. I just can’t. How did this happen? Remember that first night in Rome, when you saw my scars and I told you I didn’t think I could have children?”

Ramon’s head nodded into the pillows.

“And then later when we were engaged? I told you again. You were like, who cares? We both said that. Who cares? Remember? But you know what? I don’t think we believed it.”

I remembered saying the words. I can’t. But back then, what did we think we would not be able to overcome?

“Did you?” I asked him. “Did you believe it?”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

We were silent. “We need to stay positive.” Ramon reached around to pat my hand and got my elbow instead.

I hit him on the shoulder. “You’re right. We do. Let’s try to get through this weekend and see.” And just then I thought of that lawyer, her purple hair, the