but he said there’s no connection in the converted garage where he and Kurt and Paolo are holed up.
“It sounds awful,” she told him on their weekly Sunday-night phone call.
“We’re never here, really,” Dan had said. “We’re just out on the water or we’re making contacts, getting the business thing going.”
“How is that going?” she asked, and instead of answering he launched into a complicated explanation of a kiteboarding trick he was mastering.
“ARE YOU CHLOE PINTER?” She is standing beside the table in a neon T-shirt and jeans, mid-thirties, curvily overweight, and all Chloe can see are gigantic eggplant boobs, stretching the hot pink cotton of her shirt. She has a fried blond perm—“Top Ramen hair,” Dan would say—with dark roots, the remnants of sloppily removed mascara under her brown eyes.
“I am,” Chloe is saying as the waitress arrives, plunks down the Sprite Chloe had ordered to settle her stomach.
“I’ve been sitting at the bar for half an hour. You aren’t wearing a purple shirt and a black suit.”
“Yes, sorry about that.” The waitress steps back, and Debra plunks into the seat across from her. “Well, you,” Chloe says politely, “don’t exactly look pregnant either.” Trying to get things off on the right foot.
“Right, I’m at the phase where I just look fat.” Debra snorts, and the waitress smiles uneasily at them, tucking her hair back into her ponytail, shifting her weight.
“I’ll have a Corona,” Debra says, unrolling the paper napkin from her utensils.
“Okay, and your friend has already ordered. Do you want anything to eat?”
“You did? What are you getting?”
“Nachos,” Chloe says.
“They’re huge,” the waitress offers.
“Okay,” Debra says, but it’s not clear to Chloe or the waitress what she means; the waitress taps her pen against her teeth for a second, then walks away.
“So—” Chloe opens her folder, takes out a preliminary and a medical, pushes a brochure of a feathered-hair pregnant woman who looks to be from the 1970s toward Debra. She has been telling Judith that they need to update their material, put something more striking and modern on their cover. She has something she is working on in Photoshop, a black-and-white photo of Dan’s of a mother and child walking along the Pacific Coast, their backs to the camera, their gaze toward the setting sun.
“So?” Debra prompts, and Chloe can feel the vibrations from Debra’s leg jiggling under the table.
“Okay.” Chloe smiles at her, clicking her pen open. “First of all, what’s your due date?”
“June.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Didn’t figure it out till it was too late for the other option—found you guys in the phone book right away. My period’s always fucked up.”
“Okay. Is this your first pregnancy?”
Debra snorts. “I’ve got two kids at home, two adopted out, and a couple I knew early enough about to take care of. I suck at birth control.”
Chloe writes quickly, switching between the preliminary and the medical. She can tell this isn’t a meeting where they will linger, become girlfriends, pore over the portfolios together. At best, though, it still takes an hour to get all the information.
The waitress returns with the Corona, puts it down in front of Debra, adds a plate of limes. Debra tears the top off a pack of sugar and dumps it on a lime wedge, sucks on it. Chloe pointedly looks away when she takes a swig of the beer.
“So how do you guys do it?” Debra starts. “I mean, now you know I’m a veteran. Do you cut the check for rent and food and clothes and stuff direct to me, or do you pay it for me, or what?”
“Well,” Chloe says, “typically we don’t cover anything until the third trimester—”
Debra holds up her hand. “Let me stop you right there. I’m a dancer, you know? And I can’t be working in my line of work much longer—nobody’s going to pay to see my fat ass jiggling up there. So we’re a unique case, see? We’re going to need some assistance starting a little earlier. Like, now.”
“Okay, well, obviously I’ll connect you with all the public services that you’re eligible for, your medical expenses, WIC—how old are your kids?”
“Seven and five.”
“Okay, so we’ll get services for everyone eligible, school meals, that kind of thing.”
“Hang on, are you or aren’t you a private agency?”
“We are,” Chloe says.
“So how much are the people paying you for my baby, and what percent of that is mine?”
Thankfully, the waitress arrives with the nachos, smothered in real melted cheddar cheese, not Velveeta, and extra black olives and jalapeños, a