of Portland’s most prestigious zip codes. Fortunately, Paul is adept, ticking his way through the honey-do list of projects for their home. “Handy guy to have around,” his wife always says.
He is happily married to the woman sitting beside him, her head level with his in the reflection, though this is mostly because she has a long torso. (Paul stopped growing at a respectable five foot nine inches, but in bare feet he still has an inch on his wife, and that’s including that hair of hers.) He meets her eyes in the glass, and she gives a quirky, half-cocked smile.
Eva is the blond, bohemian college sweetheart who plucked Paul, working-class guy at a state school trying to get his business degree to help the old man out, from the boredom and irrelevance of Anthro 101, inserting herself permanently into his life twelve years ago. Now they are perched on the precipice of parenthood, expecting for the thirteenth time, Lucky Number Thirteen, they call him, their first child, due in two weeks.
So why, Paul wonders to his reflection, is he not the captain of this ship, carving his own turkey in his own cozy, if slightly dated, last-on-the-list-to-be-remodeled dining room three blocks away? Why is he stuck, like a gawky preteen at the kids’ table, at an obligatory holiday dinner listening to conversations bounce around him without a shred of interest?
You owe me so huge, he wants to hiss to his wife, who accepted this invitation without asking him. They are in The Zone, the homestretch! Eva’s thirty-eight weeks pregnant, could go at any time! This meal could be their Last Uninterrupted Supper, and they are sharing it with John and Francie McAdoo, mere acquaintances. Their only common threads: that they both live in Portland Heights (though the difference in square footage between the McAdoos’ house and the Novas’ could be the answer to a long-division problem) and that once, when they had suffered a dozen miscarriages, Paul and Eva were briefly clients of the Chosen Child, the same adoption agency where John and Francie connected with their current birth mother.
But though Paul wants to tell his wife how miserable he is, he doesn’t. He already pissed her off and got a tight-lipped look by snarking about their hosts on the short drive over.
“Don’t the McAdoos just look like infertile people?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Her bristly answer should have stopped him, but Paul sometimes doesn’t know when to quit.
“John’s old enough to have had his balls shot off storming the beaches at Normandy, and Francie just looks…dried out.” He’d had the good sense not to tell his wife about the one accidental sex dream he had had about Francie McAdoo after they first met, not an inconceivable thing until you got to know her; a decent body, if you go for that type, average face, but in the dream, when he had tried to put it in her, she was so dry he got paper cuts.
Now, stuck at the McAdoos’ dining room table, because he is not always so challenged in knowing how to say the right thing, Paul leans over into Eva’s mass of spring-loaded blond hair and whispers, “Next year, our house. Just you, me, and Junior.”
Eva methodically spears a piece of turkey, a rolling cranberry, and a fluff of stuffing, swipes her fork through gravy, and turns to their hostess. She chews her perfect bite, nodding as Francie McAdoo yammers on about back-ordered Pottery Barn furniture, but Paul knows she heard him. With her right hand, she reaches under the table and strokes Paul’s knee like it’s the head of an obedient golden retriever.
“So, Paul, you’re still with Nike?” John McAdoo asks him. It is the first he’s spoken since they all loaded up their plates at the cherry sideboard after a stiff half hour of cocktails, salty Costco hors d’oeuvres, and strangled small talk.
“Mm”—Paul wipes his mouth—“I’m actually not.” He does not add, “I have my own company,” though he does. His father would have taken this opportunity to dig in his pocket for a business card, “SUPERNOVA ELECTRIC—a super company with service you can trust!” But Paul is not his father, in so many ways. “Maybe you’re thinking of someone else from the agency. What was their name, honey, the Nike people?”
Eva, whom he has seen successfully attend three conversations at once, doesn’t miss a nod for Francie but says, “The Severins, Nate and Gina, both with Nike.”