---

“Don’t forget to come home by 5:30 tonight,” I remind Declan. “Or should I tell Dave?”

Dec looks at his phone. “First childbirth class? It’s already on my phone. Six forty-five p.m.”

“I love Dave.”

“I love Dave more,” he says, giving me a quick kiss goodbye as he walks out of my office and into his. It’s only three in the afternoon, so we have plenty of time, but I know Declan. He’ll end up on the phone with some designer and soon they’ll be in deep talks about recycled barn wood for counters and how shiplap is hideous and we’ll be late.

I don’t want to be late for childbirth class.

After he leaves, I stare at my long to-do list. It’s so long, my to-do list has a to-do list. My back aches and I’ve peed four times in the last ten minutes. I’m twenty-seven weeks along, and the novelty of this baby has worn off.

The love is still there. The miracle of pregnancy, too. But as weeks pass and I gain a pound here, two pounds there, and as the baby seems to enjoy performing the Riverdance on my bladder, I’m starting to understand the later chapters of my pregnancy books.

That whole concept that by week forty you’ll tolerate being split in half just to get it all over with? It seems ludicrous at six weeks.

Now? Not so much.

I grab my phone and text Amanda.

Covert mission? I type.

I can be there in ten, she replies instantly.

I need twenty. I’m moving slower, I answer.

I’ll order for you. She adds a winkie face.

That’s a bestie right there.

Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I grab my coat and scarf. As I walk out of the office building, I peek into the coffee shop. A toddler is playing in the new gated area for parents and kids, his fat little hands pushing a train on a table. The wall around it is high, the couches low but against the wall, giving parents a cocoon. Dec thinks it won’t last long-term in this location, given how expensive square footage is, but for our more suburban sites, it’ll be perfect. The mommy crowd is our perfect demographic: people who really need caffeine, who don’t mind spending $4 on a small luxury, and who need an escape-proof place for their little kids.

And I’m about to be that demographic.

Outside, the crisp air awakens me instantly, spirits recharging even if my joints are aching. Hips that used to be dependable have become road hazards, occasionally aching to the point of dysfunction. My spine feels strange inside my own skin as every cell in my body changes constantly, my weight distribution making kinetics feel off. I turn right, cross the bridge, and then wonder if I should be in disguise.

By the time I am about to enter the competitor’s coffee shop, full-blown panic has taken over. When a stranger taps my elbow, I let out a little scream.

“Shannon! It’s me!” Amanda hisses. In my startling, I knocked her hand holding a drink, a few drops leaking out the drink hole and down the side of the white cup with the logo.

“Oh! Sorry!”

“I went in for you. You don’t even have to be seen in there.” She tilts her head. “No worries.”

Grateful, I gather the elixir from her and take a sip. “Mmmmmm.”

“I can’t believe Declan won’t do pumpkin-flavored coffee drinks at Grind It Fresh!” she tsk tsks.

“It’s not that he won’t. He can’t find a flavored syrup provider who meets his quality control standards.”

“He lost out on peppermint latte season! You’re bypassing important seasonal demographics!”

“Tell that to him.”

“I already did. He told me long-term quality was more important than fads.”

Sip.

We start to wander-walk, that kind of ambling you do with a good friend, where neither of you picks a direction, but you start to have some sense of purpose anyhow.

“You’ve been hiding this from Declan?”

“Yes. Of course. It’s just until he gets the right pumpkin supplier.”

“You have a really dysfunctional relationship with coffee and your husband. You’re an unstable threesome.”

“Stop!” Sip. “And besides, I’ll just drink this before I go back. He never has to know.”

Bzzzz.

My phone. A text from Declan. There is an HR specialist waiting for you for a meeting at 3:15. Did you forget? Where are you?

“Damn!” I curse. I give Amanda a frantic look. “I forgot a meeting back at the office!”

She shoos me. “Go! Go! We’ll talk about those mystery shops later.” She kisses her hand, puts it on my big old belly, and runs off, back to Anterdec and her office.

I peel off and walk quickly back to mine, hiding my drink under my coat. When I walk into the small waiting area outside our offices, no one is there.

“Hello?” I call out. Instead of a woman, Declan appears.

“Hey! That was quick. Where were you?”

“Just, uh, went for a walk. Get some exercise and clear my head. You know. Keep the blood pumping and prevent blood clots!”

“Should we be worried about blood clots now?” he asks.

“Not if I keep doing these walks!” I’m so cheerful, I could audition for a children’s show hosting gig and nail it in three seconds. “Where’s the HR woman?”

“I took care of it.”

“You did?”

“Sure. She just needed some signatures for the new payroll and benefits system you acquired.”

My body starts to feel heavy with a loose anger I’m not sure I am supposed to feel. “You took care of it? The HR project I’ve been working on for weeks?”

“She needed signatures.”

“She needed discussion.”

“Oh. I know. We had a brief chat. She brought me up to speed and I made a snap decision.”

“You made my snap decision.”

“Shannon.” Once in a while, Declan has this way of talking to me. It’s a mannerism that has faded over time, but it rises up once in a while. Now is one of those times. “You were drawing it out. Bigger accounts require bigger decisions. I handled it my way. You can take it from here.”

Every part of him gives me a visceral feeling that his father has just inhabited his body, right down to the way Declan just cleared his throat and looked sideways at the clock, as if I’m wasting his time.

“Thanks for the mansplaining,” I tell him.

“Oh, come on. Not that old canard. You can’t dismiss everything I say that you don’t like as ‘mansplaining.’”

“This is worse than mansplaining! You’re, you’re… Jamesplaining!”

“Jamesplaining?” Declan leans in, his face filled with the kind of wretched concern you express toward a deranged person who is babbling gibberish. I know that face.

I make it toward my mother all the time. Which means he has no right to co-opt that face and use it on me.

“It’s when you mansplain and sound like your father!” I shout. “And when you look at me like that!”

His fingers rush up to his chin, bumping up to his nose. “Like what?”

“Like I’m crazy!”

“Oh,” he sighs with relief. “That. What are you drinking?” he asks, peering at my arm, which is still bent at a funny angle to hide my drink.

“A pumpkin spice latte,” I finally confess, taking a sip. Then a gulp. There. Ha! I am revenge drinking.

Coffee, at least.

“What?”

Is Declan actually grabbing his chest like he’s having a heart attack?

“It’s decaf!” I say quickly, knowing he’s judging me for drinking an extra coffee while pregnant. People watch every bite you put in your mouth when you are pregnant. You would think I cut off an elephant tusk in broad daylight with a Kinder Egg and some Buckyballs.

“You think I care about that?” he scoffs, but there's clearly more going on here.

“Then what? And I totally lied about the decaf part,” I mumble.

“It’s from our competitor! The big one! You’re coffee cheating again, Shannon. You’re a serial cheater. You’ve committed caffeine infidelity again.”

“It doesn’t count!” I shout.

“It’s like being pregnant. You can’t be ‘a little bit pregnant.’ Every drop counts.”

“Don’t you lecture me on being pregnant.” I poke him in the chest, hard. “You’re not the one carrying this baby.”

“I would if I could,” he replies.

“Bullshit.”

“Shannon!”

I rarely curse, so I know this will get his attention. Mission accomplished.

“Men say that. ‘I’d carry the baby if I could.’ It’s so easy to say. What a cop out. You know damn well you can’t ever carry a baby biologically, so you get all the credit for being imaginarily altruistic and experience absolutely none of the pain. Women swoon when guys say crap like that. ‘I’d have the baby if I could.’ ‘I’d breastfeed if I could.’ But you can’t. So stop saying it. You’re not sincere.”

“I do mean it!”

“Just because you mean it doesn’t make it helpful.”

“If I can’t say something I genuinely mean in an effort to be helpful, it’s going to be a long third trimester, honey. Get used to silence.”

“Silence would be better than hearing my husband tell me he could do a better job at gestating and breastfeeding than I can!”

“When did I ever say that?”

“You just did!” Fuming, I cross my arms over my chest, except my belly has gotten so big, all I see are my elbows.

“No, I didn’t!”

“And now you’re yelling at me!” White heat fills my senses, turning pink and then red, the tears slamming my corneas like a breach in a seawall.

“I am not yelling!” he yells.

This is it. This is how it all ends.

“You don’t love me anymore,” I wail.

“Not this again.”

Sniffing, I look at him. I blink. “Are we really fighting about pumpkin-flavored coffee and whether you would breastfeed if you could?”

“Yes.”

“This is so not the vision of pregnancy I had.”

“Same here.”

“What did you think it would be like?”

“We’d cuddle in front of a fire. I’d stroke your belly. You’d be horny all the time. We’d decorate a nursery. You’d go into labor, give birth before I could put on scrubs, we’d come home with a kid who sleeps eighteen hours a day, and three weeks later you’d be ready for sex again.” His eyes drift to my breasts. “Good sex. With the added bonus of even bigger breasts.”

“That’s... thorough. You have really thought this out in startling detail, haven’t you, Dec?” And by startling I mean slightly creepy.

“You asked.”

“So far, the only true part of that fantasy is the horny part. We haven’t even turned a bedroom into a nursery.” And if these boobs get any bigger, they’ll need their own GPS coordinates.

“Only because you want the baby to co-sleep with us for the first six months, and I haven’t argued with you yet.”

“But you’re planning to?”

“I’m waiting for the right moment.”

“And when is that?”

“The day the crib guys come to set up whatever I order.”

“Declan! Quit joking.”

“Oh. Right. Ha ha. I’m totally joking.” With shifty eyes, he grabs his phone and shoots off a fast text.

“You’d better be cancelling that crib.”

“What crib?”

I get that Christian Bale smile again.

“Why do we fight all the time?” I groan.

“We don’t.”

“We do!”

“Shannon, we really don’t.”

“Now we’re fighting about fighting!”

Bzzz.

Both our phones sound with alarms.

“Damn it!” I say. “We have to start getting ready for childbirth class. Now we won’t be able to keep talking.”

“Darn. And just when we were really starting to get somewhere.”

“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

“If you’re not sure, honey, just go with no.”

“You know what I hate most about this?” I huff at him, heart rate speeding up, skin humming.

“This... what?”

“This!” I wave my hand between us. “When we’re sniping at each other like this!”

“Sniping? Is that what you call this?” For the first time since we started talking, he slows down, watching me with a predator’s eye, as if he senses the subtle shift in how I feel about him.

No. Not senses.

Creates.

“What do you hate most?” he asks.

“That I still want to have sex with you, damn you!”

His face goes blank. Utterly blank. Dec isn’t the most visually emotional guy on the planet, but this takes the cake.

“You want to have sex with me?”

“Yes.”

“And you... hate that?”

A long, sad sigh pours out of me. “Yes.”

“I would like to know who stole my wife and replaced her with this sex-starved incubator.”

“Declan!” I can’t help but laugh, though.

“No. Really.” He kisses me, hard. The mood shifts quickly, so fast, my hands don’t consciously go to his belt, but there they are, undoing the buckle.

And bam!

It is the last week of the second trimester, after all.

Might as well make the most of it.

---

---

Andrew warned me about this class, so I’m prepared when we walk in and there are wall-sized paintings of vulvas all over the classroom, sprouting tentacle-like hair that reminds me of a poster for the next Cloverfield movie.

Or a Jaws remake.

“Hypnotic Childbirth” is the title of this class. If anything can hypnotize a straight man, it’s a vagina.

One with your very own baby coming out of it? The jury’s still out.

At the front of the classroom, a giant watercolor painting of a woman’s vulva with a red rose growing out of the vagina reminds me that there is an entire leftover hippie subculture out there. They are vibrant and valid, living according to a countercultural philosophy, but most important:

How can we market four-dollar coffees to them?

“Quit thinking about business,” Shannon hisses in my ear.

How does she do that? How does she know?

There are four other couples in the room, all on the floor, pillows propped around the pregnant woman so she can lean back against her partner, who rests against a backjack. All pillows are in various shades of earthtones and pinks, like labia.

Three of the couples have men as the partner, one has a woman. We’re couple number five, I guess, and as we look around, taking in the room to decide what to do next, Janis Joplin appears in a dashiki.

Or, at least, her doppelgӓnger.

“Hello! My name is Sunshine, but call me Sunny. I’ve given birth three times and have two sons and a daughter. I had water births for all three, and my youngest was born in the ocean, with two dolphins as midwives.”

“I’ll book your labor suite at the New England Aquarium,” I whisper in Shannon’s ear. “You can use a penguin as a doula.” She elbows me. Or maybe that’s the baby kicking. It’s hard to tell. Likely both.

“Welcome to the blessed couple who nurture the new, open spirit that has chosen you as its way station,” she says, bending to kiss Shannon’s belly with four kisses.

“To the spirit of the north.” Kiss.

“To the spirit of the south.” Kiss.

“To the spirit of the east.” Kiss.

“To the spirit of the west.” Kiss.

“Next time I want a blow job, I’ll just ask you to kiss the spirit of the south,” I whisper to Shannon as Sunny turns away and offers us–

A giant eggplant.

Shannon elbows me again as I take it from our instructor. I look around. Every other couple has one, too.

“Settle into your goddess pillows. We’re waiting for one more couple, and then we’ll get started,” Sunny says to Shannon.

“Goddess pillows?” I ask. My hand slides up along Shannon’s ribs and I cup the side of her breast. “I thought that’s what these are.”

Batting at me, she blushes. “Dec! Don’t be obscene.”

Tilting the eggplant in front of her, I give her a look. “I’m the obscene one? What the hell are we about to do with this?”

She laughs, the sound bubbling up and taking over the room. Sunny gives us a glowing, spacy look that either means she’s pleased we’re in touch with our creative core that fuels all souls into the divine, or she’s stoned out of her damn mind.

Probably both.

I inhale deeply, the sigh hard to contain, and smell my answer.

Definitely stoned.

Shannon picks a pile of pillows next to a guy with short red hair, his beard a slightly redder color, and shoulders that could double as scaffolding for ironworkers. He’s enormous.

His pregnant wife is as tiny as he is big, with long, black hair and a calm demeanor.

“Hey.” He reaches over to shake my hand. “Ivan.” I shake, doing a quick adjustment to his strength. No hope of matching it, though. I do my best.

“And I’m Vicki,” she says, all the handshakes going around, her voice accented in what sounds like Japanese.

“Shannon.”

“Declan.”

“Oh, that’s right! We need name tags!” Sunny exclaims, passing a basket filled with sticky tags and Sharpie pens. “Because hospital administrators insist we waste petroleum products labeling ourselves and putting our identities into little boxes,” she adds.

Ivan gets the basket first, grabs a pen, writes his name on it, slaps the sticker on his chest, and shrugs.

The final couple comes in and settles down just as Sunny claps her hands and says, “I’m flipping the class!”

“What does that mean?” I ask Shannon.

She shrugs.

“In regular classes, we do the same boring things. What’s your name? What do you do? Is it a boy or a girl?” She rolls her eyes and spreads her arms wide. “Does marijuana really help with morning sickness? How do you get your FICO score up from a 491 because your ex transferred all his credit card debt onto new cards he opened for you secretly and then fled with a woman named Moira to live in Thailand? You know. So regimented.”

The back of my neck starts to sweat.

“Instead,” she says, in that sing-songy voice, “we’re going to start with vulvas.”

A hand shoots up. “Vulvas in general, or our own?”

Shannon squeezes my knee. Hard.

“I like vulvas,” I whisper in her ear.

Sunny crosses the room, her long, flowing skirt on a three-second delay behind her. “Great question. The same hospital administrators who insist that climate change is a myth and think having me pee in a cup once a month to keep my job is a good idea also think that shaming pregnant women is a way to generate profits. My most successful childbirth education class involved having everyone release their underwear into the wild and examining our vulvas, but then blah blah blah liability and blah blah blah there’s no such thing as the male vulva and blah blah blah later, we had to stop.”

My male vulva tightens.

“So we have to resort to a pale imitation. A literal imitation.” Her face lights up, which is pretty easy given how lit she already is.

“We’re making our own vulvas.”

Each couple is handed two trays and a small bowl filled with varying earth-tone shades of clay, some pinker than others.

“Consider this a pretest of sorts,” she announces, while starting a slide show. Buddhist monks chant softly in the background while a giant vulva–a real one, with so much hair, it has to be from the ’70s–fills the screen.

“Pre-test?” Ivan asks, obviously confused.

“I want you to sculpt a vulva. Use the pictures on the wall, use your imagination–whatever you choose. And we will see how connected you are to the labianic power channel that courses through each and every vessel of birth.”

“Labianic? Sounds like bionic labia. I could get into that,” I hiss in Shannon’s ear.

“Quit stalling and show us how much you know about my vulva, Mr. McCormick,” she says, sitting up and gingerly plucking a small ball of clay out of her basket.

“I thought we would learn about contractions and do a tour of the postpartum unit. Talk about when to leave for the hospital,” I groan as I take off my suit jacket, fold it neatly, and undo my sleeve buttons, rolling up the cotton fabric.

“We will,” Sunny says to me as she walks by, leaving a trail of pot and lavender to fill my nose. “But we’re flipping the class, remember? So get those hands in that vagina...” she peers at my name tag, “...Delmonte, and mold your baby’s entrance into the world.”

“Delmonte,” Shannon snickers.

Ivan’s already hard at work, thick fingers turning the balls of clay into something resembling a hammered liver.

“Be a good sport. Wouldn’t Gerald love this?” Shannon adds.

“Gerald should teach this,” I grouse.

But she’s right.

I look around. I’ve got this.

I can make the best damn vulva this class has ever seen.

---

---

Declan’s hands are deep in the colored clay, forming the labia minora with an artistic precision that is as admirable as it is deeply disturbing, when I hear a tap tap tap on the glass of the picture window to our left.

Two old ladies wave.

“Dec,” I nudge him. “Look.”

He does. He closes his eyes. His fingers dig in, destroying the clitoral hood in a move that reminds me of the first time a guy stuck his hand down my pants in tenth grade.

“Ouch.” Core muscles I didn’t know I still had tighten.

“No kidding, ouch. My butt hurts just looking at them. What are they doing here? Neither of them can even get pregnant, right?” he asks, voice going tight.

“I’m sure Agnes has some witchy spell she could conjure in an emergency. You never know with her.”

“Hello.” Agnes pokes her head in. “You’re ruining your vagina,” she says to Declan.

“At least he found the clitoris,” Corrine says with approval. “So many men can’t.”

“What are you doing here, other than spreading joy and peace?” he asks them.

“We’re here for childbirth class. I got Corrine pregnant,” Agnes deadpans.

“Congratulations! I assume you used reproductive endocrinology?” I ask.

“What? No. We paid for an escort and got a turkey baster. Your generation makes everything so complicated.”

“Why are you really here?” he demands. “Did Marie announce our whereabouts to her entire class again? Is this going to be like that charity wine tasting in Brookline where thirty women in yoga pants descended and the cops had to be called?”

“Colonoscopy. Much less sexy. And besides, the riesling really wasn’t worth all the advance fuss. Washington State wines are so overrated.” Agnes makes a puss face.

“Childbirth isn’t sexy,” Corrine argues. “You go to the hospital, they give you pills that make you feel like you’re being chased by a dinosaur with rabies blowing poisoned darts at you, your husband smokes cigars in the waiting room, you wake up with your hands and wrists bound and a three-hundred pound wrestler named McGee pushing hard on your uterus, and then you wake up, your breasts are bound, and they’re injecting you with medicine to make your milk dry up. And a baby’s handed to you, to take care of.”

Sunny has wandered over and hears the end of this, her face elongating in horror.

“When did you last give birth, dear?”

“1961.”

“Oh, I am so sorry. It’s very different now. You don’t get knocked out, no one makes your milk dry up, and best of all, your husband is in the room with you at all times.”

“I’ll take 1961 over that last one. Thanks,” Corrine says. But then she looks at Declan and points. “Although, if he’s as supportive in the delivery room as he is in real life, I can see why you want him there, Shannon.”

“Will it be one of those naked births?” Agnes asks Declan.

“The baby isn’t planning to wear a suit coming out,” he replies.

“Ha ha. I meant will you go au naturel?”

“Me? No. I plan to stay fully clothed, Agnes,” he says, scrutinizing his clay, trying to rebuild his vulva. Sunny quietly places little bundles of brown felted wool next to each basket.

“Unless I labor in the jacuzzi tub,” I remind him. “Then you’re welcome to put on a swimsuit. Or not.”

“He has a fine body,” Agnes says, as if I didn’t know that already. “We love when Declan models for Gerald’s nude-sculpting class.”

Sunny lights up and looks at Dec with new appreciation. “A man who knows himself! How wonderful!” She points to the felted wool. “By the way, here’s your pubic hair.”

“Agnes, our ride is here, and she’s parked in a zone where we’ll have to start paying in ten minutes. Get a move on,” Corrine says, saving us. The two leave like turtles in a hurricane evacuation.

“Nice labia,” Sunny says to Declan. “You know the female body very well. Are you a gynecologist? An artist?” Poking the felted wool, she’s made it clear our projects will have hair. Lots and lots of hair. I wonder if Sunny is behind the Twitter hashtag #thebarepieisalie ?

“I own a coffee chain,” he says. “Grind It Fresh! Heard of it?”

“I only drink Fair Trade herbal, non-caffeinated teas farmed by persecuted Jainists who reclaim factory-farmed land.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Hmmm. So vaginas are just a hobby for you. Not a profession. Have you ever considered devoting yourself to the study of the female flesh orchid?”

Declan grins at me. “Oh, yes.”

A fracas in the hallway makes us all turn as four men, two in black police uniforms, two in suits, burst into the room.

“Sunshine Bacardi Tailorhaus?” one of them asks. Bacardi? If Mom and Dad named Carol after Christmas caroling, what the hell were Sunny’s parents doing when they conceived her?

“Oh, shit,” she mutters, moving fast to the back of the room, grabbing her purse and a pelvis with an upside-down doll in it.

“Freeze!”

Every guy in the room stops, hands in the clay.

“Ms. Tailorhaus, you are under arrest.”

“Pigs can’t stop me! I know my rights!” At the back of the classroom there is a door. Sunny grabs the handle. It’s a janitor’s closet.

“None of the pot in my van is mine! I swear! Big Al put it allll there. And if it’s there, it’s a gift! Massachusetts made pot legal and I’m giving it away!”

“Sixty pounds, Sunny. You can’t gift sixty pounds of GSC and try to claim it’s legal,” one of the suited men says.

“What’s GSC?” someone in the class yells.

“Girl Scout Cookies,” one of the future dads explains.

“That’s not illegal!” Ivan says, thoroughly confused.

“It’s the name for a strain of marijuana,” another man whispers.

“Oh.”

“Great,” I mutter. “Now I want a sleeve of Thin Mints.”

“Make it two,” Vicki says, tugging on Ivan’s arm. “Is your niece selling them yet?”

“Is it my fault I have lots of friends?” Sunny shouts. “Just because you’re a bunch of friendless stoogies for the state who everyone hates doesn’t mean the rest of us have no friends!”

Her sounds of resistance peter out after a few minutes.

“Did... did our childbirth education instructor just get hauled away and arrested for having sixty pounds of pot in her possession?” someone chokes out.

“Worse,” her partner says, “did I just shove felted wool all over a clay reproduction of the female vulva, to simulate hair?”

Someone peers at the felted wool. “Uh, I’m not so sure that’s simulated. Some of those fibers look pretty authentic to me.”

“Ewwwww.”

All the couples in the room just blink, until finally, Ivan stands up and looks at his vulva.

“Honey?” Vicki says, looking at it with him. “It’s not quite right. You put the clitoris inside the vagina.”

“I know. I did it for you.”

We’re all cleaning up, wondering what happens next, when a very harried woman in scrubs rushes in.

“Ah, so, it looks like childbirth education class is experiencing a technical difficulty.”

Declan snorts.

“We’ll email you about rescheduling, or finding a new instructor. Sunny is now... indisposed.”

“Pretty sure she’s about to be deposed,” Dec says under his breath.

“I’m due in three weeks!” one of the pregnant women gasps. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Hey,” another partner asks, holding high his eggplant. “What were we supposed to do with this?”

We slip out as everyone pelts the poor hospital worker with questions, peeling off to our respective bathrooms before meeting up in the hall.

“What now?” I ask.

Snuggling up to me, Dec gives me a lascivious smile. “How about we test just how accurate my vulva depiction was?”

“You’re the nude model. Not me.”

“Oh, that can be arranged, too.” Wink.