The Cloud

41

“A boy.”

Polly’s eyes glisten, which I assume mean she’s sad. But she’s also wearing this smile, a 60 percenter. Polly’s got the fullest range of smiles of anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like the Baskin Robbins, but with smiles. She can take investors and customers on a stock-market ride of emotion, guide them just where she wants them by turning her lips up and down by infinitesimal degrees only the heart can measure.

When she nears 65 percent, I see the residue of Willow Tree mushroom from the mu shu vegetables in the corner of her mouth. Why can I remember this and not, precisely, the rest?

“Fungus. On your lip.”

She wipes it off. She turns the smile dial down to 45 percent. This is not good news. I see the condensation on her water glass, the damp stain on the red tablecloth, the cracked empty shell of the fortune cookie on the small white plate. In the corner of my eye, I see the waiter with the left ankle limp plodding our direction with the cookie’s replacement.

“Boy?” I know what she means and I can’t believe it.

“You’re having a son.” She’s up to 70 percent but the eyes still glisten.

“I thought we weren’t going to. .”

“You know I’m more organized than that.”

I know she is. Of course she was going to find out. But I’d have thought it would be a joint decision. It’s not like her to find out without me. The limping waiter nears, extending the white plate with care befitting royalty. My majestic woman, my queen mother, deserves nothing less.

“That’s amazing. Amazing. Amazing! I will immediately get baseball mitts and have someone teach me how to teach him to throw a slider. I peaked out at curveball. Though you know that you shouldn’t learn to throw junk before the age of one. It can hurt development of the wrist.”

The waiter sets down the second fortune cookie in the middle of the table. Polly eyes it and dials it back to 28 percent. For Polly, this is a frown. She reaches for the cookie and covers it with her hand.

“What? Is he. . is the boy healthy?”

She picks up the cookie. She cradles it. “Completely. Gestating beautifully. Five months of crinkly perfection, currently snarfing sixteen pounds of digested lemon chicken.”

“Then we should drink. I’ll drink for three.” I look at her face, looking at the cookie. “What’s the other shoe? Drop it, already.”

“Nat, we’ve always been. .” She’s still looking down. “Different kinds of people.”

My heart drops a thousand feet from the apex of news about my unborn son. “So. And?”

“There are lots of different ways to raise a family.”

I’m frozen. I don’t want to ask her what she means. I want time to stop. That’s because I know Polly. And I know that she doesn’t bring subjects up for discussion. By the time she raises a serious issue, she’s already figured out how to resolve it. Whatever she says next is going to make me very unhappy.

She looks down into her hands. With two thumbs, she cracks the second fortune cookie. We look down at it, stunned by what we see there.

“I’m so sorry.” Her smile has dipped below zero.

“What?” This I whisper aloud. In the present. “You’re leaving me.”

Standing in the closet, I open my eyes. Then close them again. I can’t seem to remember how the rest of the conversation goes. I close down and I look at the cookie she’s opened and I can’t believe my eyes either.

I hear a noise. It’s coming from the present. I open my eyes. The closet door swings open. I see a burly former Sandy Vello, the very-much-not-dead reality-TV wannabe, holding a rifle.

I say: “What did I do wrong?”