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behalf. “Amber is happy to meet Tassie as well as you, Sarah.” Here Amber looked across at me and rolled her eyes, as if we were two girls out with our embarrassing mothers. I had been noticing Amber’s face, which was as lovely as advertised but sassy, with a strange electricity animating it, and with the missing teeth she seemed like a slightly educated hillbilly or an infant freak. Her hair was a gingery blond, shoulder length, as straight and coarse as a horse’s tail. “Amber is wondering, of course, about your religious plans for the baby. She is very interested in having the baby baptized Catholic, aren’t you, Amber?”
    “Oh, yeah,” said Amber. “That’s the whole point of this.” She pulled out the front of her bulging stretchy sweater and let it snap back.
    “And of course, she would hope you would have the child confirmed as well, when the time came.”
    “We could do that. We could definitely do that,” Sarah said agreeably.
    “Were you raised Catholic?” asked Amber.
    “Uh, well, no, but my cousins were,” said Sarah, as if this solved everything.
    Letitia, nervous about the sticky parts of a deal, said cheerily, “The birth father is white. I did mention that to you, didn’t I?”
    Sarah said nothing, her face momentarily inscrutable. She picked up a lone cold french fry the waitress had yet to clear and began to chew.
    Letitia continued. “Tall and good-looking, like Amber.”
    Amber smiled happily. “We broke up,” she said, shrugging.
    “Do you have a picture of him, though? To show Sarah?” Letitia was selling the idea of the handsome white boy-dad.
    “I don’t think I ever had a damn picture of him,” said Amber, shaking her head. Now she looked at me, grinning. “Except in my mind. My mind’s a regular exhibition.” The phrase was oddly reminiscent of the Mussorgsky we’d just listened to in the car. And her mouth, with its few and crooked teeth, bits of shell awash on a reef of gum, seemed a curious home for her voice, which was slowly surprising, with its intelligence and humor. There was a lull now. Amber suddenly leaned back, physically uncomfortable. “So, where’s your husband?” she asked Sarah.
    I examined Sarah’s face for the stiffened look of the accused. “He’s, oh, he’s at a meeting his lab is having with the university. I run my own restaurant in town, so I can make up my own schedule as far as meetings go. But, well, he’s at the beck and call of others—at least today he is.”
    “Do you think you really have time for a baby, owning a restaurant and all?” Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.
    Sarah refused to be flustered. She’d heard remarks of this sort a dozen times. But before she could speak, Letitia spoke for her. “That’s why Tassie is here. Tassie’s the backup. But Sarah will always be around. She’ll be the mom. And she can do a lot of her work right out of the house—isn’t that right, Sarah?”
    What work could Sarah do from the house? Yell at Meeska about the coulis?
    “Absolutely,” Sarah said. “Oh, I forgot. I brought you a present, Amber.” She took a CD from her purse. “It’s a mixed CD of my favorite classical music.”
    Amber took it and stashed it in her bag with the most fleeting of glances. Perhaps she’d had a slew of these lunches as a means of collecting goodies, which she would later sell on eBay. “And I have a present for you, too,” she said, and handed Sarah a foil-wrapped pat of butter she plucked from the bowl on the table. “It’s wrapped!” Amber said, smiling wickedly. The CD hadn’t been. A scalding boldness gripped Amber’s face, then a kind of guilt, then drifty blankness, like songs off a jukebox list, flipped through unchosen.
    “Thanks!” said Sarah gamely. You had to hand it to her. She opened up the butter and applied it to her mouth like lip gloss. “Prevents chapped lips.”
    “You’re welcome,” said Amber.
    When we all