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Foo,” he had said. She had never been anything but, from then on. So much for Minerva.
    And forget about calm! Or quiet! Here she was now, all spiky and indignant: “I could have a blond baby! Certainly I could. Half my genes are yours, remember.”
    “Well, maybe with Lawrence you could have,” Rebecca said. “But I seriously doubt you can hope for any blond genes from Hakim.”
    Min Foo said, “Oh.”
    Rebecca gave up on the orange juice and shut the fridge door as unnoticeably as possible. “Min Foo,” she said. “Sweetheart. Um, once this baby is born, you won’t send Hakim packing, will you?”
    “Send him packing?”
    “The way you did the others.”
    Min Foo gave her a blank, astonished stare.
    “I just couldn’t help but notice,” Rebecca told her, “that you always divorce your husbands after you have their babies.”
    “Always!” Min Foo repeated. “You talk as if I’d had
fifty
husbands!”
    “Well, but . . . three is not a negligible number, you have to admit.”
    “It’s no fault of mine that I happened to hit a teensy little run of bad luck,” Min Foo said. “Honestly! You make such a big deal about that. Every time I turn around, some jibing, jabbing remark. ‘You’re not booked this weekend, are you? Getting married or anything.’ And, ‘Oh, that was a gift from what’s-his-name, one of Min Foo’s husbands.’”
    Rebecca laughed, impressed by her own wittiness, but Min Foo stayed serious. “Everything’s just a joke to you,” she said bitterly. “Even at our wedding reception: someone says how nice it is and you say, ‘Well, it ought to be nice, as much practice as Min Foo’s given me.’” She gathered the folds of her dress and stood up. “Don’t bother seeing me out,” she said. “I’m leaving.”
    “Sweetheart!”
    “I’m late for my appointment, anyhow.”
    “Oh, all right,” Rebecca said sadly, and she trailed her to the front of the house, trying to think of some parting comment that would smooth things over. But none came to her.
    Her brother-in-law had a theory that Min Foo’s many marriages were her way of trying on other lives. The first husband had been a professor in his sixties, and Min Foo (age twenty-one) had instantly turned into a settled faculty matron. But with the second husband, who was black and eight years her junior (
two
differences, Zeb pointed out; very efficient of her), she’d become a young slip of a girl and taken to wearing a head-wrap. Hakim, now, had her spangled with Muslim holy medals. Rebecca liked Hakim, but she was careful not to get overly invested in him. That was why she kept up the pretense that she didn’t know where he was from. Of course she knew where he was from; she wasn’t senile. But, “Oh, he’s something, ah, Middle Eastern, I believe,” she would say when asked.
    Oops. Just the sort of remark that Min Foo had been objecting to.
    *  *  *
    The children were upstairs in the ex-nursery that served as the family room, watching a videotaped cartoon. You had only to look at them to guess Min Foo’s whole history—Joey a freckled eight-year-old with straight black hair and blue eyes, Lateesha four years younger and decked out in tiny beaded braids, her skin the warm, soft brown of a baked potato.
    “Hey, kids,” Rebecca said, “who wants to help me decorate for a party?”
    They didn’t take their eyes from the screen, but Joey said, “What kind of party?”
    “Graduation; high-school graduation. Teenagers galore! I’ll need to consult with you two so I don’t do anything uncool.”
    That got their attention, all right. Joey asked, “Are they having a DJ?”
    “Certainly a DJ! He’s bringing his own sound system, later this afternoon.”
    Joey punched the remote control and a Superman-type figure halted in mid-screen, trembling slightly. Then the two children slid off the couch and followed Rebecca downstairs. Lateesha’s beads sounded like an abacus clicking. (What a jewelry-laden family