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breathe.
    It’s hot for June, and the breeze from the air-conditioning vent chills my toes. I turn off the light, pull my T-shirt over my head, and crawl into bed beside him, cradling his smooth back against my breasts. He mumbles something and reaches over to grab my hip. I move slightly, and he rolls over and runs his hands through my dirty hair. We don’t make love — too raw, too soon. Sleep finds me still clutching the baggie of raspberry jam and capers and Aunt Sylvia’s spoon.
    The next morning, I cancel my nine o’clock staff meeting. I was scheduled to fly to Boston the day after I miscarried, so now the whole office knows what happened, compromising my status as den mother of our “little nonprofit that could.” I’m going to have to face my coworkers. Best to get it over with, so at noon I stop by the office to pick up some files, and they treat me like I’ve got a raging case of pinkeye, except for Valerie, the stripper turned receptionist, who has a six-year-old son. She greets me with a homemade loaf of banana bread she’s been keeping in her desk drawer for me. I almost cry.
    I go home and try to nap. Nothing doing, so I pull on an old pair of shorts from my Bucky Badger days and walk two blocks up M Street to a coffeehouse that doesn’t sell anything beginning with the letters “frap.” Danny wants to move to Bethesda, but the thought of living in the suburbs without children thoroughly depresses me.
    A cell-phone-blabbing mother spills her latte on me; the hot liquid burns my thigh. “Watch where you’regoing,” she says, and her brusque words crack me open like a walnut. Instead of crying, I find a table and rub my iced tea against my leg.
    A man with kind eyes and a thumb ring sits down next to me and asks to borrow a pen. I reach into my purse, and the baggie falls to the table. We both examine it.
    â€œMust have been a hell of a sandwich.” He laughs nervously.
    â€œKeep it.” I slide a pen at him with more force than I intend and snatch the baggie from the table. These days, I go nowhere without my spoon and baggie; they make me feel close to my Sylvias. Strange, I know, but they comfort me when nobody else can. One miscarriage and you get “Seventy-five percent of women miscarry during their first pregnancy.” With the second, it’s “My sister/cousin/hairdresser had two; you’ll be fine.” Three begets “I know of a fertility clinic out in Gaithersburg.” I’m on number four.
    I return to our apartment and go straight to the guest room I’ve been avoiding since I lost Sylvia. A stack of pink, blue, and yellow hand-me-downs from Robin provides the only color against the oatmeal carpet and white futon.
    Danny’s shoved the teak wooden cradle into the corner. We bought it at the Georgetown Flea Market last summer, a few days before our first miscarriage. I remove the spoon and the baggie from my purse and lay them in the cradle. With the edge of my thumb I rock the bassinet back and forth so gently that the spoon and the baggie barely move.
    The day folds into itself. At five, I’m massaging a chicken breast with olive oil when Danny calls. “I have to show a house tonight, sweetie. Can I pick up some Ben and Jerry’s on the way home?” He sounds both anxious and relieved to take a night off from our grief. I don’t blame him. I call my mom in Milwaukee. Just because.
    â€œWhatcha doin’?” I try to sound like that plucky girl who beat the entire sixth grade class in an arm-wrestling tournament, who trotted off to Mali to run an AIDS program, and not the hormonal casualty I am.
    â€œThinking about you, honey.”
    â€œNo need.”
    â€œWe spent today at Aunt Sylvia’s house, sorting her things.”
    My cheeks flush, and I feel like I did when I was eight and my father caught me stealing a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from Winkie’s.