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not only going, she was going to get paid—like her father’s graduate students—to clean and preserve and catalogue relics from the ancient city of Aphrodisias.
     
    Carly’s bags weren’t exactly packed when he called three weeks before they were scheduled to leave, but they might as well have been. The trip was pretty much all she was thinking about in between studying for exams. In fact the call came when she was at a camping-equipment store downtown. Her father had sent her a gift card and made her promise to buy clothes with the official seal of approval from the American Dermatological Society.
    “The sun over there is brutal. I promised your mother we’d be careful.” She’d managed to find a not-too-ugly, dermatologist-approved, long-sleeved shirt with UVA and UVB protection, and she was heading over to check out dermatologist-approved hats. When her phone rang and DAD flashed on the screen, she assumed he was calling to remind her of something else she needed to pack or do for the trip. Did she have the right shoes? Good sunscreen? A sun hat? Layers for night when the desert gets surprisingly cold? “Feminine products,” because they were sometimes hard to find in the villages near the dig? Was she sure her passport was valid? Had she gotten her gamma globulin shot, was her tetanus up to date?
    She answered the call with: “I got SPF nine hundred ninety-nine, and I’m bringing three hundred tampons, so you can stop torturing yourself.”
    “Carly, it’s Dad.”
    “Yeah, Dad, I know. You think that’s how I answer the phone for everyone?”
    “Oh.” He made a noise approximating laughter. “Of course. Sorry. Listen—I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. No. Wait. What am I saying? It’s—” The connection started to break up. It sounded like her father had just jumped into a swimming pool. “—news, in fact.”
    “Wait a sec. I barely have a signal here.” She hung the shirt from a shelf full of PowerBars and headed toward the exit. Something about her father’s tone told her she wouldn’t be coming back for it.
    As soon she set foot on the sidewalk, he said, “Ann’s pregnant.”
    “Oh.” It was late afternoon on a warm Saturday in spring. The first truly warm, summer’s-just-around-the-corner Saturday, and Broadway was thick with shoppers.
    For three years, Carly’s father and his wife had been trying desperately to have a baby, using everything science had to offer. Ann had gotten pregnant twice through in vitro fertilization but had miscarriages both times. The last Carly had heard, they were going to give the test-tube method one more try before starting the adoption process. But not until after the summer.
    “I thought you guys had decided to wait until we got back before you—”
    “Did the next round of IVF, I know. That’s what’s so crazy! This just happened. The old-fashioned, low-tech way.”
    “Oh.”
    “Nature took its course.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “We really didn’t think it was possible. Ann threw away her diaphragm a long time ago—”
    “Dad.”
    “And if you don’t have to use a condom, then—”
    “Dad—”
    “God, when I think of all the trouble we’ve been through. The money we’ve spent. Did you know we were spinning my sperm to make it more concentrated?”
    “Dad! Please—you can spare me the details.”
    “Oh. Sorry. It’s just—I’m excited.”
    Carly already knew way more about their procreative woes than she needed or cared to know. One morning during her winter break visit two years earlier she had awakened to her father calling up the stairs to say, “We’re going to get Ann inseminated.”
    After they left, she made the mistake of flipping through a brochure from the Center for Reproductive Health, which explained all about sperm collection. For days she was tormented by thoughts of her father entering a little room with a DVD player full of porn—actually, the brochure used the term “erotic materials”—holding a little