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he would wake me up after he watched the late show.
    But as I drove out of Kansas City, it didn’t feel like midnight. A nervous energy zipped through me, pure adrenaline, preventing my pulse from slowing to a normal rhythm. My mind churned through the events of the day in fast motion, replaying everything that had happened. Everything that was wrong. Without the music of the piano or the comforting closeness of my unusual flight companion, it was hard to block out the disturbing litany of reality.
    How am I going to tell everyone? What will I say?
    A sense of failure filled me, an odd feeling of shame, as if I had something to hide, some guilty secret I didn’t want anyone to know. It didn’t make sense, yet it was like a passenger in the car, hissing critical whispers, telling me it was my fault that I’d lost my job. Telling me that when the family heard what had happened, they’d know I was really a failure masquerading all these years as a success.
    I could picture my father pointing out that I should have gone intothe medical profession, as he and my mother had wanted. He’d remind me that the medical industry is recession proof— Good times or bad times, he’d say, people still get sick.
    Kate would give me the look —the sad look that women who have children give to women who choose not to. The look that says, Oh, you poor thing. All you have is your career, and now look where that has landed you. You’ll never be truly happy. You’ll always be incomplete. Even if Kate never said it, even if she didn’t do a thing to intimate those words, I would perceive them, and it would be a wedge between us. She would wonder, like she always did, why we weren’t closer, why we didn’t do the sisterhood thing very well.
    And since we didn’t do it very well, we would confine ourselves to small talk and job talk. Sometime during the visit, I would put in a plug about how happy James and I were, how Kate’s life was right for her and mine was right for me, and it was good that we had both found fulfillment. I would be sure to point out that, for James and me, not having a family was a choice. Obviously, even after the miscarriage and my partial hysterectomy, we could have sought out other ways of building a family, if we had wanted one. We certainly had the money to pursue adoption or surrogacy. The fact that we had never explored those options just proved that our lives were busy and full and complete just as they were.
    Only right now, my life was falling apart.
    I couldn’t admit that to my family. This visit was a mistake. The worst place for me to be right now, when things were definitely not wonderful, was at the farm trying to show everyone how wonderful my life was.
    “Oh, God, what was I thinking?” I muttered, raking a hand through my hair, pulling dark shoulder-length strands away from my face. Breath caught in my throat, and my heart hammered painfully against my chest. I shouldn’t have come. Coming to Missouri was only going to make things harder.
    I pulled into the parking lot of a motel and rolled down the window, trying to think. Tears crowded my eyes and I wiped them away impatiently, taking a deep breath. The air smelled of spring, heavilyladen with new grass and the sweet, pungent aroma of blackberry vines blooming nearby. I drank it in like wine, sensing my childhood, wrapping it around me like a blanket sewn from those long-ago summers at the farm—the early ones that I could barely remember. The summers when I looked at the world through the eyes of a little girl, before I reached adolescence and middle school and began to see that I didn’t quite measure up to my parents’ standards.
    At some point around eleven years old, when my body started to change and my awareness began to broaden, I realized that I wasn’t particularly brilliant for the daughter of two high-profile doctors. I remember the day it happened: sixth-grade math, an honors class, another C on a test; only this time,