“Maybe,” Cord considered. “I really loved those oatmeal cookies with the cream in the middle.”
Sasha laughed and laughed. Together they made a list of cartoon mascots by fuckability. Sasha felt Tony the Tiger was the clear winner. He just exuded cis-male hotness with his big puffy chest and boundless enthusiasm. The Sun-Maid raisin lady was obviously also a babe, rosy-cheeked, wearing a peasant blouse and a bonnet. The Cheetos Cheetah would be a fun date, but they agreed he’d try to leave his sunglasses on during sex. The Jolly Green Giant was maybe even hotter than Tony the Tiger, but Sasha worried he would be a terrible boyfriend, spending all his time in the gym. He was ripped. “Oh, so you’re more into the Pillsbury Doughboy?” Cord asked. “More to love?”
“No, the Pillsbury Doughboy is too white. Not sexy!”
“Colonel Sanders?”
“Ugh, no! Also too white, plus the goatee!”
“The Quaker Oats guy?”
“Stop! All the human mascots are old men! Why do guys get the hot ones?”
“Like who?”
“Miss Chiquita?” Sasha countered.
“Smokeshow,” Cord agreed.
“Wendy?”
“No way.” Cord wrinkled his nose.
“Wait, so you loved Little Debbie but not Wendy? They’re the same thing.”
“Shut your lying mouth.” Cord shook her shoulder playfully. “Little Debbie is all kindness and cream-filled cakes. Wendy looks like Conan O’Brien with braids and smells like hamburger grease.” That settled, they turned off the lights and cuddled up, and as they fell asleep Cord whispered in her ear, “You’re grrrrrrrreat!” and Sasha knew he was the one.
* * *
—
Where Mullin was thunder and darkness, Cord was pure sunshine, always in a good mood, emotionally easy, a man of simple pleasures. He enjoyed so many things. When he took a first bite of food, whether it was a bacon sandwich or a seared scallop, he always paused and threw his head back in bliss as he chewed. “Oooh,” he’d moan appreciatively. “That’s nice. That’s just really nice.” When a server put a plate before him at a restaurant, he’d give a slight whimper that was nearly indecent, so full of lust and unselfconscious adulation. He rejoiced in the bounce of new sneakers, in the feel of sun on his face. He sang along to anything that he heard on the radio, even if he didn’t really know the words, even if it was crappy pop for teenagers. He was equally indiscriminate about movies, willing to sit through absolutely anything Sasha wanted, so together they watched every single movie with Catherine Keener, then everything directed by Nancy Meyers, and they both cried during Father of the Bride and had to rewind and watch the part again where Steve Martin plays basketball with his daughter.
“That’s the kind of dad I want to be,” Cord said, rubbing his wet cheeks with a blanket. “But probably tennis instead of basketball.”
“You’re the country club Steve Martin.”
“But not as funny.”
“But not as funny,” Sasha agreed sadly, and Cord pouted.
Sasha knew he would be a wonderful father. His niece and nephew worshipped him. Cord was goofy and spoke to them in funny accents, he convinced them the Easter Bunny was a close personal friend, he pretended to think the spring in a gag can of nuts was a real snake and screamed upon opening it at least twelve times in a row.
* * *
—
While they were in agreement that they wanted children, they had only ever talked about it in the vaguest of terms, without a time line or any sense of urgency, but in June Cord’s best friend, Tim, had a baby and Cord started getting broody. Sasha had only ever heard of the phenomenon in women, or maybe chickens, but there was no other word for it, really. Cord wanted babies. Walking down the street, Cord started checking out strollers the way some other men might ogle women or motorcycles, letting out a low whistle and turning to watch them roll away. “You know that one’s the new YOYO that folds up smaller than a suitcase,” he might remark. Or “That’s the UPPAbaby Vista. You can add a rumble seat for a second child underneath.” He dragged Sasha to Picnic in Cobble Hill so that he could buy Tim a baby present, spending a solid hour selecting tiny pajamas and a little rattle shaped like a taxicab. When they visited Tim at his apartment, he even followed Tim into the baby’s room to watch a diaper change, announcing that he might as well start learning how to do it.
Tim’s wife looked at Sasha wide-eyed, and she shook her head with amusement. “We’re not pregnant. He’s just excited.”
“About diapers?” she asked.
“Cord is a very enthusiastic person,” Sasha snickered in reply.
Sasha didn’t know what would happen to her business when she had a baby; she was a one-woman design shop without a human resources department, so she supposed she would just have to take a pause on projects and hope her clients would come back to her on the other side. She had one client, a Brooklyn-based company that made bed linens, that she had been with since their launch. She’d designed their logo, their website, their packaging, and their subway ads. Another client, a luxury hotel in Baltimore, had hired her to design everything from their restaurant menus and matchbooks to the eight-foot sign above the entrance. She had a craft beer brewery, an organic baby food meal-delivery service, a 3D-printing vendor, and an （admittedly weird） Chinese Swedish restaurant. She could get them all through their holiday campaigns and then, she hoped, take her maternity leave in the spring when things calmed down. It was terrifying to contemplate, but she didn’t see any other options.
“I just picture you as this badass mom,” Cord told her later that night. “Doing your job with a baby strapped to your chest.”
“And then teaching the baby how to use Photoshop?” Sasha asked.
“We’ll teach the baby to do both our jobs so we can cuddle all day,” Cord promised, snuggling his nose into her hair.
“You seem like you’re ready, huh?”
“I am. Are you?”
“I’m getting there.” Sasha nodded. Her friends were starting to have babies too. It no longer seemed crazy or irresponsible, and there was something incredibly cool about imagining a tiny human that was half Cord, half her. She could already picture him talking to the baby in weird voices, pretending the bathtub was a wild ocean, dancing around the living room with a child in his arms. He would pour all his natural silliness and joy into parenthood, and their home would be happy and full.
Sasha called her mom to talk it through. “Sasha, there’s never a perfect time to have a baby,” her mother said. “Your dad and I were flat broke when we had Nate, but it all worked out. You’re healthy, you’re in love, and you’re under forty. In my day they would classify anyone over thirty-five as a ‘geriatric mother’ and make you wear a shameful paper bracelet at the hospital. Get on the stick.”
* * *
—
They decided to start trying to get pregnant. Sasha had friends who had begun telling people as soon as they decided, saying, “We pulled the goalie,” and it always made Sasha laugh because what were they really saying except that they were about to have a lot of sex? So instead of informing the entire Stockton family that they were embarking on a bonefest, they just made a note of the start of her last period and had sex five days in a row two weeks later. It didn’t work the first time around, and Sasha was surprised at the disappointment she felt at the brown spot in her underwear, but when her period was a single day late the second month she ran out to the drugstore and bought four pregnancy tests.