“Are you saying he might get violent?” Mercy asked.
“B.J.? Not a chance.”
Mercy wondered how she could be so sure. B.J. was a motorcycle mechanic, and he favored black leather jackets and leather boots with chains around the ankles. But she said, “Well, that’s some comfort.”
“Why on earth is it,” Lily said, “that you always, always manage to miss the point.”
“Miss the point! What point? You tell me you’re having a baby, and I would naturally wonder about the father’s reaction.” She paused. She said, “Father figure’s, I mean.”
“Well, B.J. is not the father or the father figure, either one.”
“Okay,” Mercy said. “Who is?”
She felt pleased with herself for sounding so unshockable. However, Lily didn’t seem impressed. “Oh, just a guy from Dodd,” she said offhandedly.
“From…the real-estate place?” Mercy asked. That was the latest job Lily had quit, or maybe been fired from—a receptionist position at Dodd, Goldman.
Lily said, “Right. He’s an agent there.”
“Ah,” Mercy said, but she was taken aback. A real-estate agent didn’t sound like Lily’s type at all. She said, “What’s his name?”
“Mom!”
“What? He’s the father of my grandchild! I need to know his name!”
“Oh, God,” Lily said, and then she started crying.
Mercy said, “Lily, honey. Lily. Stop. We need to think this through. We need to think calmly and collectedly. Have you told him about the baby?”
“He’s married,” Lily said.
“Buried” was how it came out through her tears.
It was Mercy’s turn to say, “Oh, God.”
“Of course you’d have to act all scandalized,” Lily said.
Mercy let this pass. She waited while Lily blew her nose. Then, “So,” she said finally. “Just to consider this from every angle…Does B.J. really need to know that he is not the father?”
“What! You mean I should lie to him?”
Mercy felt herself flush. She said, “Not lie, exactly. Just fail to tell the truth. It might be a…kindness to him.”
“But that’s just wrong!” Lily said.
“Oh. Yes, sorry, I—”
“Besides which,” Lily said, “it would have to be immaculate conception, if B.J. was the father.”
“Oh.”
“We’ve kind of gone off each other.”
Mercy wondered why she hadn’t noticed that. The family saw very little of them—they’d eloped during Lily’s sophomore year at community college, where B.J. was not even a student, and they lived in a little apartment downtown—but she had always thought they seemed happy.
However: “If I could just get away from here,” Lily was saying now. “Get away somewhere and think for a while. Go on a cruise or something.”
“A cruise!” Mercy said. It was such a bizarre notion that she wondered if she had misheard, for a second.
“Or at least get away from them, from B.J. and Morris both, until my head is clear.”
Morris. Mercy filed the name in her memory. So many unexpected people seemed to edge into a person’s life, once that person had children.
“I was thinking last night that I might ask if I could camp out in your studio awhile,” Lily said. “Sleep on the couch, heat a can of soup on the hot plate…”
Mercy stirred uneasily. “Oh, well,” she said. “Actually, your and Alice’s old room would make more sense. Since it has real beds and all.”
“My room! Do you know how defeated I’d feel, moving back into my childhood bedroom?”
“Well, no need to make any rash decisions,” Mercy told her. “But, listen! Maybe you should see a doctor, find out if you’re really pregnant. It could be that you’re just late.”
“Three months late?”
“Oh.”
Recent sightings of Lily raced through Mercy’s mind—Lily stopping by the house to borrow the blender, Lily at David’s goodbye supper. Had she been wearing extra-loose clothing? But she’d always been the sloppy type. “Well,” Mercy said, “you should see a doctor anyhow. How do you feel, by the way?”
“I feel fine,” Lily said. “What do you hear from David?”
Mercy dragged her mind back to the reason she’d called. “Not a word,” she said. “I was thinking we might get a letter today, but the mailman’s already been and he didn’t bring a thing.”