It's Sunday morning.
All the traffic seems to be going in a steady stream the other way; people coming back from parties or going to the market to panic buy food for relatives they didn't know were coming for lunch.
Becky is asking the driver if he can go any faster (he can't). They are a married couple in a cab, headed downtown.
The first day of 2017.
They are just two people in a cab, going downtown on New Year's Day, could be doing anything. It's their secret. By 10am they will be coming down this road again, they will have their baby.
It's the day they finally get their baby.
Everyone knew when they were pregnant with the twins. People in coffee bars and cable cars knew and they couldn't walk down the street without someone cooing over Becky and that added to the worry.
There were the mood swings and the cravings and the worry that they're going to come out with seven fingers on each hand or between them. There wasn't an hour in those seven-about months when he wasn't worried and praying to deities and gods he never believed existed before that they were okay.
Becky says it feels exactly the same but it doesn't. It's different – good different.
It's out of their hands somehow. Sure, there are thousands of ways to screw a kid up out of utero but they're all far in the future, all not unfixable.
He doesn't exactly know what has brought them up to this point, this day in January, why exactly Becky wants this baby so much. Sure, she's pre-menopausal. Sure, the twins have started their fish taco truck but they're hardly entrepreneurs; Jesse wouldn't be surprised if they ended up moving back home or marrying rich twins older than their mother.
Jesse gets all that, he does, but there's baby Tommy and they're at that place where couples want to be.
They drive each other crazy sometimes, really fucking crazy. Don't speak to each other for days at a time because they're both too proud but then something will click, without either of them knowing what it was, and they'll find themselves in bed screaming have mercy or curled up on the couch watching garbage on TV.
She doesn't believe that he's still crazy about her, that he doesn't fantasise about younger girls and being a free man somewhere on the Florida Keys.
He can't believe how he can love her more than he did all those years ago when she came and bailed him out of jail, wearing her wedding dress. He still gets that same rush of relief when she comes home from work, when she calls in the middle of the day to ask if he can fix dinner or tell him a funny story from work she couldn't save 'til later or just that she loves him.
He feels sorry for men who don't feel that way about their wife of nearly twenty-six years, who feel the need to chase failed actresses young enough to be their daughter.
He wasn't mad on the idea of adopting but what was the alternative? No Becky or an unhappy Becky. He would rather have a baby. They are two but in a singular unit, like a paddle ball or a pair of side burns. You can't have one without the other; what they do, they do together.
Even their midlife crises synced up. He wears her jeans. She steals his caffeinated shampoo. They went to Thailand and got each other's initials tattooed in... an intimate place (he said wasn't it about time she dropped the Donaldson, she told him to suck it up), they sold their family home and bought a place in LA, for God's sake, made a list of all the surfaces they could have sex on and completed it.
Becky asks the driver if he's sure he knows where he's going, if he can go faster again. The answer is the same: yes, he does and no, he can't.
Jesse moves his arm so her shoulders are enclosed in the crook of his elbow. She leans back in her seat, body relaxing, and hums in agreement.
He doesn't think he could live without her and maybe the love is suffocating sometimes and the excess has to go somewhere and he can't word it right and neither can she and so, here they are.
They are having a baby.
She turns her head to smile at him.
He catches her murmured hey in the back of his throat. He kisses her.
There aren't many sparks in their embraces anymore. It's a different sensation and a thousand times better.
He thinks that kind of electricity comes when you're afraid of losing someone and you're grabbing rations while you can and wanting everything now now now in case tomorrow or next year the chemistry has gone or they just walk out of your life for ever.
With Becky, even when they first started dating (seriously, exclusive), it felt like they had forever. The urgency to get her clothes off was there, in the heat of the moment, but it was never rushed. They could make out on her couch for three hours before moving upstairs or it could just be that, hot languid kisses then home because there were going to be other nights, many where they just couldn't wait and made love in her living room.
Her lips are chapped. Her breath is not all that pleasant; still a hint of his saltiness from last night (this morning? they were too nervous to sleep and sex is effective stress relief), acidic because there was no time for breakfast with an undertone of peppermint.
It shouldn't feel exciting but it does. He is kissing Rebecca Donaldson.
Jesse is a man in a taxi kissing his wife. She is his wife.
He breaks away; her chewing gum is stuck on the inside of his cheek. He takes it out, shows it to her.
Becky makes a face. They laugh, teetering hysterical laughter. The driver shoots them a levelling look in his rear view mirror; he thinks they're drunk, maybe they're having an affair; he is judging them.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist, reaches into her coat pocket for a tissue. Jesse winks at her.
"What was that for?" she whispers when the gum is sorted and she is comfortably nestled back in her place, against him.
"Just love you."
She kisses him sweetly, fingers grazing over his hairline. It's over in a second. Before he can reorganise his thoughts, her palm is pressed against his forehead. Her hands are cold; it's 44 degrees outside – will the baby have enough clothes?
She draws back, looks dissatisfied, roots around in her purse for something.
He can't take his eyes off her face; she is some kind of jellybean bearing goddess, "Beck, it's eight o'clock in the morning, I don't really want –"
"Well, I want my husband conscious when we meet this baby, you need to keep your blood sugar up."
He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear (she didn't bother straightening it this morning, he loves her curls, a little piece of smalltown charm clinging on); he misses suddenly the Nebraskan burr she lost years ago, "honey, I feel fine, I feel great."
Her eyes flick to the driver barking into his earpiece. Or, at least that's what it sounds like to his unfamiliar ear (hasn't spoken Spanish since high school), he could be telling his wife he loves her.
Becky covers his hand at her jaw with hers and presses it over the box of jellybeans, "Jess, just eat them."
He doesn't have the best track record, Jesse will be the first to admit that. When Rebecca told him she was pregnant, he passed out. When they found out that they were having twins, he was the one who had the massive anxiety attack. He had to have appendicitis was the day she was giving birth to the boys, she still brings it up at least once every six months at the tail end of an argument, it had to be all about him.
They will be there in a minute.
So he eats the jellybeans. Becky squeezes his knee affectionately or nervously and closes her eyes. Nicky and Alex will be at home, getting everything ready (he gave them $50 each, he's pretty sure their mom did too).
This afternoon they will be a family of five.
She keeps her eyes closed, "we haven't thought about names."
He passes her the box, she takes them for him. "We don't know if it's a boy or a girl yet."
"Should we have asked?"
A silence hangs and sticks. It's comfortable. The radio hums in and out. Becky picks out all the tangerine beans and Jesse presses his lips into her hair, "does it matter, really?"
"No, but I'd like a girl."
A teenager is slumped on the edge of the curb, his head against the fire hydrant. Jesse wants to roll down the window and shout: I'm a fifty-three and I'm still in love with my wife and I get laid four times a week and we're about to get a baby!
He heaves. Jesse looks away, "yeah, me too."
Becky asks if she can use his compact mirror to touch up her makeup because she took hers out to make room for the baby blanket DJ crocheted for her new cousin (yellow, delicate, must have taken ages). He holds her elbow, in case they go over a bump, as she applies her lipstick.
"I've got an idea for a girl's name, actually."
They turn into a side street. The San Francisco Children's Home comes into view. He slides his other up her back, "yeah? What is it?"
She snaps the mirror shut, leans forward – "would you stop on this corner, please?" – to the driver who smiling at her now, probably trying to place her, work out where he recognises her from; barista, shop assistant – "thank you."
For once Jesse does feel that small but very sharp pinch in his ego; envious that Becky is the one that people ask for autographs, whose face is plastered across billboards from Alabama to Wyoming; pride that he gets to wake up next to her every morning. He jumps out the cab and goes round to open her door.
She hangs onto his arm and pays the driver with a smile even when he asks her to say: Wake Up, USA!
"So, the name?"
"Oh," she stops, her hair has fallen over her face, her hands on the lapels of his jacket, kisses him softly, "Pamela."
Jesse will remember this moment exactly; the sunshine, the cold air, the abandoned couch amongst the garbage cans opposite with its stuffing coming out. Beautiful in the strange, detached way that some things just are.
Becky's lip quirks in disappointment before she burrows her face in his neck, "you don't like it."
"No, I –" there is a sudden rush of tears in his throat, because he's happy and his sister is not here, because this year it will be thirty years since she died; that's longer than she was alive and there's still not a day that goes by when he doesn't think about here, a family gathering where Danny doesn't catch him in the kitchen or from the other side of the room with a Pam-would-love-this smile.
Jesse wraps an arm around his wife. He will sit down with their child one day when he's finally given up dying his hair and tell them (her, he hopes so much that it's a girl) about this day, the aunt who would have adored them.
"Beck, I love it."