Just a little FYI. This is in the past. This story will jump from the future to the present every now and then but don't worry, hopefully it won't be too confusing.

CHAPTER 4

THEN, Fall 1979

From the way Maya hefted the small brick of banana bread in the palm of her hand, her husband was not sure if she was planning to eat it or to throw it. She closed the front door, still shiny with new paint, and carried the loaf to the cartons that were substuting as a makeshirt kitchen table. With reverent finger she touched the French-wre ribbon and untangled a card decorated with a hand-drawn house. "Welcome," she read, 'to the NEIGH-borhood."

"Your veterinary reputation has preceded you," she said, handing the card to Neil.

Neil scanned the brief message, smiled, and tore open the cellophane. "It's good," he said. "Try some?"

Maya paled. Even the thought of banana bread- of and food really before noon made her queasy these days. Which was odd because every book she'd read on the subject of pregnancy- and she'd read many- said that by now, her fourth month, she should be feeling better. "I'll call to thank them," she said, retrieving the card. "Oh. My." She glanced up at Neil. "Kirsten and Sandy. And they sent baked goods. Do you think they're...you know?"

"Gay?"

"I would have say 'embarking on an alternative lifestyle.'"

"But you didn't," Neil said, grinning. He lifted a box and started up the stairs.

"Well," Maya deplomatically announced, "Whatever their...orentation, I'm sure they're perfectly nice." But as she dialed, she was wondering again what kind of town they had moved to.

She had not wanted to come to Newport; she'd been perfectly happy in Boston, and even that was a stretch from her native Ohio. Maya had never been particually good at forging friendships, and couldn't Neil have found large animals to minister to somewhere farther south?

A man answered on the third ring. "Grand Central Station," the voice said, and Maya slammed down the phone. She redialed more carefully, and this time getting the same voice with a smile in it, crisply saing, "Cohens."

"Yes," Maya said. "I'm calling from next door. Maya Roberts. I wanted to thank the Cohens for the bread."

"Oh, great. You got it. Are you all moved in yet?"

There was silence while Maya wondered who this person was and protocol was in this part of the country; if one went about revealing one's whole life to a housekeeper or nanny. "Is Kirsten or Sandy there?" Maya asked quietly. "I, um, would like to introduce myself."

"I'm Sandy," the man said.

"But you're not a woman," Maya blurted.

Sandy Cohen laughed. "You mean you thought- Wow! Nope, sorry to disappoint, but last time I checked I was male. Sandy, as in Sanford. But no one's called me that since my grandmother died trying to. Hey, do you need a hand over there? My wife would love to come. She's got nothing to do. And quite frankly, she's driving me nuts." Before Maya could demur, Sandy made the decision for her. "Leave the door open," he said. "she'll be there in a few minutes."

Maya was still staring at the receiver when Neil came back into the kitchen, carrying a large carton of china. "Did you talk to Sandy Cohen?" he grunted. "What's she like?"

She had just opened her mouth to answer when the front door burst open, slamming back agaisnt its hinges on a gust of wind to reveal an extremly pregnant woman with a festival of wild hair and the incongruously sweet smile of a saint.

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"So," Neil said, accepting the gin and tonic that Sandy Cohen had mixed for him. "You're a public defender."

Sandy settled across from Neil in a wing chair. From the kitchen, he could hear Kirsten and Maya, their voices high and sweet as robins'. "That I am," Sandy said. "I'm finishing a case over at there." He took a sip of his own drink. "Kirsten tells me you took over Howath's practice?"

Neil nodded. "He was one of my professors at Tufts," he explained. "When he wrote to say he was retiring out here, I started thinking there might be room for another vet." He laughed.

The two men smiled uncomfortably and stared down at their glasses.

Neil glanced toward the women's voices. "They've hit it off," he said. "Kirsten is over so much, I sometimes think she's moved in."

Sandy laughed. "Kirsten needed someone like Maya. I have a feeling she gets more support complaining about stretch marks and swollen ankles to your wife than she gets from me."

Neil didn't say anything. Perhaps Sandy was ambivalent about pregnancy, but Neil wanted as many details as he could get. He had taken books out of Maya's bookcase showing a blastosphere reconfiguring into a tiny human. He had been the one to sign up for natural childbirth classes. And as ashamed as Maya was by her burgeoning body, he found it lovely. Pomengrante-ripe and lush, it was all he could do to refrain from laying hands on his wife whenever she breezed by him. But Maya undressed in the dark, pulled the covers to here chine, batted away his embrace. Neil had, from time to time, watched Kirsten move about his house-five months more pregnant and unwieldy, but with a confidence and a vigor that lit her from within, and he would think, this is how maya should be.

He looked toward the kitchen, caught a glimpse of Kirsten's swollen stomach preceding her. "Actually," Neil said slowly, "I kind of like this whole pregnancy think."

"Oh don't get me wrong." Sandy said. "I do too. Kirsten is amazing, and she's beautiful. But...she likes to complain a lot and I really don't know what to say to her."

"Ah," Kirsten said, suddenly there, putting her hand on Sandy's shoulder. "My husband is downright terrified of childbirth," she teased, speaking to Neil. "Would you like to delivier my baby?"

"Sure," Neil said. "But I'm most comfortable operating in a barn."

Kirsten took a cheese tray from Maya's hands and set it down on the coffee table. "I'm flexible," she said.

Neil watched Kirsten settle on the arm of her husband's chair. Sandy made no move to touch her. He leaned around her toward the cheese tray. "Is the pate?" he asked.

Kirste nodded. "Homemade," she explained.

"I see," Neil said.
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"Sandy is being an idiot," Kirsten said when Maya called. "He told me if I don't stop walking down the road I'm going to be having the baby under a telephone pole."

"I would think you'd have more time than that."

"Try telling him."

"Use a different tactic," Maya said. "Tell him the better shape you're in before the baby is born, the easier it will be to get your old body back."

"Who said I want my old body back?" Kirsten asked. "Can't I pick someone else's? Farrah Fawcett...Christie Blinkley..." She sighed. "You don't know how luck you are."

"Because I'm only five months pregnant?"

"Because you're married to Neil."

Maya didn't answer for a moment. She liked Sandy Cohen, with his cool looks, and effortless charm, the thread of a New York accent in his speech. Many of the characteristics that Maya possessed Sandy possessed also, but with a positive twist: She was reserved, he was level-headed; she was shy, he was introspective; she was obsessive, he was exacting.

He was also right. Kirsten's water broke three days later, half a mile down the road, and if a passing telephone company vehicle hadn't stopped to ask if she was all right, she might very well have delivered Seth on the edge of a street.
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The dream went like this: Maya could see Neil's back as he crouched in a stall, his silver hair glinting with the early sun light, his hands moving over the heavy belly of a mare that was trying to foal. And she was standing overhead somewhere- in a hayloft, maybe?- water dripping down her legs as if she'd wet herself, yelling for him although no sound came out of her mouth.

That was how she knew she was going to have her baby alone.

"I'll call every hour on the hour," Neil assured her. But Maya knew how Neil functioned: Once he got wrapped up in a colicky horse or a ewe with mastitis, time fell away from him; most of the roads he traveled as a country vet didn't have a luxurious string of telephone booths.

Her due date came and went at the end of April. Then one night, Maya heard Neil answer the phone beside the bed. He whispered something her mind did not register, and disappeared in the dark.

She dreamed again about the barn, and woke up to find the mattress soaking wet.

Pain made her double over, Neil must have left a note somewhere with a telephone number. Maya walked through the bedroom and the bathroom, periodically stopping to sweat out contractions, but she couldn't find it. She picked up the phone and called Kirsten.

"Now," She said, and Kirsten understood.

Sandy was working late again that night, so Kirsten brought Seth along in his car seat. "We'll find Neil," she assured Neil. She placed Maya's hand on the gearshirt, telling her to squeeze when it started to hurt. At the Emergency pavilion, she parked the car. "Stay here," she said, grabbing Seth and running through sliding doors. "You have to help me," she shouted to a triage nurse. "There's a woman in labor."

The nurse blinked at her, at Seth. "Looks to me like you're too late," she said.

"It's not me," Kirsten said. "It's my friend. In the car."

Within minutes Maya was in a delivery room, wearing a fresh johnny and writhing in pain. The obstetrics nurse turned to Kirsten. "I don't suppose you know where the father is?"

"On his way," Kirsten said, though this was not ture. "I'm supposed to stand in for him."

The nursed looked at Maya, who had reached out to hold Kirsten's hand, and at Seth, who was asleep in a plastic bassinet. "I'll take him to the nursery," she said. "Can't have a baby in delivery."

"I thought that was the point," Kirsten muttered, and Maya choked out a laugh.

"You didn't tell me this hurt," Maya said.

"Of course I did."

"You didn't tell me," she amended, "it hurt this much."

Maya's doctor had also delivered Seth. "Let me guess," she said to Kirsten, reaching beneath the johnny to check Maya's cervix. "You had so much fun the first time you couldn't stay away." She helped Maya sit up. "Okay, Maya," the doctor said. "I want you to push."

So with her best friend bracing her shoulders and shouting in strident harmony, Maya gave birth to a girl. "Oh, my," she said, her eyes damp.

"Oh, look at that."

"I know," Kirsten said, her throat tight. "I see." And she left to find her own child.

The nurse had just finished packing ice between Maya's legs and drawing the covers up to her waist when Kirsten returned to the room with Seth in her arms. "Look who I ran into," she said, holding the door so that Neil could pass through.

"I told you so," Maya chided, but she was already turning the baby so Neil could see her.

Neil touched his daughter's fine blond eyebrows. His fingernail was larger than her nose. "She's perfect. She's..." He shook his head and looked up. "I don't know what to say."

"You owe me," Kirsten suggested.

"I do," Neil said, smiling from the inside. "I'll give you anything but my firstborn."

The door of the room swung open again, and Sandy Cohen stood there in his business suit, holding aloft a bottle of champagne. "Hey!" he said, pumping Neil's hand. "Rumor has it that you've had quite a morning." He smiled at Kirsten. "And I hear you're a midwife." He popped open the Moet, apologizing as some fizzed onto Maya's blankets, and poured the champagne into four plastic cups. "To parenthood," he said, lifting his glass. "To...does she have a name?"

Neil looked at his wife. "Summer," she said.

"To Summer."

Neil lifted his glass. "And, belatedly, to Seth."

Maya glanced at the baby's translucent eyelids and slack bow mouth, and reluctantly transferred her to the plastic bassinet beside the bed. Summer barely took up a third of the space.

"Do you mind?" Kirsten asked softly, pointing to the bassinet and then to Seth, snoring softly in her arms.

"Go right ahead." Maya watched Kirsten lay her son beside Summer.

"Look at that," Neil said. "My daughter's an hour old and she's already sleeping with another guy."

The all looked at the bassinet. The baby startled, a relfex. Her long finger flailed open like a morning glory and curled back into fists, grabbing for purchase. And although she was completly unaware, when Summer Roberts again settled into sleep, she was holding tight to Seth Cohen's hand.

AND...now's the time to review.