Read Online A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger - Free Book Online

although that sounds so feminine.”
    “You lost consciousness?”
    “I’ve been feeling a little off lately, but this was different. My mother called me from Florida and told me to turn on the television. One minute I was looking at the footage of the second tower, and the next minute I was waking up on the floor.”
    “Have you seen a doctor? I don’t think that’s a normal reaction.”
    She’s even more worried now; waves of uneasiness travel along the backs of her thighs. Her capacity for worry is as vast as the ocean. It’s one of the reasons she thinks she would make an excellent mother.
    “I finally went for a checkup,” he says. “Do you have another beer?”
    She untucks her foot, but he motions for her to stay where she is. He circles the counter and opens the refrigerator. As he does, she turns on the lamp next to her chair. The lightbulb pops and goes out.
    “Want to split the last one?” he says. She notices the pebbles in his voice again, the rippling of uncertainty.
    “It’s all yours,” she says. “What did the doctor say?”
    He looks at her then, a look that is the equivalent of a phone call in the middle of the night.

    LUCY MADE some hummus to bring to her brother’s house and then spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down documents she would need for the agency that would conduct her home study. For $1,200 of her $20,000 fee, a social worker would walk her through the paperwork, visit her home, and interview her at least twice. Yulia had told her that the process had two sides: first, to educate the adoptive parent on what to expect before and after the adoption; and second, to make sure the parent wasn’t dealing drugs, stealing cars, or possibly worse, taking antidepressants.
    Lucy found her birth certificate in a folder in the bottom drawer of her bureau, underneath some old bathing suits. A copy of the apartment lease was shoved in a basket of papers underneath her desk, and her latest W-2 form was in a magazine rack that she sometimes used to organize her tax returns. The exception was her passport, which she kept in a plastic bag in the refrigerator at the insistence of her mother, who had read an article about identity theft and convinced Lucy that it was the only safe place if, God forbid, someone broke in. “Do you know what the terrorists would pay for your passport?” she had said. “A dark-haired American girl?”
    That evening Lucy dressed in jeans, boots, and a thick turtleneck for dinner, because Paul and Cokie kept their house at sixty-three degrees to save energy ever since Paul’s software business had dried up. She mildly dreaded seeing them. Paul and Cokie, it turned out, had a relationship that centered on a joint interest in purchasing the latest technology. When the flat-screen television came on the market, they pored over issues of
Consumer Reports
and talked endlessly about which models offered the best features. Then the money dried up, and they couldn’t afford one. The tension had been rising ever since.
    “Aunt Lucy’s here,” Cokie yelled over her shoulder as she opened the door and stuffed some used tissues into the pocket of her belted sweater. “Come on in, little mother.”
    She took one of the tissues out again, blew her nose, then gave Lucy a hug, whispering into her hair, “What have you done?”
    Before she could answer, Paul came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a barbecue apron.
    “We’re making pizza,” he said. “Gotta use that bread maker for something. Hey, congratulations.”
    She thought Paul looked a little thicker around the middle, but maybe it was the apron. It still surprised her a little to see him as a suburban father. To her, he would always be the brother who let her fold his newspapers and follow him on his route as he darted through the neighborhood on his bike. Or the brother who had talked one of his baseball teammates into asking Lucy to the junior prom when she had already given up hope.
    “Kids,”