Mockingbird by Sean Stewart

dizzy with hunger, your fingernails blue and your concentration shot, and no one can tell. Time and again over the last couple of weeks I had found myself staring at the young women who passed me in the street, or the girl working behind the counter at McDonald’s, or the salesclerk who rang up my purchase, and thinking, Is she pregnant? Is she? What about her, over there?
    And you can’t tell. You just can’t tell.
    â€œSo what’s a Peachy Keen?” I asked.
    â€œPeach cordial, ice cream, and Kahlua,” Bill said. “They make these great frozen drinks here. You sure you wouldn’t like one?”
    Yuck. “No, thank you.” I wondered what Louis Jadot would think of his pouilly fuissé losing out to a Peachy Keen. “Anyway, you were just starting to say something when I yelped.”
    â€œOh.” Bill’s mouth worked for a moment. “Let’s, uh, let’s just order. I’ll get back to it later.”
    Another set of letters came around, announcing the approach of the Kellogg Building and the YMCA. “For some reason I always thought a revolving restaurant would turn so slowly you could hardly tell it was moving,” I said. “But this one just . . . rockets around, doesn’t it?” I tried looking away from the windows, toward the hub of the restaurant, but we had just come even with a tank of lobsters. They sat there like so many political prisoners in the blue-tinted water, their claws held shut with rubber bands, waiting numbly to be boiled alive and then served with creamed butter and port—
    I took a few quick panting breaths, as the books advise, and stared very hard at the pepper shaker on the table. The stuff in it was fine ground, not coarse, but the shaker had a gold top and it was something to cling to.
    â€œAre you sure you’re all right?”
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    Bill stared at me for a longer time, caught himself, and looked around. “Nice view,” he tried.
    â€œMm.”
    â€œUm—Terrible thing about that woman in Phoenix,” Bill said. “You hear about that?” I nodded. “Inconceivable. That any mother could take her own child and step off a building. She must have been on drugs.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNo drugs. They did an autopsy. There were no drugs.”
    â€œOh. I hadn’t been following the case that closely.” Bill shook his big head and reached for his menu. “Just shows that some people don’t need drugs to be stupid. See anything you like?”
    â€œOh, well,” I said, staring blindly at my menu. “Everything looks so good.”
    (Momma dries a coffee cup and puts it up. She is taller than me, always, until the last six months of her life, when she shrinks terribly. She is smoking two packs a day and doesn’t give a damn about the effects of secondhand smoke on the rest of the family, no matter how often I bring it up. “One good tip about how you pick a husband,” she says as I hand her a bowl to dry. “The reason you leave a man is the same as the reason you married him.”)
    If I could say why I would leave Bill Jr., would I see why I should marry him? He sat across the table from me, looking awkward in his expensive suit, and all I could see was his clumsiness. Him suggesting the most expensive wine on the menu. The dreadful peach and Kahlua drink. How big and sure and comfortable he was dismissing Mary Keith, the woman in Phoenix who had killed herself and her child, this woman he knew nothing about, nothing . . .
    And it seemed to me, seeing him there, that Momma was right, and that if I were to love him, someday, it would be because he had his clarity to offer, his certainty. He might sneak a cookie or a bowl of ice cream to gratify his small greeds, but he would never deceive me. The obtuseness, the Dignity I disliked, were also a sense of honor that compelled him to do right, and I knew, I just