The Abortionist's Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde

long have you known her?” she asked politely.
    “All semester,” he said. “But we didn’t hook up until right after Thanksgiving.”
    “Well,” she said, “I’m very happy for you, Bill. What’s her name?”
    “Amanda.”
    Hearing this, Megan felt an unexpected tug, which unsettled her. Why should she feel anything, hearing his new girlfriend’s name? She guessed she had a lot to learn about love, and breaking up, and moving on.
    “Well, good for you, Bill,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to re-enroll.”
    “How’s the U?”
    “Hard,” Megan said. “Pre-med is a bitch.”
    “You’ll be a great doctor. As good as your mother ever was—and that’s saying a lot.”
    Megan’s eyes welled up.
    “You’ll get through,” he said, fingering a strand of hair back from her face.
    Megan recoiled. “There’s my father,” she told him. “I have to go. Thanks for coming to the service. That was a nice thing to do. Good luck with Amanda.”
    She already had her hand on the door handle when Bill said, “So how come Mister Michael Malone didn’t show up?”
    Megan turned around and stared.
    “Weren’t you two kind of, you know?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Actually I heard he was being forced to resign,” Bill said. “I heard he was sleeping with a student. I didn’t say
you,
” he added innocently. “Why do you look at me?
Was
it you?”
    She jabbed her key in the lock.
    “Was he good?” he asked loudly. “Was he better than me?”
    She wrenched open the driver’s door.
    “Did you swallow?” he called.
    She didn’t look to see who might have heard; instead she slid into the seat and slammed the door shut and started the engine. Her father, hearing her rev the motor, broke from a group of people and came over. Megan saw him shake hands with Bill, give a curt nod, shake his head. Then he opened the passenger door and settled himself into the seat.
    “That was nice of Bill to come,” he remarked, buckling his seatbelt.
    —————
    They headed back to the Goldfarbs’, friends of the family who had persuaded them to come stay at their house the day after Diana’s death. The Goldfarbs had a large multilevel house in the same neighborhood, with lots of spare bedrooms, and Megan had welcomed the chance to stay in a place that was neither home nor dorm.
    All afternoon people stopped by. Megan stood by the fire in the living room most of the time, making small talk with her parents’ friends. Everyone seemed to need to touch her, like she possessed some kind of religious shroud. She was aware that she was still in shock; the fact of her mother’s death kept slipping in and out of reality, and at times she found herself acting quite normal—unemotional, even, as though she were in an audience, watching a play about a girl whose mother had died.
    In a quiet moment she held her palms out to the fire and let her thoughts skitter about. She wondered if her father would have thought it was so nice of Bill to come to the funeral if he knew about the e-mails they’d exchanged earlier that fall. Can’t we try again? he’d written. It’s over, Bill, she wrote back; You need to accept it and move on. Don’t give up, he typed; You know you really love me. Please do not e-mail me anymore, she wrote back, to which he retorted: GIRL YOU HAVE TAKEN A SLEDGE HAMMER TO MY HEART AND SOUL!!!
    Megan turned her back to the fire and faced the roomful of people again. It seemed as though the entire town had passed through this house in the last several hours; there’d been city councilmembers and state representatives, and even their U.S. congressman had stopped by, bearing a basket of fruit. People were drinking beer, wine, scotch, soda, water; they were eating cake and pie and lasagna and fruit salad and chicken wings and chips and salsa. It might have been a New Year’s Eve party, for all you saw on the tables.
    Her back began to sting from the heat of the fire. During a burst of laughter in the