Free Ruby by Ann Hood Page A

me what you know.
    Olivia couldn’t shake the image of Ruby in the hat. She sat in Janice’s kitchen, watching her three-year-old daughter, Kelsey, methodically tear out all the pop-up pieces of a storybook and thinking about Ruby. Olivia and Janice had been friends since seventh grade. They had double-dated at their junior prom, lost their virginity in the same week of November during college, and then drifted apart, Olivia to New York, Janice here, to Rochester, the same small formerly rural town where Ruby’s family lived right across the highway. The town was being developed in a frenzy of mismatched architectural styles and economic classes. The family next door to Janice raised chickens; Olivia could hear them now, clucking away.
    Still, Janice and Olivia were friends of sorts. Olivia had worn an embarrassing emerald green bridesmaid’s dress at Janice’s wedding and Janice made a yearly weekend trip to visit Olivia in Manhattan. When she came, they drank pink zinfandel, the way they had when they were younger and trying to be sophisticated. Once, Janice brought her old Ouija board, and the two of them sat on Olivia’s bed, asking it the same questions they used to at overnights in junior high: “Who will I marry? Where will I live? How many children will I have?”
    Olivia looked around Janice’s kitchen with its slate blue cupboards and ornamental copper molds hung along one wall. She had never thought she would one day envy Janice’s ordinariness, but, Olivia realized, she did in a way. Janice’s husband, Carl, was stretched out on a recliner in their family room, watching CNN and enjoying a beer; Kelsey was entertaining herself, humming “Frère Jacques” as she tore up a book; the baby, Alex, stood in the playpen, throwing measuring spoons onto the linoleum floor; and Janice herself was at the stove, frowning over a recipe that was too complicated for someone who could not cook very well. It made Olivia feel bad that her old friend was trying so hard for her. But then Olivia was gripped by an even stronger pang of envy for the things that Janice had.
    Across the state, the country, the world even, families were operating in this very way, Olivia knew. Even Winnie, who was up in Rhinebeck painting a mural of a cow jumping over the moon on the nursery wall. Olivia imagined Jeff, Winnie’s investment banker husband, downstairs cooking spaghetti just the way Winnie liked it: so al dente, it crackled slightly when she bit into it. They could hear chickens, too. And the low mooing of cows at the farm across the street. They drank milk from that dairy, milk so rich and fresh, it lay heavy on your tongue all day.
    And what do I have? Olivia asked herself.
    She was surprised by the answer that popped into her mind: Ruby. Ruby’s baby.
    The girl was back at Olivia’s house, in Olivia’s bed, wearing Olivia’s white cotton nightgown. Before she left for Janice’s, Olivia had given Ruby extra pillows, warm milk, an iron pill, and a stack of the magazines that her sister, Amy, had left for her to read. “They’ll help you get a grip,” Amy liked to say. “Look at what’s going on in the world. Put things in perspective.” Surely the girl needs iron, Olivia thought. Six months pregnant—“I guess,” Ruby told her. “Something like that. I wasn’t ever too regular, you know? My girlfriend Betsy told me just not to do it fourteen days after your period and you’re fine. Ha!”
    Olivia had cringed. Didn’t they teach birth control in schools these days? Even she and Janice had suffered through a course euphemistically named Health when they were in high school, lessons about ovulation and condoms and how long sperm could live. She thought again of Sheryl Lamont, happily pregnant in Texas, and Winnie, fat and happy in Rhinebeck, and she sighed.
    “I know,” Janice said, appearing beside her to refill her wineglass, “dinner’s taking forever. Carl told me just to make steak, but I told him a lot of